Publications Library
Type
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2026
Night Markets: Community Partnerships for Safety
Case Study
As small businesses felt the impact from the pandemic and anti-Asian harassment surged across the U.S., NP became a key safety partner for Think!Chinatown (T!C)’s Night Markets. This case study reflects on the evolution of NP’s partnership with T!C and examines how this community partner continues to apply Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) practices. It demonstrates how direct protection practices, especially when rooted in community partnership, can foster both immediate safety and the conditions for longer-term peace.
May 2026
Protecting Those Who Stay: Rethinking Duty of Care
Issue Brief
At NP, a holistic Duty of Care framework embeds physical, technical, psychosocial, and operational safety measures into the design and delivery of our work. NP’s Duty of Care approach has been shaped most clearly through experience in high-intensity conflict settings such as Ukraine. Yet, we're finding that the principles underpinning the approach are transferable across diverse operational environments. Our latest briefing explores how we are adapting the Duty of Care package across varying conflict landscapes, from Ukraine, DRC, Iraq, Myanmar, to South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and within the United States.
2025
Protection Trends Report 2025
Programme Brief
New report documents how contemporary conflicts are increasingly fought in civilian spaces, exposing communities to sustained violence, dangerous and cyclical displacement, widespread hunger, climate-related insecurity, conflict-related sexual violence, misinformation, and shrinking humanitarian access. Drawing on frontline reporting and close engagement with affected communities, the report highlights both the erosion of formal protection systems and the growing sense of abandonment felt by civilians. At the same time, it underscores that, even under extreme constraint, civilians continue to act with agency to protect themselves and one another — reinforcing the urgent need for preventive, civilian-led, and nonviolent protection approaches grounded in long-term presence and trust.
January 2026
Safety Through Community: San Diego, California
Programme Brief
This snapshot gives insight into how civilian-led protection and safety cultivated by community can play a significant role in meeting emergent community needs in San Diego. With a consistent presence in San Diego since 2024, Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) has built relationships with leaders and community organizations doing a wide range of work to protect civilians. Through analysis and consultations, NP finds migrant, Asian, Muslim, LGBTQIA+, and unsheltered communities in significant need of protection support. Common threads amongst these communities are the significant risk of violence posed by state actors, as well as identity-based violence targeting a broad range of communities. This Snapshot places special focus on the targeting of immigrant communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) due to the dramatic escalation in ICE activity since the beginning of 2025 and repeated references by community members of fears of violence related to this escalation.
January 2026
Communities Under Attack: Protection Needs in the United States
Programme Brief
Communities across the United States are facing extreme restrictions on civic space, militarized approaches to public safety, increasing identity-based violence, violent racist rhetoric from political leadership, and record levels of detention. Simultaneously, funding cuts for violence prevention programs, public health, and social services at state and federal levels are constraining the resources available to communities to keep themselves safe. This brief is an attempt to highlight the impacts of key threats to civilians on targeted communities, and explores how community-led efforts can work to support safety and prevent violence in the U.S. This brief is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of all forms of violence encountered by civilians in the U.S. but focuses specifically on targeted, systematic violence against civilians.
December 2025
Building Community-Based Safety in Rural Minnesota
Case Study
Rural communities across Minnesota have faced escalating challenges to public safety and social cohesion. From 2022-2025, Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) partnered with local organizations to pilot a community-led approach to safety rooted in nonviolence, trust-building, and local leadership in the Brainerd Lakes area and Northeast region (Cook County and Cloquet Valley) of Minnesota. This work focused on cultivating structures of safety and protection through trainings, workshops, and deep community engagement to support residents with the tools to prevent conflict and rebuild social trust.
2024
Community is the Answer | Unarmed Civilian Protection in Practice 2024
Extended Annual Report
Amidst escalating violence against civilians, it is critical that we recognise examples of possibility and hope. This publication contains testimonies of fortitude, of lives saved, of relationships repaired—always amidst difficulty and violence, but pursued nevertheless. We hope these actions and insights remind us that prevention, protection, and repair are possible, of the importance of investing in peace and protection to save lives, and as inspiration for future action.
April 2025
Program Spotlight: Youth Safety and Violence in Minneapolis
Programme Brief
Despite promising trends and the lowest rates of gun violence in North Minneapolis in over a decade in 2024, young people, particularly young African American men, continue to face many challenges. In this program spotlight, we highlight the key safety risks that these young people face, the interventions that are making a difference in their lives, and the critical investments that need to be made to sustain this progress.
May 2023
Community Safety in California
Programme Brief
Community safety needs in California – and around the United States – are urgent and escalating. There has been a documented increase in violence against civilians, particularly against the most marginalised communities. As violence strains our social fabric, also under pressure from the Covid-19 pandemic and rising economic pressures, people face a range of threats that undermines their personal and community safety.
2022
Interrupting Cycles of Violence | Unarmed Civilian Protection in Practice 2022
Extended Annual Report
In this new report, we share stories of our people-centered approach to protecting civilians, and what that means in practice. With examples from Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan, Iraq, the Philippines, and the United States, the report details initiatives taken by local communities and NP in 2022 to interrupt cycles of violence.