Distractions, Distortions and Dilemmas: The Externalities of Protecting Civilians in United Nations Peacekeeping

ABSTRACT

This article explores the unintended consequences associated with the protection of civilians (PoC) mandate in United Nations peacekeeping. Drawing primarily on two case studies – the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and South Sudan (UNMISS) – we advance three lines of argument. First, the gravitational pull of PoC can distract missions from other, often interdependent, priorities. Second, the implementation of PoC can distort intended impacts. Third, these distractions and distortions can combine to produce dilemmas for mission architects, leadership and implementers. We conclude by identifying how these quandaries can ultimately make civilian protection, sustainable peace, and mission exits more elusive.

Introduction

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) as a concept has a long history and deep roots in international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Over the past twenty years, the Protection of Civilians (PoC) has gradually become a key norm for the UN system (Ki-moon 2012). While understood differently by humanitarian, human rights and security communities, the application and operatinalisation of PoC through peace operations has been a key feature of this evolution (Willmot and Sheeran 2013). A fixture of most major operations since peacekeepers were first authorised in Sierra Leone to ‘protect civilians from the threat of physical violence’ (UN 1999), this PoC mandate has provided the foundation for peacekeepers to actively address threats against vulnerable populations and rebuild the credibility of peacekeeping as an instrument of human security following the protection failures of Rwanda and Srebrenica (Hunt and Zimmerman, 2019). While there has been considerable variation in the interpretation of PoC mandates in practice (Bode and Karlsrud 2018, Paddon, 2014), there has been a gradual consolidation and institutionalisation of PoC within the UN peace operations bureaucracy through the development of policy, doctrine and training (UN 2019, 2020).

Recent studies have shown that the deployment of peacekeepers correlates to reductions in the incidence of conflict-related violence (Fortna 2008, Hultman 2013, Hultman et al. 2019) including at the local or sub-national level (Ruggeri et al. 2018, Phayal 2019). This has been shown to correlate positively with the magnitude of the deployment (Fortna 2008, Hultman et al. 2013), the diversity of mission composition (Bove and Ruggeri 2016), the type of mission mandate (Doyle and Sambanis 2006, Hultman 2010) and the quality of troops/TCCs (Haass and Ansorg 2018). Of particular relevance to this study, the presence of peacekeepers has also been shown to correlate with a reduction in violence targeting civilians (Hultman et al. 2013) in particular from attacks by armed groups (Fjelde et al. 2019). Indeed, Hultman et al. (2019) found that more peacekeepers tend to equate to a bigger protective effect. More recent studies have shown that military peacekeepers tend to be better at protecting civilians from attacks by rebel groups than from abuse by host governments (Phayal and Prins 2019).

However, notwithstanding these effects, the unique way in which PoC in peace operations has been mandated by the Security Council, interpreted by mission leaders and implemented by military, police and civilians in the field, has contributed to a number of unanticipated outcomes. These externalities – which can be both positive and negative – are critical to missions’ ability to achieve their overall aims. As yet, these have not received attention in academic work and warrant further examination.

This article seeks to fill this gap and examines the major negative unintended consequences associated with the PoC mandate. It focuses primarily on two case studies – the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). These cases were selected as they are both large multidimensional missions in existence for over a decade, operating in contexts where threats to civilians are manifold – stemming from both state and non-state actors – and on-going. In both settings, PoC has been designated as a strategic priority, while both missions have also faced significant challenges in their relationships with their respective host governments. As such, while all peace operations are sui generis, these two cases can offer broader lessons for peace operations around the world, especially those with large military/police components, multidimensional mandates, and a protection priority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders, including field visits to both countries,¹ the article advances three lines of argument. First, the gravitational pull of PoC can distract attention and scarce resources from other, often interdependent, priorities. Second, the ways in which PoC has been pursued can distort intended impacts and in some circumstances even do harm. Third, these distractions and distortions can combine to produce dilemmas for mission leaders, Secretariat officials, and the Security Council. The article concludes by identifying how these quandaries tend to undermine coherent strategic approaches, ultimately making civilian protection, sustainable peace and mission exits more elusive.

