This thesis analyses different approaches to the protection of civilians (PoC) as mobilized by police/military and humanitarian actors in contexts of armed conflict and humanitarian emergencies where a United Nations peacekeeping operation is deployed. Inspired by the strategies of post-structural discourse analysis, the thesis focuses on the PoC sites in South Sudan, which have sheltered civilians fleeing from violence and persecution since armed conflict broke out in that country, in December 2013. These protected sites have been an integral part of protection strategies and practices advanced by both humanitarian actors present in the country and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and are taken here as a privileged analytical microcosm for assessing protection discourse(s) due to the colocation of different protection rationales that characterizes those spaces. Grounded on a Foucauldian theoretical-conceptual framework, this work mobilizes the concepts of sovereign power, governmentality and biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault and employed by critical literature on peacekeeping operations and humanitarian action. It is argued in the thesis that the rationales of protection advanced by both the humanitarian and security sectors work according to the rationality of police power, understood as an ensemble of technologies and techniques that maintains order and protects life among populations but also decides on the suspension of law. Pointing to the particular relationship between protection, policing and exceptionality unraveled in the context of PoC sites, these spaces will be treated as Giorgio Agamben s camps: as spaces of normalized exceptionality where bare life is managed.