Side by Side

by Liam Mahony

Download full notebook below.

Since the mid-1980s, human rights groups and other activist organizations being targeted with repressive abuses have been calling on international NGOs to provide them with direct accompaniment by international field workers. These field workers – usually volunteers – spend twenty-four hours a day with threatened activists, at the premises of threatened organizations, in threatened communities or witnessing public events organized by threatened groups. The international presence serves as a deterrent against the use of violence. In order to ensure this deterrence, these international accompaniment organizations are part of transnational networks poised and ready to mobilize political pressure against perpetrators should their volunteers witness any attacks or should their clients be further threatened.

"I can say with certainty that the fact that we are alive today is mainly because of Peace Brigades’ work." – Luis Perez Casas, Lawyer’s Collective Jose Alvear Restrepo, Bogotá, Colombia

International protective accompaniment is the physical accompaniment by international personnel of activists, organizations or communities threatened with politically motivated attacks. Peace Brigades International has been developing this tactic since the mid-1980s, sending hundreds of volunteers into different conflict situations around the world. PBI currently sustains a presence of about 80 people working in several conflicts, responding to requests for accompaniment from all kinds of threatened civil society organizations.

Accompaniment can take many forms. Some threatened activists receive 24-hour-aday accompaniment. For others the presence is more sporadic. Sometimes team members spend all day on the premises of an office of a threatened organization.Sometimes they live in threatened rural villages in conflict zones. This accompaniment service has three simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing impacts. The international presence protects threatened activists by raising the stakes of any attacks against them. It encourages civil society activism by allowing threatened organizations more space and confidence to operate and by building links of solidarity with the international community. And it strengthens the international movement for peace and human rights by giving accompaniment volunteers a powerful first-hand experience that becomes a sustained source of inspiration to themselves and others upon their return to their home country. This tactical notebook will analyze how protective accompaniment works, based on the substantial experience of PBI in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Sri Lanka and El Salvador. Since the 1990s, numerous other organizations have also provided protective international accompaniment in other settings, modifying the approach according to their particular identity and mission. In the final section of the notebook I will also offer a brief comparative discussion of several of these experiences.

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