The main contribution of this article is to provide an evidence base for the externalities of PoC mandates and a clearer articulation of the trade-offs required by the peace operations system and peacekeepers on the ground when authorising and implementing the PoC mandate. A second contribution is to help clarify what Bode and Karlsrud (2018) have identified as a conceptual blurring of PoC across peacekeeping, where the proliferation of activities now considered as protection has caused some confusion as to what should be expected of peace operations. The significance of such a contribution will be in helping UN leadership define and deliver PoC in a way that complements other mission priorities and avoids some of the pitfalls witnessed in today’s missions. This in turn would facilitate a shift away from more operational approaches to PoC – e.g., thinking of it as a set of activities meant to reduce immediate risks to civilians – and help to position PoC mandates within a broader strategic context for peacekeeping (Jacquand 2019: 27).

Distractions: The Problematic Magnetism of PoC

In missions with PoC mandates, UN doctrine dictates that protection must be the highest priority (UN 2019, 2020). Over time, the large peacekeeping missions operating today have been tasked with increasingly ambitious PoC roles, lengthening lists of activities related to PoC, and clear directives that mission resources should be channelled to PoC as the primus inter pares of the mandate. This means that PoC has become a strongly magnetic force within peacekeeping; pulling in time, resources, and the expectations that go with them.

Consumption of Scarce Resources

While experts have argued persuasively that PoC requires even more resources and attention than it currently receives, in the context of finite resources, attempts to better support PoC priorities often contribute to deficits in other areas. For example, in South Sudan, the PoC sites – UN bases housing tens of thousands of internally displaced people – have gobbled up many of the mission’s resources since they were created at the outbreak of civil war in 2013. Reflecting their peak occupancy, a 2018 independent review of UNMISS noted, ‘By a conservative estimate, 50 per cent of the Mission’s efforts, in time, money, staffing and energy, are devoted to managing and protecting those sites. At least 5 of the 12 infantry battalions are engaged in protection of civilians site security, as are five formed police units and nearly 400 individual police officers’ (UN 2018: para.13). In Bor state in 2018, the mission employed well over half of its available resources for the state on its PoC site, though only 0.1 per cent of the displaced population resided there (Day et al. 2019).

Our previous research has demonstrated that the PoC sites have performed an essential role, protecting at least 200,000 of the most vulnerable civilians caught up in the war over a number of years (Day et al. 2019). At the same time, the concentration of assets around a relatively small proportion of the population has meant UNMISS has had fewer resources to patrol areas beyond the PoC camps, where the overwhelming majority of South Sudanese reside. This in turn means a smaller geographic reach for other related UNMISS tasks, such as human rights monitoring and opening up areas for delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Similarly, in the DRC the PoC mandate has become the overriding priority, often at a cost to other mission priorities. In recent years, MONUSCO adopted a ‘protection through projection’ approach meant to reduce static sites across eastern Congo and replace them with rapidly deployable battalions by air. Heavily reliant on expensive air assets, this approach actually proved more expensive than previous PoC activities, leaving fewer resources in an already shrinking budget for other mandated tasks (MONUSCO 2018).² Moreover, the reduction of static team sites left other mission components like civil affairs and community liaison assistants (CLAs) – which rely on UN sites as a base for operations – with fewer points of contact with communities. Ironically, local community engagement around conflict resolution is seen as a crucial element of PoC (UN 2017, 2019).

Competing for Attention

In theory, PoC should be part of a broader approach to conflict resolution and progress towards a comprehensive peace. Well-planned PoC approaches can bolster political processes, increasing confidence amongst the population in peace outcomes, helping to restore relations amongst former belligerents and reducing the risks of future violence. In practice, however, PoC often appears to draw attention away from mission priorities, including the political process, sometimes operating more in competition than in synergy with them. In wide ranging interviews in the DRC, for example, experts argued that MONUSCO’s overriding focus on PoC had detracted from its potential work on the political process. Specifically, PoC was seen as ‘crisis driven’, meaning the mission was continually responding to the latest massacre or early warning threat, less able to articulate a strategic vision, and often on the defensive in explaining the loss of civilian lives.³ Similarly, experts in South Sudan suggested that the dominant narrative of UNMISS had become the PoC sites, leaving less bandwidth for the mission to engage on the political process. In fact, the mission’s role in protecting civilians from state security forces was seen by some as placing it in a difficult position vis-à-vis the government during the political talks (Hunt 2020: 73).⁴

