Overlapping Agendas and Peacekeepers’ Ability to Protect

ABSTRACT

This article scrutinizes the overlaps between three major UN policy agendas to explain how their interaction impacts the delivery of protection, particularly against conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Building on Pierre Bourdieu, it reconstructs the ‘field of international interventions’ and subsequently analyses the evolution of the protection mandate, highlighting the complementarities and contradictions between Children and Armed Conflict, Protection of Civilians and Women, Peace and Security. My findings suggest that while these agendas have reinforced each other during their establishment and institutionalization, the multiplication of administrative structures has also led to the compartmentalization of protection. The field’s competitive pressures, furthermore, push organizations to focus on their own mandates and subsume aspects of other agendas under them. Data from the Democratic Republic of Congo indicate that despite recognizing the need for gender-sensitive approaches, UN peacekeeping largely continues to understand protection against CRSV as part of its general protection efforts. Therefore, the militarized and gender-ignorant approach to protection prevails and specific measures to address sexual violence remain too headquarters-driven.

KEYWORDS:

• UN peacekeeping
• protection of civilians
• conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV)
• women peace and Security (WPS)
• MONUSCO

Introduction

Almost all modern peacekeeping operations are mandated to protect civilians. However, within the UN, three overlapping policy agendas approach protection from different angles: Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) focuses on the protection of children against six grave violations;¹ the Protection of Civilians (PoC) pertains to all conflict-affected civilian populations and also has a broader thematic scope across various domains and tasks; and Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is the most ambitious in its thematic scope, which contains prevention, participation and protection as distinct pillars, but focuses on the protection of women and girls against sexual violence.² In addition to their joint objective to protect vulnerable populations, these agendas overlap in other important ways. They share roots in international humanitarian and human rights law and gained momentum in the same time period after the end of the Cold War. They share supporters and are oriented towards the same set of principals (UN member states), were institutionalized in parallel, and are implemented by similar organizations through largely similar tools and practices. Given these overlaps, the three agendas potentially complement each other in their shared goal to protect. But as their interaction can also lead to contradictions,³ this paper asks: How do overlaps between the UN’s main policy agendas impact the provision of protection?

The existing literature on peacekeeping has not considered the overlaps between UN protection agendas as a possible explanation for their effectiveness. Research usually discusses CAAC, PoC and WPS separately, ignoring the ways in which they interact. Some authors have started to recogzise overlaps between two individual agendas, such as between WPS and CAAC,⁴ and between WPS and PoC.⁵ These authors recogzise common origins and objectives by two of the agendas but do not systematically explore the overlaps among all three and, furthermore, lack a conceptual framework for capturing not just individual interactions but also their broader structural background.⁶ The most intuitively appealing theoretical framework – the International Relations literature on regime complexity and institutional overlaps – is not suited for exploring the agency and practices of interaction since it has a rather static and rationalist perspective, and focuses mainly on political dynamics at the macro-level.

The literature on CAAC, PoC and WPS also uses the term ‘agenda’ without defining it or paying sufficient attention to actors and practices. Authors appear to implicitly adhere to the common understanding of policy agendas as a ‘set of concrete items scheduled for active and serious consideration by a particular institutional decision-making body’.⁷ Accordingly, they focus on agenda setting, i.e. on how advocacy groups contested existing priorities in the Security Council and successfully negotiated the inclusion of CAAC, PoC or WPS on its agenda.⁸ However, they overlook the fact that the agendas’ gradual institutionalization and operationalization led to their increasing emancipation. Through successive Security Council resolutions, the establishment of implementing agencies and the development of specific practices and standards, the protection agendas themselves now set rules and expectations. Hence the agendas have developed their own momentum such that they shape behaviour, including that of the actors who initially advocated for them. This sometimes leads to confusion of subject and object, and underlines the necessity of analysing agency in and between agendas across the different phases of their development.⁹

In response to these shortcomings, I apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and conceptualize the interaction of agendas as taking place in a field of international interventions¹⁰ that operates with shared interpretations, taken-for-granted assumptions and specific norms and practices.¹¹ The field’s specific symbolic capital can be understood as recognized competence or authority and manifests in an organization’s mandate, years of experience, and size.¹² Organizations use their symbolic capital to advocate for issues, acquire funds and implement projects, which, in return, provides them with more symbolic, social and cultural capital and improves their position in the field.¹³ The structural conditions of the field not only shape action but, over time and through repeated practices, become embodied in an organization’s culture and the habitus of its staff. The habitus constitutes a system of embodied dispositions that organizes the ways in which individuals understand the world and act within it.¹⁴ This explains why competition and other counterproductive behaviours unwittingly persist between protection actors or, to put it differently, why smart and dedicated people continue to work in clearly ineffective ways.¹⁵

The theoretical contribution of the articles lies in developing an empirically oriented framework that is better suited to capturing structural conditions and the dynamic nature of the interaction between agendas. Bourdieu’s reconciliation of constructivist and rationalist perspectives goes beyond the international relations literature on regime complexity and institutional overlaps with its rather static and macro-level perspective. In turn, the application of Bourdieu’s framework reinforces an emerging paradigm of political-sociology analysis of international interventions.¹⁶ While previous researchers have highlighted the importance of agenda-setting for international organizations,¹⁷ my findings indicate that – similar to norms and regimes – agendas themselves shape behaviour and can even transform the field.

Reconstructing the field and the interaction between CAAC, PoC and WPS was an abductive¹⁸ process, based on extensive fieldwork and subsequent comparison of the findings with relevant literature.¹⁹ Specifically for this article, I analysed the establishment, institutionalization and operationalization of the three agendas on the basis of 30 thematic and 50 country-specific Security Council resolutions. As part of a larger project on the interaction between international protection actors, I conducted over 250 semi-structured and unstructured interviews²⁰ with peacekeeping personnel, staff from other UN entities and international organizations, national protection actors and local populations between 2014 and 2019. I also conducted 16 months of participant observation at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York and the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO).

The Democratic Republic of Congo (henceforth DRC or Congo) is a particularly pertinent case for examining the institutionalization and operationalization of protection. MONUSCO²¹ was only the second mission to receive a Protection of Civilians mandate in 1999 and the first to prioritize the task in 2007. The mission then took the lead on developing and testing new protection instruments that have subsequently been mainstreamed into other peacekeeping contexts.²² Considering the field’s social logic and similar institutional dynamics across contexts, reconstructing the development and implementation of MONUSCO’s protection mandate also allows general conclusions about the operationalization of the three agendas by UN peacekeeping. However, given the high prevalence of conflict-related sexual violence in Congo and the broad spectrum of activities falling under the three agendas, this paper focuses on illustrating their interaction in the provision of protection against CRSV.

