In South Sudan, in Mindanao, in Iraq, unarmed civilians have walked between armed actors and the people they threatened — and, far more often than the theory of deterrence predicts, the guns have not fired.
Unarmed civilian protection — accompaniment, protective presence, interpositioning, early-warning networks — has matured over three decades from an activist’s improvisation into a documented practice with training curricula and a growing evidence base. Its premise is simple and strange: that the deliberate, visible presence of unarmed protectors changes an armed actor’s calculus in ways that another gun cannot.
Muslim-majority contexts have been among its proving grounds, and Muslim practitioners among its quiet pioneers. Community cease-fire monitors in the Philippines’ Bangsamoro, tribal mediators sustaining local truces in Yemen, neighbors organizing escorts so that families of the “wrong” sect could cross Baghdad — few of these actors used the term “unarmed civilian protection.” Most understood themselves to be doing something their religion asked of them.
A jurisprudence of presence
The tradition supplies deep foundations for this work: the Qur’anic weight of the single life; the duty of protection that the Prophet ﷺ extended even to those outside his community by covenant; the honored place of the one who stands between. What remains underdeveloped is the connective tissue — a jurisprudence of presence that would name this practice as worship and train for it as a discipline.
The body placed between the weapon and its target is an old Islamic argument, made flesh.
Building that connective tissue — between the practitioners who protect and the scholars who could ground them — is precisely the kind of work this Fellowship exists to host.