The result of this competition for attention is that many mission components have merely ‘rebranded’ their work as PoC in order to ensure that it receives the resources and public spotlight needed to secure future support from the Security Council.⁵ Rather than meaningfully articulate a mission-wide strategy to include all priority mandate areas, the overriding focus on PoC has caused components like Human Rights, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR), Security Sector Reform (SSR), Civil Affairs, and Police to rearticulate their goals in protection terms.⁶ This is not necessarily a bad thing – indeed the Department of Peace Operations’ PoC policy lays out a third tier of its operational concept with precisely this in mind – but the subordination of activities to PoC without a broader strategic focus can lead to a superficial recasting by mission components (UN 2019: 16). ‘As long as I put PoC on my plan, I know it will be funded, even if we all know it’s the same work I was doing before,’ one UN official summarized.⁷

In sum, the PoC mandate – often made an explicit priority by the Security Council always an implicit moral imperative on the ground – can be all-consuming for missions. The gravitational pull of PoC can distract attention and scarce resources from other, often interdependent, priorities (Kullenberg 2021). These distractions contribute to distorting the intended objectives of peace operations, including those relating to protection, discussed further below.

Distortions: The Unintended Consequences of PoC

The fundamental goal of PoC is to reduce harm to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence. While this is most frequently thought of through a security lens and the presence of UN troops, a broad array of UN activities – often civilian-led and non-coercive – may contribute to reduction of risks. Local community engagement can reduce tensions, DDR can attenuate the flows of weapons and fighters into conflict zones, SSR can tackle abusive cultures and personnel in police and justice institutions, human rights monitoring can deter would-be assailants, and progress on a peace process can diminish incentives for violence. Indeed, a raft of bespoke PoC mechanisms and tools including Community Alert Networks, Community Liaison Assistants and Joint Protection Teams have been developed to good effect over the past decade to do exactly this (Weir and Hunt 2011, UN 2020). Acknowledging these positive effects of peacekeeping, we here argue that the practice of PoC has also produced unintended effects, negative externalities that may at times outweigh the intended outcomes.

Outsized Expectations

As PoC has become more central to large multidimensional peace operations, so too have expectations grown that the UN will be able to protect enormous populations spread over vast, inaccessible terrains. Innovations like MONUSCO’s Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) have driven expectations still higher, pushing the UN to take offensive action against armed groups as part of its protection mandate. Yet, according to experts in the DRC, even the deployment of rapid, agile air assets in the FIB fell far short of the kinds of resources that would have been needed to protect the tens of thousands of people facing the risk of attack by armed groups.⁸ The result was a dramatic increase in expectations amongst the Congolese community that MONUSCO would be able to protect communities in eastern Congo, one which was continually confronted by the reality of large-scale massacres and insufficient protection responses. Not only has this contributed to a loss of confidence amongst the Congolese in MONUSCO’s role – in 2016 well under half those surveyed believed that MONUSCO protected civilians at all (Congo Research Group 2016) – but it also may have caused the other brigades in the mission to become more passive and less willing to engage in robust protection activities. One expert suggested that the expectations around the FIB acted as ‘Valium for MONUSCO’, allowing the other troops to fall into apathy (Day 2017).

Similarly, in South Sudan, the outbreak of the civil war in late 2013 triggered a dramatic shift away from statebuilding to PoC for UNMISS. The shift of the mandate formalised what was a clear and in many ways unprecedented policy of the mission to shelter civilians fleeing attacks by their own government forces. This naturally heightened expectations of those inside the PoC sites that the UN would provide for needs that were not met.⁹ The protection provided inside these safe areas was at best palliative. In the extreme, the perimeter of the PoC sites offered little resistance, for example, during attacks by government forces on PoC sites in 2016 (UN 2016a, CIVIC 2016a, 2016b), risking IDPs becoming the ‘well-fed dead’.¹⁰ (See further discussion below). Any expectations that the PoC mandate would help the plight of those stranded outside of the PoC sites – i.e., the vast majority of IDPs – were even further from the reality.

