The Paradoxes of Protection: Aligning Against the Lord's Resistance Army

Abstract

Protection has risen to prominence over the past decade in fields from humanitarian practice to military operations. Its rise, however, has been characterized by a lack of clarity over what it means in practice. This article attempts to discern the politics of protection by examining a specific case: the international effort to protect civilians from the Lord's Resistance Army. It argues that the initiatives being mounted to protect civilians from the Lord's Resistance Army should be seen as efforts to constitute and experiment with new forms of transnational political authority, specifically unaccountable, militarized administration networks that bring together state, international, and substate actors and institutions.