I argue that the overlapping PoC, CAAC and WPS agendas have reinforced but also hindered each other in their establishment, institutionalization and operationalization. The remainder of this article describes such complementarities and contradictions between CAAC, PoC and WPS during the different stages of their development. First, it shows how overlaps facilitated successful advocacy on the policy level that resulted in the establishment of the agendas at the UN Security Council. Secondly, the article describes how continued advocacy by their supporters resulted in the increasing institutionalization of agendas. However, growing institutionalization also meant a compartmentalization, or even fragmentation, of the protection mandate as each agenda became represented by several entities with distinct strategies, work plans, budgets and reporting obligations. The competitive pressures of the field also resulted in a subsumption of protection mandates, whereby staff habitually consider their respective entity’s approach to protection to be the most important and subordinate other aspects of protection under their own mandate. In the third section, the article then explores overlaps between agendas during their institutionalization and operationalization in DRC, focusing on protection against conflict-related sexual violence. The analysis of MONUSCO’s mandates shows that overlaps between the agendas facilitated successful advocacy resulting in increased institutionalization of protection in Congo. At the same time, the creation of new implementing entities in a very competitive environment also resulted in a compartmentalization of protection interventions and the subsumption of some aspects of protection under others. A direct consequence of subsumption is that MONUSCO continues to understand protection against conflict-related sexual violence as part its larger PoC efforts and primarily addresses it with the same tools it applies to the implementation of its general protection strategy, such as deploying soldiers, conducting patrols, etc. As a result, MONUSCO has not prioritized the functioning of WPS-specific measures²³ against conflict-related sexual violence, which according to several participants remained rather headquarters-driven. In the conclusion, the article discusses the findings and outlines avenues for further research.

Putting Protection on the Agenda

Women, children and sexual violence were not the traditional focus of the Security Council. Rather than as an issue with direct relevance for peace and security to be discussed at the highest intergovernmental level in New York, their suffering was perceived as an inherent side effect of armed conflict. Falling under International Humanitarian Law and human rights law, it was regarded as already addressed by specifically mandated institutions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Human Rights Council.²⁴ Accordingly, the Security Council did not see protection as its concern and only broadly criticized human rights and IHL violations on rare occasions. This meant that protection issues received insufficient attention, reflection and resources and that UN peacekeepers were not tasked with or provided with the necessary means to protect civilians.

It was only through mutually reinforcing advocacy by their proponents that protection concerns emerged on the agenda of the Security Council. A loose alliance of actors across the ‘three UNs’²⁵ converged in their shared objective to highlight the experiences of civilian groups in armed conflict.²⁶ Independent experts, academics and transnational civil society organizations generated joint momentum by first drawing attention to the problem of human suffering and subsequently pushing for the establishment of specific protection agendas.²⁷ As ‘norm entrepreneurs’, they ‘constructed’ issues and influenced agenda setting at the Security Council through expert-based authority, professional advocacy techniques and provision of information and policy proposals to UN staff and member state diplomats.²⁸

UN officials from different entities often shared similar concerns and convictions and hence helped bring CAAC, PoC and WPS into the UN institutions. They functioned as gatekeepers to UN member states and played a crucial role in the agenda-setting process. A number of UN member states equally ensured that protection concerns arrived on the Council’s agenda. Particularly middle-power countries, such as Canada and Norway, saw a leading role concerning human rights issues as an opportunity to have a meaningful impact and increase their reputation.²⁹ Known for its activist politics in the Security Council, France was also a strong proponent of the protection mandates, particularly CAAC and PoC.³⁰ In that manner, the agendas’ constituencies claimed political attention and space that each agenda would not have been able to assert individually:

Only a few years earlier, it would have been difficult to imagine that the Security Council might discuss thematic issues that were not directly linked to one or more specific conflicts. It would have been even more difficult to imagine that the Security Council would treat gender issues in relation to international peace and security, let alone adopt a resolution on the subject matter.³¹

My analysis of over 30 thematic resolutions indicates that issue linkage was a central method for gaining traction.³² Advocates increased the urgency and relevance of the protection agendas by cross-referencing them. For example, the Security Council increasingly noted the impact of armed conflict on ‘vulnerable populations’, and then specified them as ‘women’ and ‘children’.³³ This specification of vulnerability made the PoC agenda more palpable. Similarly, the concept of sexual violence was helpful for underlining the dramatic consequences of armed conflict on civilians and the need to protect them. This resulted in international public attention to these issues, which in turn created pressure for the UN and member states to become more active.³⁴

Another key strategy of protection advocates was framing human security issues as a security concern.³⁵ A first major success was when the Security Council recogzised the ‘deliberate targeting of civilian populations’ as a ‘threat to international peace and security’ in April 2000 (SCR 1296). In August 2000, this status was extended to children and almost eight years later, in June 2008, to sexual violence. The framing of protection issues as threats to international peace and security saw them rise in prominence and become concerns for the Security Council. In particular, conflict-related sexual violence benefitted from such categorization as it had long been seen as an inevitable by-product of war and hence neglected. Labelling it a security concern allowed it to be reframed as preventable and addressable through proactive security measures and victim services.³⁶ As a result, UN Action was ‘able to bring on board UN actors who had not necessarily responded to earlier efforts at integrating a gender and conflict perspective into humanitarian and peacekeeping operations’.³⁷ Stressing the connection of sexual violence to gender issues instead of security concerns may have made its uptake by UN Peacekeeping and international security actors much more difficult.

Institutionalizing Protection

After CAAC, PoC and WPS were put on the Security Council’s Agenda they were increasingly institutionalized. Following the initial ‘landmark resolutions’, UN entities, NGOs and some member states played an important role in pushing towards compliance and implementation through regular briefings, Arria-Formula meetings³⁸ and Open Debates. For instance, the Security Council Informal Expert Group on PoC was established in 2009 and has met around 100 times since then, acting as ‘an important forum for humanitarian and other actors to brief Council members with a view to ensuring that protection concerns are addressed in the Council’s decisions’.³⁹ CAAC, PoC and WPS also became the most frequent topics for the Security Council’s ‘open debate’ format,⁴⁰ which in return, ‘led to specific best practices provisions being incorporated into Council decisions on country- and region-specific items, and especially peacekeeping mandates’.⁴¹

With growing institutionalization, implementing entities were established and existing organizations were restructured according to the agendas’ mandate. Accordingly, each agenda became represented by several entities in the UN system, on both the policy and the implementation levels. Subsequently, these overlapping entities reinforced each other, for instance via mutual representation and by highlighting each other’s relevance.⁴² Each step forward within one agenda served as a milestone and reference for the others. In particular, CAAC provided a ‘pathway’ and lessons learned. The former French Representative to the UN, de la Sablière, describes how expertise on humanitarian law and human rights that the members of the Security Council acquired during CAAC processes was useful for other thematic concerns.⁴³ More importantly, CAAC’s relatively quick establishment of a robust institutional framework also provided a model for WPS.⁴⁴

Together CAAC, PoC and WPS contributed to a normative and doctrinal change within peacekeeping, transforming how the UN functions. The three protection agendas were part and parcel of the UN’s shift from macro processes, such as peace agreements and organizing elections, to an orientation towards individuals and their well-being. Their joint institutionalization also contributed to a deeper understanding of gender and age-specific vulnerabilities and facilitated the development of a range of protection instruments and practices.