Harming Civilians

Perversely, some of the UN’s PoC actions might be causing harm to the very civilians they are trying to protect (Hultman 2010).¹¹ In eastern DRC, the impact of the FIB’s aerial bombardment is often unknown, as the mission rarely carries out battle damage assessments following an attack (Day 2017). However, there is evidence that, following MONUSCO offensive operations on armed group positions, there are sometimes increases in kidnappings, reprisal attacks, and civilian displacements (UN 2014, 2015). While it is difficult to determine whether MONUSCO’s neutralization operations directly caused these responses, repeated instances of civilian harm following such operations raises worrying questions about their overall impact (Hunt 2017: 115–6).

Furthermore, the fact that MONUSCO conducts these operations jointly with the Congolese army raises concerns that the UN may be unwittingly supporting other actions that could harm civilians. According to a UN report, the Congolese state was responsible for up to 65 per cent of human rights violations in 2017, and in many parts of the country the army is seen as the most dangerous armed group. A well-respected PoC advocacy organisation has commented that joint operations with the Congolese army ‘at best, forego opportunities for protecting civilians and, at worst, support FARDC operations that cause excessive civilian harm’. (CIVIC 2017: 2). While the UN (2013) Human Rights Due Diligence Policy (HRDDP) is meant to put in place mitigating measures for such harm (and indeed operating with the FARDC does allow the UN to keep an eye on potentially dangerous units), these tend to focus on specific actors with a poor human rights record and may ignore the broader systemic ways in which support to the Congolese security forces could lead to protection risks.

In South Sudan, too, there is evidence that the PoC work of the mission may have created new threats, even while saving tens of thousands of lives. The PoC sites administered by UNMISS have become highly politicised, often the sites of rival gang fighting, and subjected to high levels of violent crime (UN 2018: para.13). One UN official suggested the sites were in fact a concentration of violent dynamics, a ‘microcosm of the broader conflict’.¹² In February 2016, for example, the PoC camp in Malakal had Nuer/Dinka/Shilluk residing in it, and President Salva Kiir reportedly decided to punish the Shilluk for switching allegiances during the war. According to several experts on the ground, the SPLA attack on the UNMISS compound was preceded by cutting the fence by the Dinka inhabitants and placement of arms ahead of time. When the SPLA attacked the compound, UNMISS fled its stations around the perimeter, following which the SPLA entered, burned the Shilluk and Nuer parts of the camp and transported large numbers of Dinka back to Malakal. Accusations by both sides in the civil war that UNMISS had allowed the PoC sites to be places of refuge for active combatants have hurt the mission’s standing in the country and have been the basis for attacks on the PoC sites resulting in significant casualties (CIVIC 2016a).

Postponing Durable Solutions

The large-scale supply of humanitarian aid and basic services to civilians in the PoC sites of South Sudan highlights another unintended outcome of PoC. Over the seven-year course of the civil war, the PoC sites have become semi-permanent fixtures in South Sudan, places where civilians can turn for more reliable services than elsewhere in the country. This has created an incentive for many people to stay in the sites, postponing their return to home villages.¹³ Not only does this delay durable solutions, the persistent insecurity in and around these sites means that by maintaining the PoC sites the UN may be inadvertently exposing the inhabitants to risk. As the revitalised peace process moves forward, the unwillingness of many South Sudanese to leave these sites and return home was seen by many in South Sudan as an impediment to implementation of the agreement, and a constant reminder that trust in the government has not returned.¹⁴

Letting Governments off the Hook

While all PoC approaches begin with some version of the mantra ‘the host government bears primary responsibility for the protection of civilians’, the practice of peacekeeping missions has often resulted in PoC being seen as mainly in the hands of the UN. In some cases, such as eastern Congo or Mali, the state is too weak and overstretched to respond to protection risks in much of its territory, turning instead to the UN. This not only saves the government the trouble of deploying into some of the more dangerous areas but also means that it can scapegoat the UN if and when civilians are harmed. In other situations, such as South Sudan, the government is one of the main sources of risk to civilians, placing the UN in the impossible situation of needing to operate with host state consent and interpose itself between the state and its citizens. The result in both cases is a tendency to obscure the fundamental responsibility of governments to protect their citizens. This is discussed in more detail in the Dilemmas section below.

