*This post summarizes my undergraduate thesis.
International interventions in mass killing episodes often fail to adequately protect civilians.
The UNMISS peacekeeping operation in South Sudan is a case in point. Bureaucratic, political, and financial constraints consistently inhibit the deployment of well-staffed interventions, and often prohibit them outright.
Therefore, many civilians must survive without external assistance, but we know surprisingly little about how this occurs.
No scholar has produced a work combining empirical examples of civilian self-protection with a theory of the mechanisms that allow it to function during mass killing or even conflict more broadly. The lack of focus on civilian self-protection is symptomatic of a larger issue of how scholars envision violent conflict.
Check out the rest of the article at the Monkey Cage. You can read the entire thesis here.
The Widening Lens 
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