Other thematic resolutions could have been established on the agenda of the Security Council as norm consumption in international organizations is contingent on lobbying and political dynamics between constituencies rather than on norms’ inherent characteristics.⁴⁵ The three ‘allied’ protection agendas prevailed against alternatives because of their joint advocacy and increasing institutionalization (through thematic resolutions, SC presidential statements, the establishment of the respective Offices of Special Representatives, Security Council working groups, etc.).

However, their institutionalization also introduced a new dynamic between the overlapping protection agendas. Given the competitive conditions in the field of intervention, overlaps that had facilitated successful advocacy during the agenda-setting phase now also meant that the newly established institutions were competing for limited attention and resources. This has played out in two ostensibly contradicting dynamics – the compartmentalization and the subsumption of protection mandates.

Compartmentalization of the Protection Mandate

On the one hand, the establishment of specialized protection agendas with specific foci, entities and instruments has increased the compartmentalization, some say ‘fragmentation’, of the protection mandate.⁴⁶ Instead of holistically addressing protection needs, there has emerged a system of multiple, insulated and ‘self-perpetuating’ administrative structures.⁴⁷ Its entities are expected to work together, but are primarily bound by their respective priorities, financial needs and reporting obligations. Interviewees described this as ‘working in silos’ because each entity has its own approach, work plan, activities and staff to deal with a specific aspect of the problem.⁴⁸ Not only does this system lack effective oversight and accountability, but entities are actually competing against each other for ‘turf’ – their position in the field – because they perpetually need to acquire political and financial support. A UN review found that interest in one agenda has direct implications for the others ‘in terms of allocations of resources and posts’ with some indications that posts such as WPAs and gender advisers are trading off against PoC posts more broadly’.⁴⁹ The pressure to constantly prove the relevance of their approach to protection and their competence in implementing it distracts from the larger goal of protecting civilians. Organizations and their staff are unwittingly pushed to orient their activities away from the direct needs of the beneficiaries and towards the donors and the actions of potential competitors.⁵⁰

The logic and consequences of compartmentalization are manifested in reporting. Given the competitive pressures in interventions, organizations have to be visible and demonstrate their expertise, dedication and impact. Reporting has a central function in such production of symbolic capital. However, as each entity focuses on writing reports, other activities become neglected. Consider the following interview segment with a UN official from September 2017:

Participant:

Too many sections are busy with reporting on things which are not their business, to be really honest, or tasks should be divided in a different way. It’s like UNPol [the UN police] is doing. I think they write seven reports a day on issues they have no qualifications for.

Researcher:

So they do it [write reports] in the framework of addressing crimes, right? Crimes that should be followed up.

Participant:

Yeah but they don’t, they actually just write the reports. They gather the data, they write the reports. And the data, they often gather it from other sections. That’s how it happens in the field. They walk into your office at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, they’re a bit hurried because it has to go fast, they take your – they want your data and then they’re gonna write their report. But what sense does that make? And in addition the military reports on all cases and then Civil Affairs reports on cases and it’s like … that is a problem.

The interviewee alludes to the problem of a multiplication of parallel reports that have limited practical value and take time, resources and focus away from actual protection work. In addition, information flows remain largely insulated from each other and the multitude of reports does not lead to a more complete picture as entities primarily report to and through their own hierarchies. UN staff refer to this as ‘stovepiping’. In emergencies, stovepiping inhibits timely action because sections of the same peacekeeping mission report to their hierarchy first and share information with other sections later. As a result, decision-makers are frequently confronted with inconsistent information and diverging facts. The problem has become so serious that in 2015 the High Level Panel on Peacekeeping (Hippo) report⁵¹ recommended to consolidate reporting on the different protection mandates. Therefore, the example of reporting aptly illustrates how the compartmentalization of the protection mandate has led to impractical organizational arrangements and ineffective practices.

Subsumption of Mandates

On the other hand, competition within the field has also created incentives to maintain broad understandings of protection⁵² in which certain aspects are subsumed under a supposedly larger mandate. In the struggle for symbolic capital, the meanings of concepts, such as protection, become ‘discursive battlegrounds’.⁵³ Entities attempt to lead discussions in order to improve their position in the field, including by subsuming other mandates under their own. As a senior UN official relates:

The challenge that this whole field has faced from day one is that everyone thinks they own it. UN Women, UNFPA, UNICEF, OHCHR and SRSG-SVC all compete to be a global voice for women and girls on matters of sexual violence. It’s a very crowded field.⁵⁴

During my research at UN headquarters in 2016, the on-going Consolidation reform allowed me to observe such dynamics. The reform was decided by the Secretary General⁵⁵ in response to the Hippo report and foresaw a consolidation of protection functions within the human rights components of peacekeeping operations. However, instead of deciding the modalities, the Secretary-General let the involved entities discuss what this would look like in a specifically established ‘consolidation working group’. This negotiation process between the convictions, interests and approaches of the different entities diminished the impact the reform, but also made it an excellent opportunity to study interaction. Many participants across the UN saw the reform as a result of strategic advocacy by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) with the primary goal of acquiring more responsibility, funding and staff as well as access to the Security Council. However, OHCHR staff seemed to genuinely perceive all aspects of protection as part of human rights, while child protection and CRSV experts argued vehemently for the need for specialized expertise and independent structures. They reasoned that particular vulnerabilities only become visible through distinct methods and foci. Accordingly, the initial blindness of UN institutions to these issues was the reason these mandates had been developed in the first place and consolidating meant ‘going blind again’.⁵⁶