National Level Focus at Expense of Local Level Conflict Dynamics

A further distortion due to the way PoC has been approached to date is the risk of focusing on a particular set of threats to civilians while ignoring or underplaying others. Despite their prevalence and lethality, conflicts at the local/community level are often treated as a second-order consideration in protection assessments and analyses.¹⁵ While missions are increasingly authorised to protect civilians ‘irrespective of the source’, there remains a reflex within the culture of peacekeeping to focus PoC strategies on the threats posed by organised non-state armed groups, and perhaps the host state forces, rather than the insecurity caused by inter- and intra-communal violence. As the UN itself has recognised, ‘peacekeepers rarely prioritize violence that occurs at the community level – primarily below the level of governments or organized armed groups – in developing PoC strategy’ (UN 2017: 18). For example, herder-farmer conflict exacerbated during seasonally heightened periods of transhumance in Mali, CAR, South Sudan, and Sudan (Darfur and Abeyi), represents a major and predictable source of civilian vulnerability (Vellturo 2020, Delsol 2020). The result is that missions tend to overlook these dynamics until they become deadly enough that they draw media/public attention and peacekeepers can no longer ignore them, by which point missions are resigned to reactive and palliative responses. This is not always the case, and UNMISS’ work on intercommunal reconciliation may be an example of more proactively addressing local risks as part of a broader approach to national peace.

More broadly, it is important to highlight that intercommunal sources of violence are often linked due to an array of symbiotic relationships between the various actors involved.¹⁶ Eighty per cent of the cattle of South Sudan are owned by Juba-based powerbrokers, meaning that even the most local-seeming cattle rustling will reverberate at different levels across the country.¹⁷ If PoC strategies only react to violence when it reaches a certain threshold, they are unlikely to address the interdependence of the conflict dynamics, missing opportunities to contribute to more sustainable protective environments.

To summarise, the headlining of PoC in peace operations and the operationalisation of the mandate have contributed to creating a number of distortions to the intended impacts. Attending to the immediate protection needs of vulnerable populations in mission areas has led to the displacement of efforts towards finding political solutions and obscuring the primary responsibilities of host states to protect their own populations. The distractions and distortions discussed so far combine to generate a number of dilemmas for those authorising, leading and executing contemporary peace operations discussed further below.

Dilemmas: The Paradoxes of the PoC Mandate

The distractions and distortions emanating from PoC mandates combine to generate recurrent dilemmas for peacekeeping. These may appear as tradeoffs between short-term and long term gains/risks, or as tensions between the PoC mandate and other core aspects of the UN’s work in the country.

Protection as a Substitute for the State

The arrival of PoC as a strategic priority in many of the large UN missions can create a significant paradox: the more successful the UN is at PoC, the less incentive there may be for the host government to assume its primary responsibility for protecting its populations. As discussed above, during the South Sudanese civil war, UNMISS took over nearly all of the protection responsibilities for hundreds of thousands of civilians, providing them shelter in team sites and channelling in humanitarian and other services. While this protection from the state security forces was necessary given their role of in the violence against many civilian groups, it also created a set of conceptual and practical challenges for UNMISS: at what point did (or will) the primary responsibility for protecting those in the sites revert to the host government? How could the mission create incentives for a return of people from the sites when the government showed little capacity or interest in protecting them?

