The Politics of Protection: The Limits of Humanitarian Action Elizabeth G. Ferris …In the mid-1980s, protection was largely the territory of lawyers, particularly specialists in international refugee law, international humanitarian law, and human rights law. But in the 1990s, the failure of the international community - and the humanitarians - to prevent widespread bloodshed in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda forced protection advocates to rethink that approach. […] In the absence of concerted political action to protect civilians, humanitarian agencies began to incorporate protection into their work […] Protection is now very much in vogue in the humanitarian world. […] Scholars and practitioners alike discuss their understanding of the concept of protection at conferences organized for that purpose […] This book explores the evolution of the international community's understanding of protection, with a particular emphasis on the humanitarian community […] Elizabeth Ferris is a senior fellow of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where she is codirector of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement. Prior to joining Brooking she spent twenty years in the field of humanitarian assistance, most recently with the World Council of Churches in Geneva.