As these discussions indicate, not all behaviour is strategically geared towards personal or organizational interests. During many interviews, participants seemed to speak with deep conviction, expressing personal, unfiltered perspectives. This is because the logic of the field is manifested in a disposition of how they understand the world and act within it. Through repeated practices, values and discourses, staff habitually take the position of their organization. As a part of that and depending on their respective organizational affiliation and routines, individuals come to understand some problems and related solutions as more or less important and, hence, subsume mandates under others.⁵⁷ For example, PoC actors often assume that protection against sexual violence is a part of the general efforts to protect civilians. As the majority of its implementing personnel belongs to the military, UN peacekeeping is inherently focused on physical security and ‘short-term’ rather than transformative approaches.⁵⁸ It adheres to a ‘dominant masculinist logic’ that prevails over gender concerns.⁵⁹ Some authors have even reported a certain resistance to ‘gender’.⁶⁰ Although peacekeepers widely acknowledge the need for specialized expertise on children, women and sexual violence, most seem to believe that these specific concerns are practically best addressed through the same means as general protection efforts – the deployment of peacekeepers, conducting patrols, etc.⁶¹ This is reflected inter alia in peacekeeping training: although knowledge about other mandates is widely seen as a main way of mitigating inter-organizational tensions, training sessions are conducted in a way that can only create minimal awareness of specific protection concern⁶² and sometimes even exacerbate divisions between implementing entities.⁶³

The field’s logic is so strong that even purportedly independent academics internalize it. During an interview, a fellow researcher explained that specific aspects of protection are important but also, paradoxically, not relevant for her inquiry:

I never thought about gender during my research on protection. Gender was subsumed in what I looked at. It was a two-way street: I could not think about protection risks and behaviour of armed groups without considering sexual violence. Through the prevalence of the sensationalised sexual violence topic, gender was everywhere. I felt like gender was addressed before PoC, so maybe it wasn’t something I saw as lacking attention. Just because I was not looking with a gender-specific lens does not mean gender was neglected. There were people working on gender, it was just not me.⁶⁴

The risk of subsumption is that subordinated issues receive less attention and resources even if their concerns are officially recogzised as legitimate and worthwhile.⁶⁵ Specifically, the critics of the Consolidation reform contended that specialized protection mandates, such as CAAC and CRSV, are being neglected under the human rights mandate. Additional consequences of subsumption and compartmentalization will be described in the case of MONUSCO below.

Institutionalizing and Operationalizing Protection in the DRC

Congo has a legacy of abuses against civilians that started with an extremely brutal and exploitative colonial period, swelled under Mobutu’s 32-year dictatorship and culminated during the deadliest conflict since World War II (from 1996 to 2003).⁶⁶ MONUSCO was established amidst that internationalized conflict in 1999, but even after the formal end of the war in 2003, violence continued primarily in the country’s eastern provinces.⁶⁷ While the complex entanglement of local, national and regional conflict dynamics has changed over the last 20 odd years, the targeted and extremely brutal violence by state actors and numerous armed groups against civilians has remained constant, including killing, maiming, sexual violence, torture, recruitment of child soldiers and multiple displacements. Meanwhile and despite shifting priorities and approaches, MONUSCO gradually evolved from a small observer mission to one of the largest, most expensive and robust peacekeeping operations with a lead on the development and implementation of protection measures. The literature usually explains this evolution with a number of embarrassing protection crises – such as the 2002 Kisangani Massacre, Mutebusi’s 2004 pillage of Bukavu, the 2011 Luvungi mass rapes and the M23’s brief occupation of Goma in 2012 – in which MONUSCO failed to protect civilians in its immediate surroundings, provoking outrage, media attention and political pressure, effectively prompting the Security Council and the mission to do more.⁶⁸ However, this perspective appears deterministic whereas ‘the Congo case study underscores the importance of agency’ in the operationalization of protection.⁶⁹ Protection failures and connected political pressures do not automatically result in more robust mandates or the development of more and better tools as the literature suggests. They did not have that effect across peacekeeping missions and a different specification of protection priorities was possible in Congo. Over the years, MONUSCO’s resolutions mention alternative specifications of protection, such as ethnic violence (Res 1234 in 1999), massacres (Res 1292 in 2000, Res 1493 in 2003) and displacement (e.g. Res. 1291 in 2000, Res 1896 in 2009), which could have become the central concerns.⁷⁰ While I agree that reoccurring protection failures threatened the symbolic capital of peacekeeping and the UN more generally, I want to draw attention to the advocates, supporters and staff members of CAAC, PoC and WPS that framed issues and exerted political pressure, leading to stronger Security Council mandates and greater determination within MONUSCO to address protection threats more effectively. Therefore, this section examines the interaction between the three agendas during their institutionalization and operationalization in DRC, focusing on its impact on protection against conflict-related sexual violence.

Institutionalizing Protection in MONUSCO’s Mandates

Protection issues were initially not on the Security Council’s agenda for the DRC. When the Council first authorized the deployment of 90 military observers to the country in August 1999, the resolution (S/Res/1258) did not once mention ‘protection’, ‘children’ or ‘sexual violence’, and instead focused on working with the parties to the conflict on maintaining the ceasefire agreement. When protection gradually became more prominent in MONUSCO’s mandates, it was primarily seen as a responsibility of belligerents according to international humanitarian law. As a task for the mission itself, protection was at first understood as ‘protection of UN personnel’ and ‘force protection’.⁷¹ For instance, report S/2000/30 and resolution 1291 (2000) indicate that the Security Council was initially more concerned with access and security for humanitarian workers and peacekeepers than protecting Congolese civilians.

As with the thematic resolutions, the joint advocacy efforts of their proponents were successful in drawing attention to CAAC, PoC and WPS, and gradually put them at the core of Security Council deliberations on Congo. Making protection tangible through the suffering of women and children in DRC was, again, a door opener. Through CAAC concerns, advocates were first able to get protection into Security Council deliberations on Congo. Resolution 1279, which established MONUSCO on 30 November 1999, mandated the mission after a list of ceasefire-specific tasks to ‘assist in the protection of human rights, including the rights of children’. It further institutionalized protection concerns by deciding to deploy ‘human rights’ and ‘child protection’ personnel. Resolution 1291, which provided MONUSCO with the renowned chapter VII mandate to ‘protect civilians under immanent threat of physical violence’ in February 2000, requested the mission to ‘facilitate human rights monitoring with particular attention to vulnerable groups including women and children’. Such monitoring subsequently gave advocates a much better basis to engage the Security Council to do more to protect civilians in DRC. Data on incidents and victims provided an impression of human suffering and illuminated patterns as well as changes. It fed into regular Secretary-General reports and had to be discussed in Security Council meetings on Congo. Therefore, the monitoring contributed to a shifting focus and was an important basis for protection advocacy.