While the situation in South Sudan’s protection of civilians sites is unique, the tendency for the UN to substitute for state security services is not. In the DRC, for example, experts have suggested that MONUSCO’s prioritisation of PoC has led to a lack of accountability for the Congolese government in its primary protection responsibilities and a sort of complacency when it comes to providing for its citizens.¹⁸ The result is that the mission must juggle two competing objectives: protecting civilians while also recognising that its success may lead to the state putting less effort into building its own protection capacities, meaning the UN might have an endlessly retreating horizon on its exit. This does not mean, of course, that absent UN peacekeeping host states would automatically step up to the protection challenge. Indeed, as we highlighted at the outset, there is strong evidence that the presence of peace operations helps to reduce violence in many settings – including that perpetrated by host state forces. But by substituting for the state, the UN may be emplacing a thornier long-term problem of dependence or a host government that does not see protection as its primary responsibility and invests its scarce resources elsewhere.

Protection versus Consent

Reproducing the broader tension within the UN charter between the respect for state sovereignty and upholding the rights of individuals, PoC can operate in near direct contradiction with the UN’s principle of consent, which is interpreted as a legal requirement to gain the agreement of the host government for the presence and operations of a mission in country (Sebastián and Gorur 2018). In most settings, this means UN peace operations operate together with state security services, conducting joint patrols, at times co-locating troops and police, and selecting targets based on the government’s preferences (as in the Force Intervention Brigade in MONUSCO) (Bellamy and Hunt 2015, Kjeksrud and Vermeij 2017). Partnering with the state is seen as the most expedient way to ensure continued consent and indeed also a pragmatic way to avoid accidentally targeting state actors. However, notwithstanding the mitigation aims of the HRDDP (discussed above), it becomes nearly impossible when the state is the primary risk to civilians. This was the case in Darfur, where state-aligned militias were responsible for the bulk of the atrocities in the early parts of the war, and during the 2016–18 constitutional crisis in the DRC, where state security agents reportedly carried out more human rights violations than the armed groups combined (UN 2016b).

The oft-repeated mantra in these cases is that the UN should act to protect civilians when the state is unable or unwilling to do so. This fairly euphemistic phrasing fails to capture the scenario where state security forces are pursuing unarmed civilians into UN sites, as was the case in South Sudan in 2014 (Day et al. 2019); nor does it offer clear guidance for MONUSCO when observing Congolese police using live bullets on protesting civilians in 2016 (Cocks and Ross 2016). Interposing troops or police units in such settings might well fulfil the mission’s protection obligations, but it would certainly run afoul of the principle of consent. Indeed, there are almost no instances of such direct interposition, with the possible exception of UNOCI’s actions against Laurent Gbagbo’s forces in Côte d’Ivoire in 2011 (Hunt 2016). As a result, mission leaders may even find themselves weighing the tradeoffs between robustly pursuing the objectives of the Council or maintaining a constructive working relationship with the host government (Gorur and Vellturo 2020). Either of these alone, without the other, will not lead to the durable protective environment envisaged under the PoC framework nor the sustainable peace pursued by the mission overall.

Protection versus Peace?

The overriding focus on PoC can also mean that UN missions become sidelined in the broader peace process, more focused on crisis response than a longer-term strategy that can ultimately provide the foundations for a mission’s exit strategy. This is particularly the case in settings involving active conflict, where a peace agreement either has not yet been signed (e.g., 2013–14 in South Sudan, or 2012–2015 in Mali) or where a peace agreement has not succeeded in meaningfully reducing violence (e.g., 2008–2016 in Darfur). Here, PoC can become a sort of ‘holding pattern’ for missions, a series of crisis response patterns in which the UN is blamed for protection failings, scapegoated by the government and opposition forces, and/or marginalised by being seen as too aligned with one side or another due to its military operations.

In eastern Congo, for example, offensive operations against a range of armed groups during the 2016–18 constitutional crisis were viewed by many populations as MONUSCO being instrumentalized by President Kabila against his political opponents. The government’s overriding push for offensive operations against the Allied Democratic Forces in the Beni area, while ostensibly a reaction to the atrocities perpetrated by the group, was also seen as Kabila punishing the populations of the area for turning against him and aligning with his political opponents. Regardless of the veracity of this, the widespread perception that MONUSCO was operating hand in glove with a very unpopular government left the mission in a weakened position in some parts of the country. According to several experts in Congo, it also meant the mission’s standing as an impartial actor in the national political process was hurt, rendering its possible role as a broker for inclusive political agreements more remote.