Similar to the thematic resolutions, advocates used issue-linkage and cross-referencing to produce momentum for protection issues. In the context of limited international interest and means, protection issues were crucial for drawing attention and resources to the DRC. Given the country’s persistent image as the ‘heart of darkness’, child soldiers and rape were particularly successful frames for acquiring attention and resources.⁷² A senior protection expert stated that ‘in Congo much of the protection focus arose from CRSV, so it’s hard to view these themes as truly distinct’.⁷³ In MONUSCO’s mandates, the Security Council increasingly referred to the respective thematic resolutions on CAAC, WPS and CRSV. In 2007, the Security Council combined all three protection mandates and referred to their respective founding resolutions in one paragraph (S/Res/1794). This was also the first resolution that instructed a peacekeeping mission to ‘prioritize’ the protection of civilians ‘in decisions about the use of available capacities and resources’. From that point onwards, CAAC, PoC and WPS are regularly mentioned in MONUSCO resolutions, almost always together. The agendas were no longer subsumed under human rights but were themselves institutionalized. Strikingly, the mention of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Congo-specific resolutions increased from zero to twenty-four between 1999 and 2018.

Operationalizing Protection on the Ground

The increasing institutionalization of the three protection agendas through MONUSCO’s mandate also advanced the operationalization of protection in the DRC. Mounting support and resources from member states and UN headquarters meant the growth of MONUSCO’s substantive sections, including via the hiring of more staff. These sections worked together to achieve joint objectives:

We [CRSV-unit], the PoC people and Child Protection tended to be allies because we know that protection is what we have in common. We would really get together and work together under the umbrella of protection.⁷⁴

Each section developed new indicators, work plans and reporting obligations that further anchored the agendas in the bureaucratic logic of the UN and increased awareness on protection concerns across the DRC. The mission invested in expertise on gender and age-specific vulnerabilities by recruiting qualified staff, including from NGOs with experience on children, gender and/or protection. The peacekeeping force established focal points to address CRSV, which engaged with the civilian sections, sensitized troops and briefed MONUSCO’s military leadership. One senior official observed that:

Probably, these focal points did not fundamentally change the force, but on the strategic level, the UN’s military leadership was briefed on [CRSV-related] problems, which had not been the case previously.⁷⁵

The mission’s substantive sections, such as Child Protection, the Sexual Violence Unit and the Joint Human Rights Office (JHRO), started training soldiers and other mission components, ensuring that everybody was at least familiar with the basic terminology. Consequently, protection became institutionalized in the DRC, so that ‘nowadays, reports of protection issues, such as mass rapes, almost automatically trigger some kind of response’.⁷⁶

MONUSCO developed a number of tools and practices to operationalize the growing protection mandate, such as different types of peacekeeping patrols, community alert networks and joint protection teams.⁷⁷ These measures aimed at generally curtailing violence and abuse against all civilians. MONUSCO also implemented instruments to specifically address threats to women and children, such as dedicated personnel (i.e. Child Protection Officers and Women Protection Advisers), and monitoring and reporting mechanisms (MRM and MARA), which facilitated political engagement with the perpetrating parties. Most recently, MONUSCO introduced ‘gender markers’ across the mission’s different components with the goal of ensuring that their activities and reporting reflect gender aspects.

During the process of operationalization, the agendas’ implementing agencies could learn from and build on each other, particularly from the Child Protection Section. A Senior Women Protection Adviser⁷⁸ described during an interview how her team had benefitted from Child Protection’s experience of engaging with armed groups: as MONUSCO’s CRSV unit lacked the capacity to formally engage with armed groups, the head of Child Protection allowed them to add key actions on sexual violence to her section’s action plans.⁷⁹ Therefore, armed groups that signed an action plan on child protection also made commitments against CRSV.

Members of the protection-focused sections described achieving everyday synergies such as joint ‘messaging’. In meetings with parties to the conflict, protection actors advocate together against abuses and reinforce each other’s position. A Senior Women Protection Adviser explained: ‘So we come into these meetings [with the Congolese army] and I say: I support their point very much from the angle of CRSV’.⁸⁰ In MONUSCO’s internal meetings, the agenda’s implementing agencies jointly ensure that protection issues are considered in reflections and prioritized by the mission as they are competing with other perceptions and tasks from MONUSCO’s military, the logistical administration and the leadership.

How the described improvements translated into protection impact is difficult to discern. However, there has been considerable progress against conflict-related sexual violence and abuses against children (particularly the recruitment and use of child soldiers) in the DRC. Likewise, quantitative research increasingly finds that peacekeepers reduced the violence against civilians in Congo and other contexts.⁸¹ Yet, violations have persisted, and the following sections provide some explanations for why protection interventions have not reached their full potential.

Fragmentation of Protection in Congo

While the institutionalization and operationalization of protection agendas in the DRC has led to a number of practical complementarities, it has also resulted in a proliferation of implementing agencies that overlap in their foci and responsibilities. On the one hand, a lack of holistic vision and accountability for the numerous overlapping entities leads to gaps and contradictions. MONUSCO’s military operations have, for example, repeatedly reduced the space for action by humanitarian protection actors. On the other hand, overlaps result in inefficiencies and duplications as different entities work on the same issues without proper sufficient coordination or supervision. For instance, MONUSCO’s various sections frequently investigate and report on the same incidents without addressing the underlying problems. A UN protection expert stated that ‘there are many instances where WPAs, Human Rights, UNPOL and Gender Officers will interview and re-interview the same survivor because they haven’t coordinated effectively’.⁸²

There is also ample evidence that the emergence of implementing entities in DRC has increased competition in the field. One example is the notorious tension between MONUSCO’s Child Protection section and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In 2017, a joint review found that representatives of both entities withheld information, obstructed collaboration, aired disagreements in public and made ‘disparaging comments’ about each other and their organizations in front of government representatives, diplomatic missions, implementing partners and UN staff, which hindered implementation, demoralized staff and caused embarrassment, reportedly, up to the level of the Security Council in New York.⁸³ Interestingly, such conflicts often play out as personal feuds and are described by participants as ‘ego battles’, although they reflect technical challenges, organizational interests and larger structural issues. In this case, the review found that ‘institutional tensions’ between UNICEF and missions with child protection mandates are inherent across missions and have existed in the Congolese context ‘between almost all of the UNICEF and MONUSCO Chiefs of Child Protection since the establishment of the MRM [Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism] in DRC in 2006’.⁸⁴

Within MONUSCO, the Civil Affairs and Human Rights sections have struggled with each other to gain the ‘lead’ on protection. Their rivalry has played out in a number of ways. For instance, Human Rights staff stated that it had often been difficult for them to gain access to reports from locally deployed Civil Affair officers. Instead of forwarding these reports directly to their colleagues across the office, Civil Affair officers usually report first up their hierarchy. Section heads at provincial and mission headquarters then decide whether and how much they should share with partners. However, by that time events on the ground have often already progressed and the information has lost much of its value.⁸⁵

Turf issues between protection agendas and their involved entities appear to have also considerably delayed the implementation of Monitoring and Reporting Arrangements (MARA) for CRSV. Although Congo was chosen as one of four countries for an accelerated MARA roll-out in May 2012, the Security Council restated the request to implement MARA in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. Another request for a coordinated MARA implementation in 2018 (Res 2409) suggests persistent coordination issues among the different implementation partners concerning data collection and treatment. Despite the establishment of a MARA working group, data on sexual violence in conflict has been a ‘contentious issue in the DRC and a subject of inter-agency tensions for the UN’.⁸⁶ Fundamentally connected to turf issues, these tensions are usually explained by diverging approaches to information verification and different standards of information sharing among the participating entities. For instance, the Joint Human Rights Office (JHRO) has higher standards for the verification of reports and is often reluctant to share information with partners. Consider this depiction by a Human Rights Officer:

UNHCR gathers data through their monitors. Their monitors are national contractors who fill out forms based on people’s statements. They don’t check the information at all. They just fill out the form. UNFPA has information through the hospitals and the medical facilities but it’s not always clear what the criminal aspect of the violation was. We on our side, we do triple verification. We have to have three independent sources before we confirm a case. UNHCR does not do verification. UNFPA has data from hospitals, which is a very different concept of data, and UNICEF has data from their partners in the health sector. UNFPA is interested in SGBV [sexual and gender-based violence], not necessarily from armed perpetrators or parties to the conflict. UNHCR cannot share their data with us – individual data, meaning names of victims. And we cannot share our data with them.⁸⁷

These dynamics are even more pronounced with ‘partners’ outside the UN. NGOs staff reported how cooperating with the mission was difficult because MONUSCO would not share information, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, and not include them in work processes. Furthermore, staff from MONUSCO’s Joint Human Rights Section was described as leveraging the mission’s power over smaller organizations, such as NGOs’ dependency on logistical assets and security escorts, to reduce their criticism and interference.⁸⁸

Subsumption of Protection in the DRC

Similar to headquarters, the subordination of specific protection concerns under a larger mandate has also had negative consequences in Congo. Notably, MONUSCO’s emphasis on physical protection has led the mission to overly focus on military means. As an institution, the peacekeeping mission is naturally inclined towards a security perspective. Given that the majority of its personnel are soldiers, staff members habitually perceive threats and response through a military lens. In addition, the ability to provide physical protection is the unique capacity of MONUSCO, which is why many civilian peacekeepers and even humanitarians think that this is what the mission should focus on. Consider the following statement by a MONUSCO official:

My point of view has always been that sexual violence does not exist [laughs]. It’s a strong statement. My point of view is that it never comes on its own. Sexual violence comes with killing, it comes with looting, it comes with torture, it comes with everything. And so the awareness about sexual violence is important on all levels of the population, of the authorities, and of the mission and all actors. So this awareness raising is important. But at the same time, when it comes to prevention or it comes to reacting against that is let’s say a general PoC approach. So you don’t need special mechanisms. I think you don’t have to have special mechanisms. That falls into the general mechanisms of PoC.⁸⁹

The statement demonstrates the frequently occurring tension between recognizing the need for specialized expertise while also thinking that its perspectives would be of limited practical use. As a result, MONUSCO essentially continues to address sexual violence with the same measures taken to protect civilians in general, such as deployment of peacekeepers and patrols. Although gender awareness and CRSV-sensitivity have long been recognized as important, most staff are familiarized with the terminologies in short training sessions prior to and/or during their deployment, and since 2018 all personnel is required to integrate gender perspectives in their daily work (e.g. through gendered indicators), MONUSCO’s military force remains largely ignorant of specific protection matters. A 2019 internal Audit of MONUSCO’s gender mainstreaming and responsiveness found that ‘gender issues had not been adequately mainstreamed into the military operations, increasing the risk that its operations for the protection of civilians may not be adequate to respond to the different security needs of women, men, boys and girls’.⁹⁰ This was confirmed in the in my interviews:

The male peacekeepers just didn’t get that. The local women weren’t talking to them or they felt themselves that it was inappropriate to ask women very difficult questions about being raped.⁹¹

MONUSCO’s former force commander described protection as a problem of eliminating the bad guys, displaying a certain neglect of more nuanced approaches.⁹² Accordingly, women, girls, old men and young boys are covered by the same protection efforts, which should be more ‘robust’. However, without specific expertise and focus, the problem of sexual violence might remain undetected. A former WPA cautioned that:

You need the focus [of the specialised mandate] in order to identify what is going on. Because if you don’t have the focus you will – like it was before the year 2000 – you will not identify it [CRSV], you will not see it, you will not analyse it, you will not report it and you won’t be able to do anything against it.⁹³

A senior MONUSCO staff described what this can mean in practice:

If you are on a mission with a specific mandate, you are so focused that you don’t see other things. For instance in Ituri, there was this conflict in Djugu. Human Rights only sent general human rights officers, who came back reporting that sexual violence was no issue in this context. That really surprised me. I think they simply didn’t ask the right questions. There are specific approaches, which require time to learn. If a man just runs around in a displacement camp and asks if someone was raped, it is very possible that victims do not step forward.⁹⁴

MONUSCO’s focus on PoC has also slowed down the implementation of protection mechanisms against sexual violence. While PoC measures were largely developed by the mission itself, the specific protection of women and girls (as proposed by the WPS agenda) has remained a headquarters-driven process that has not received the practical support it requires.⁹⁵ Due to a lack of prioritization and resulting shortage of funding the deployment of Women Protection advisers (WPAs) has, for example, proven slow and cumbersome, also impacting the functioning of monitoring and reporting arrangements. The Security Council requested MONUSCO to ‘identify Women Protection Advisers (WPAs)’ in 2009 (Res 1906, page 5) but had to restate this request in 2013 (Res 2098) and in 2014 (Res 2147) before MONUSCO finally redeployed existing staff as WPAs later that year. Although developing and financing adequate implementation structures is a challenging task, MONUSCO has also used the available resources for WPS implementation inadequately and ‘completely neglected the funding of posts’.⁹⁶ Considering the size of the country and the number of incidents, the mission never established a sufficient number of Women Protection Adviser (WPA) positions to tackle CRSV or ensure coverage across MONUSCO’s field offices.⁹⁷ In addition, the seven Women Protection Advisers currently deployed are UN Volunteers and national staff, who hold less sway in the very hierarchical organization.⁹⁸ For a number of reasons, MONUSCO has been unable to establish international professional staff positions and maintain or transform previously seconded positions.⁹⁹ The Senior Women Protection Adviser effectively remains dependent on volatile funding from the Swedish Government.¹⁰⁰ The lack and frequent rotation of staff has impacted MARA coordination and meant a lack of CRSV leadership and representation, for instance in mission leadership meetings.¹⁰¹ Although some MONUSCO officials have explained these circumstances as a series of unfortunate incidents, the overall situation indicates a lack of prioritization of the WPS agenda.¹⁰²