There is a risk of an even more worrying dilemma: could the UN’s PoC work actually undermine peace processes rather than complement them? In principle, protection efforts should contribute to reducing tensions, building confidence amongst the population, and lowering the chance of conflagrations that could undermine a peace process. However, the PoC imperative can generate situations where efforts to protect vulnerable populations may undermine the prospects for peace and therefore a longer-term protective environment. For instance, when missions have set-up impromptu safe havens and temporary protection areas (e.g., Bosnia in the 1990s, PoC sites in South Sudan since 2013, on occasion in the Central African Republic since 2014) mission leaders often face tough choices that require a balance between immediate protection concerns and the underlying peace process. One of the most important of these has been the return of people displaced by the conflict: their day-to-day protection concerns may call for a continuation of their protection in IDP camps, which in turn can undermine the prospects for a return to normalcy envisaged in a peace process.

South Sudan illustrates precisely this dilemma. After years of providing physical protection to hundreds of thousands of people in its PoC sites, in 2018 UNMISS was also tasked to support a revitalised peace process that envisaged the return of displaced people to their homes. Large numbers of residents of the PoC sites felt unable to return to their former homes, either because they were inhabited by other groups during the conflict or because they felt the areas were not yet safe.¹⁹ Indeed, as discussed above, many of the PoC residents were also receiving better services inside the camps than they would have in their former communities. UNMISS was thus presented with a conundrum: the continued presence of the PoC sites offered immediate protection to residents but were an impediment to a peace process that hoped for their return (and indeed also limited the mission’s ability to operate beyond the sites). Instead of returning IDPs to their former homes, UNMISS offered to transport many of the civilians to their ‘traditional homelands’, areas where they would be able to live primarily with their own ethnic group and avoid some of the immediate risks of their former homes. Nuer residents of the Bor PoC site, for example, were offered transport to Nuer-dominated areas of Jonglei State, even if many of these were hundreds of miles from their homes prior to the war. While such a plan would head off the risk that the Nuer civilians would be transported into areas of immediate risk, it raises a longer-term concern that the UN could be supporting a sort of homogenisation of South Sudan, helping to create more ethnic division along geographic lines rather than greater admixture. At worst, some experts have suggested that the UN risks becoming an ‘agent of “ethnic cleansing”’ (Foley 2017: 89) incentivising ethnic conflict rather than combatting it, undermining prospects for durable peace (Vertin 2018).

This dilemma points to a recurrent shortcoming in the UN’s response, which is overwhelmingly to state that such questions are for locals to decide on their own. Indeed, the South Sudanese residents of the PoC sites should be free to make decisions about their future homes, and should not be forced to return to sites where they are not free. But the UN creates incentives that affect those decisions: where the UN decides to place key services and protections will create a gravitational pull for vulnerable civilians that cannot be ignored by merely suggesting they exercise their agency.

In sum, a series of – in many ways interdependent – dilemmas arises out of the distractions and distortions created by the existence and implementation of the PoC mandate. These present a range of practical challenges with implications for planning, prioritising, sequencing and the feasibility of exit strategies. But they also pose fundamental political and potentially existential challenges to the basis for UN peace operations including the cardinal principles of impartiality, host state consent and minimum use of force as well as force generation.

Conclusion

As has been argued above, the emergence of PoC as a centre of gravity for many UN peace operations has at times diverted scarce resources, created unrealistic expectations, shifted accountability and affected impartiality. Combined, these factors have created a situation where the dominance and inexorableness of PoC have contributed to today’s ‘endless missions’ that struggle to envision a defensible exit from their host countries given the likelihood that civilians will remain imperilled for decades to come.