Conclusion

The article has argued that understanding peacekeepers’ efforts to protect civilians requires analysing the interaction between the UN’s protection agendas. To make that argument, I demonstrated that overlaps between CAAC, PoC and WPS resulted in complementarities and contradictions from when they were first established as formal agendas at the Security Council, through their gradual institutionalization, and operationalization in the DRC. Although the analysis focused on the effects of interaction on measures against conflict-related sexual violence, the described institutional dynamics are rooted in the structural conditions of the field and, therefore, relevant for protection more generally and other areas of intervention. Furthermore, the field is ‘self-referential’ and functions quite independently from local realities, which is why we should expect similar observations in other peacekeeping settings.¹⁰³ Unfortunately, the embeddedness of interaction in the field also means that the described dynamics are not easily addressed through partial reforms. If the larger structural context is not considered, initiatives are likely to be incorporated into existing practices and institutions.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, the field’s rich history of reforms demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to absorb criticism and emerge strengthened in the process without making fundamental changes.¹⁰⁵

Although structures are important, the account of the overlapping protection agendas also shows that agency can transform ideas into institutionalized agendas with specific tools and practices that shape norms, expectations and behaviour, and ultimately transform the field itself. This highlights the role of strategic thinking and skilful advocacy, and points to the importance of everyday choices that individual interveners can make to better serve beneficiaries.¹⁰⁶ While previous researchers have stressed the importance of agenda-setting for international organizations,¹⁰⁷ my findings indicate that agendas themselves matter.

More research on the interaction between protection agendas is needed, especially during their institutionalization and operationalization in the DRC and other contexts. Since agency in agendas remains complex and dynamic, researchers should pay particular attention to who is acting, while considering the structural conditions of the field that shape individuals’ sense-making and behaviour.

I believe that my approach to making plausible claims about organizational effectiveness and protection output is valid, but data on protection impact would be helpful for confirming and detailing findings, not least to convince field members. However, even as quantitative studies make progress towards disaggregating data (according to location, gender, and increasingly staff categories), attributing impact from an array of activities on multi-dimensional events of violence (or rather non-violence) will remain challenging.¹⁰⁸ Despite the need for a holistic approach to protection, rigorous testing of protection impact will require narrowing down specific activities and assumed outcomes. These two demands may appear somewhat contradictory, but fittingly reflect the balancing act that practitioners have been asked to perform over the last two decades. It is my sincere hope that this article will provide constructive input for policy-makers and implementers during this process.

Acknowledgements

In addition to the gatekeepers and participants that enabled this research, I am grateful to Alex Veit, Sheree Kullenberg, Ralph Mamiya, Klaus Schlichte, Emily Paddon-Rhoads, Frederik Unseld, Séverine Autesserre, Anna Wolkenhauer and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback and encouragement. I also thank Macartan Humphreys and his team at WZB for hosting me during the revision of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [grant number VE 856/2-1].

Notes on contributors

Janosch Neil Kullenberg

Janosch N. Kullenberg is a PhD fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) and a post-doctoral researcher at Durham University with over five years of practical experience in international interventions, including with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO).

Notes

1 Happold, “Protecting Children in Armed Conflict,” 265.

2 Kirby and Shepherd, “Reintroducing Women, Peace and Security”.

3 I use the term contradictions to refer to all negative consequences (for organisations and their provision of protection) that stem from irreconcilable aspects of the agendas themselves as well as diverging interests and interpretations of those implementing them.

4 Lee-Koo, “WPS, Children, and Armed Conflict”.

5 Dönges and Kullenberg, “What Works (and Fails) in Protection”; Hultman and Muvumba Sellström, “WPS and Protection of Civilians”.

6 Engle has, however, recognised the value of analysing the resolutions of the three agendas in tandem, “The Grip of Sexual Violence,” 26.

7 Cobb and Elder, “The Politics of Agenda-Building,” 906.

8 Livingston, “The Politics of International Agenda-Setting,” 313; Zahariadis, Handbook of Public Policy Agenda Setting; Carpenter et al., “Explaining the Advocacy Agenda”.

9 I identified three different phases of agenda development from (1) agenda-setting and awareness raising to (2) institutionalisation and (3) operationalisation (cf. Bode, “Reflective Practices at the Security Council,” 301), which are somewhat similar to the norm cycle (Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” 887).

10 When using field, this articles refers to the Bourdieusian sense and not interveners’ common usage of the term as the place where implementation takes place.

11 Adler-Nissen, “Bourdieu in International Relations”; Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State”; Bourdieu, “Entwurf Einer Theorie Der Praxis”; Schwingel, “Bourdieu Zur Einführung”; cf. Goetze, “The Distinction of Peace”.

12 Krause, The Good Project, 98.

13 Veit and Tschörner, “Creative Appropriation,” 10.

14 Adler-Nissen, Bourdieu in International Relations, xv; Schwingel, Bourdieu Zur Einführung, 55.

15 Autesserre, Peaceland, 44–5; Goetze, The Distinction of Peace, 28.

16 Krause, The Good Project; Goetze, The Distinction of Peace.

17 Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics.

18 Kennedy and Thornberg, “Deduction, Induction, and Abduction”.

19 For instance, I developed the concept of ‘subsumption’ of protection mandates from my analysis and only later discovered similar usage by other authors (e.g. Jacob, “Children and Armed Conflict”; Howard-Hossman, “Human Security: Understanding Human Rights”).

20 To protect participants, I have anonymised their identities and positions.

21 Although the UN peacekeeping operation in Congo was named MONUC between 1999 and 2010, I use ‘MONUSCO’ to refer to the entire mission from 1999 to the present.

22 Martin, “The Protection of Civilians,” 34; Weir, “DR Congo”.

23 Such as Women Protection Advisers (WPAs), Senior Women Protection Advisers (SWPAs) and Monitoring and Reporting Arrangements (MARA).

24 Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings, “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325,” 135. For an account on the conceptual roots see Mamiya “A History and Conceptual Development of the PoC”.

25 A useful concept for differentiating between three types of UN actors: (1) UN member states, (2) UN institutions, and (3) actors that are not formal members but associated with the UN, such as NGOs, academics, consultants, experts and independent commissions. Weiss, Carayannis, and Jolly, “The Third United Nations,” 123.

26 Lee-Koo, “WPS, Children and Armed Conflict”, 607.

27 Engle, “The Grip of Sexual Violence”.

28 Bode, “Reflective Practices at the Security Council,” 297; Carpenter, “Setting the Advocacy Agenda”; Jansson and Eduards, “The Politics of Gender in the UN Security Council,” 4.

29 Suhrke, “Human Security and the Interests of States,” 265.

30 Bode, “Reflective Practices at the Security Council,” 307.

31 Tryggestad, “Trick or Treat?” 543.

32 Haas, “Why Collaborate?,” 162–75.

33 Engle, “The Grip of Sexual Violence,” 27.

34 Cf. Charli Carpenter, “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups’”.

35 Somerville and Aroussi, “Campaigning for ‘Women, Peace and Security’,” 156; Hudson, Gender, Human Security and the United Nations, 14.

36 Baaz and Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War?; Eriksson Baaz and Stern, “The Complexity of Violence”; Veit and Tschörner, “Creative Appropriation”.

37 O’Gorman, Review of UN Action, 32.

38 Named after the Venezuelan ambassador Diego Arria who initiated them in 1992, these informal meetings allow the Council to receive input from outside the UN.

39 Secretary-General, “Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (S/2020/366),” 4.

40 Basu, “Gender as National Interest at the UN Security Council,” 262.

41 Sievers and Daws, The Procedure of the UN Security Council, 52.

42 For instance, on 29 June 1998, the SRSG CAAC briefed the Security Council (as an authority) on PoC. Brooks, “The UN Security Council and Civilian Protection”.

43 de la Sablière, “Security Council Engagement on the Protection of Children in Armed Conflict,” 21.

44 Lee-Koo, “WPS, Children, and Armed Conflict,” 611; Interview with DPKO official, 29.01.2017.

45 True-Frost, “The Security Council and Norm Consumption,” 122; Basu, “Gender as National Interest at the UN Security Council,” 162.

46 Interview with UN official January 26, 2017.

47 Exchange with UN Official July 2018.

48 E.g. interview with Human rights Officer on March 9, 2016.

49 O’Gorman, Review of UN Action, 14.

50 Krause, The Good Project, Chapter 2; Autesserre, “International Peacebuilding and Local Success,” 121.

51 S/2015/446.

52 Personal correspondence, July 2018.

52a Stensland and Sending, “Unpacking the ‘Culture of Protection’”.

53 Sande Lie, “The Knowledge Battlefield of Protection”.

54 S/2015/682.

55 Senior Child Protection Expert, October 2017.

56 See also: Howard-Hassmann, “Human Security: Understanding Human Rights,” 103.

57 Lee-Koo, “Translating UNSCR 1325 into Practice,” 40.

58 Ibid; Mobekk, “Gender, Women and Security Sector Reform,” 284.

59 Puechguirbal, “Gender Training for Peacekeepers,” 117.

60 Hultman and Muvumba Sellström, “WPS and Protection of Civilians,” 604.

61 Flaspöler, “Adding Peacekeepers to the Debates,” 9.

62 Vermeij and Holen, “Building Bridges for Success,” 3.

63 Interview, January 2017.

64 Howard-Hassmann, “Human Security: Understanding Human Rights,” 103; Jacob, “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security Studies,” 20.

65 Reyntjens, The Great African War; Prunier, From Genocide to Continental War.

66 Berwouts, Congo’s Violent Peace; Vogel and Stearns, “Kivu’s Intractable Security Conundrum, Revisited”.

67 Berkman and Holt, “The Impossible Mandate?” Holt and Taylor, “Protecting Civilians in the Context of UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Reynaert, “MONUC/ MONUSCO and Civilian Protection in the Kivus”.

68 Paddon, “Peacekeeping in the Congo,” 176.

69 Interview with senior protection expert, June 2019; cf. part on ‘counterfactual’ above.

70 Holt and Taylor, “Protecting Civilians in the Context of UN Peacekeeping,” 243.

71 Autesserre, “Dangerous Tales”; Koddenbrock, “Malevolent Politics”; Koddenbrock, “Recipes for Intervention”.

72 Email exchange, June 2019.

73 Interview with WPA, August 2019.

74 Interview with SWPA, November 2018.

75 Interview with SWPA, September 2018.

76 DPKO/ DFS-OHCHR, “Report on the Joint Protection Team Mechanism”; Martin, “The Protection of Civilians”.

77 Given that there only has been a total of four SWPAs in DRC, I do not provide further identifiers.

78 Interview with SWPA, September 25, 2019.

79 Ibid.

80 Peitz and Reisch, “Violence Reduction or Relocation?”; Phayal and Prins, “Deploying to Protect”.

81 Email exchange July 2018.

82 Joint Review of the MRM in DRC, Interview with senior MONUSCO official, October 2017.

83 Ibid., 4.

84 Interview with Human rights Officer, June 2014.

85 O’Gorman, Review of UN Action, 87.

86 Interview, September 2017.

87 Interview, July 2019.

88 Interview, September 2017.

89 Office of Internal Oversight Services, Report 2019/014, 5.

90 Interview with WPA, July 11, 2019.

91 Interview, May 2016.

92 Interview, September 2017.

93 Interview, November 2018.

94 Interview with former WPA, June 2017.

95 Interview with former WPA, June 2016.

96 In November 2016, an internal analysis showed awareness, comparing MONUSCO’s then 6 WPS staff (no int. professionals) with UNMISS 15 WPS personnel (including 9 int. professionals) and MINUSCA’s 10 WPS staff (7 int. professional staff), as well as with other sections within MONUSCO, such as Child Protection (35 staff) and Human Rights (110 staff). With the Consolidation of CRSV under human rights, JHRO has introduced additional ‘focal points’ amongst its human rights officers, but these do not possess the same expertise and were described as focusing on their regular human rights work. Therefore, the issue has been ‘addressed’ but not solved.

97 Interview with SWPA, September 25, 2019.

98 Interview with member state official, July 2019.

99 Interview with MONUSCO official, July 2019.

100 Interviews with WPA, July 11, 2019 and with SWPA, November 2018.

101 Interviews with senior MONUSCO Official, June 2018; WPA, July 9, 2019; donor government official, July 2019.

102 Goetze, The Distinction of Peace, 218. Cf. Autesserre conducted most of her fieldwork in the DRC to subsequently confirm the findings in other peacebuilding contexts.

103 Krause, The Good Project, 126–46.

104 De Waal and de Waal, Famine Crimes, XVI.

105 Goetze, The Distinction of Peace, 175; Autesserre, Peaceland, 185–9.

106 Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics.

107 Brosig and Sempijja, “Does Peacekeeping Reduce Violence?”; Fjelde, Hultman, and Nilsson, “Protection Through Presence”; Hunnicutt and Nomikos, “Nationality, Gender, and Deployments at the Local Level: Introducing the RADPKO Dataset”; Otto, “The Civilian Side of Peacekeeping”.

105 Goetze, The Distinction of Peace, 175; Autesserre, Peaceland, 185–9.