A debate about the future of UN peace operations is currently underway.²² Some anlaysts have argued that tomorrow’s missions are less likely to be in the business of PoC (e.g., Osland and Peter 2021). But others suggest that, despite the many headwinds facing UN peace operations today, the PoC mandate is not likely to disappear any time soon (di Razza and Mamiya 2020). Indeed, if the COVID-19-triggered economic downturn deepens the ‘pragmatic turn’ in these endeavours – i.e., less ambitious missions, focused on stabilising war zones and providing palliative care to vulnerable populations – then PoC could become even more central to missions in the future (Karlsrud 2019, Curran and Hunt 2020). Our conclusions do not point towards an end of PoC, but rather to the need to improve how the practice of protection is aligned with broader mission objectives, and to undertake a more serious inquiry into why PoC tends to fall into these traps. As our analysis above indicates, issues of state-centrism, slow bureaucratic change in response to shifting contexts, and a supply-side approach to peace operations may all inhibit the ability for the UN to adapt effectively. It is essential, therefore, that scholars and practitioners interested in enhancing the theoretical underpinnings of the PoC concept and improving the effectiveness of peace operations grapple with the distractions, distortions and dilemmas presented here.

To avoid these ‘PoC traps’, the Security Council and the Secretariat should find ways to link protection mandates more concretely to viable exit strategies for missions. Mandating peace operations to deploy in settings with ‘no peace to keep’ may appear to be a political necessity for today’s Security Council, but it should not be a reason to ignore the dilemmas such settings create. Protection of civilians is a requirement that can be implemented separately from a peace process (in fact, the absence of a viable political track often necessitates even more robust protection activities) (Bellamy and Hunt, 2021), but it should be planned with clear links to longer term peace (Johnson 2019). This requires that missions are empowered to develop strategies where protection priorities clearly and meaningfully support long-term political objectives. Moreover, where certain protection activities may undermine or conflict with longer term peace, the UN may need to make difficult decisions about its strategic objectives in the country, including whether deployment of a peace operation is the right tool to achieve them.

To build protection into a longer-term strategy, the UN must redouble its efforts to build holistic, systemic analyses of the settings in which it will deploy a peace operation. Many of the dilemmas described above result from partial, siloed approaches taken by peace operations, where local conflict resolution is largely divorced from support to national peace processes. Multiscalar analysis – at the local, national, and regional levels – will help peacekeepers to identify the potential negative externalities associated with PoC activities, and to weigh them against the benefits of a proposed course of action. When MONUSCO undertakes a campaign against an armed group, the question should be broader than ‘will this reduce the capacity of the group to harm civilians?’ Instead, it should ask, ‘what impact will this intervention have on the inter-related local, national, and regional systems connected to the group?’ The answer to this latter question may lead in unanticipated directions, including to the possibility that offensive operations against some groups may actually increase the broader risks to civilians. Similar questions about UNMISS’s role in protecting civilians in PoC sites – and indeed facilitating their return home – would help the mission balance difficult short- and long-term objectives.

A great deal of progress has been made in recent years including the development of various policies, handbooks and training manuals on PoC in peace operations. These have helped to clarify the scope and content of PoC in peace operations. However, as our analysis illustrates, the way that longer-term peacebuilding objectives such as SSR are aligned to PoC, aside from being lumped into the bucket of tier three activities, remains unclear in practice. UN’s efforts to enhance mission coherence and integration should articulate guidance for senior mission leadership and planners on how efforts to build the capacity of deeply compromised national police and corrupt courts, for example, can be implemented in a manner that is consistent with PoC imperatives.

Our analysis also suggests that greater policy-level attention may need to be paid to the UN’s Human Rights Due Diligence Policy (HRDDP, discussed above) which has evolved to become a central way for missions to work with a range of armed actors in conflict settings. Beyond merely identifying mitigating measures for working with potentially nefarious actors, the HRDDP could helpfully be broadened to provide an analysis of the full range of negative outcomes associated with PoC identified here.

Finally, we recommend that PoC be thought of as one of the many ways in which peace operations can gain leverage and execute their overall mandates towards sustainable peace. This can be a quite intuitive role for PoC: building confidence in the population that their lives are not at risk, that turning to armed violence is not the only option, thus increasing the prospects for a viable peace process.²⁰ But there may be less direct ways in which PoC can help the UN carve out a more meaningful role in conflict settings, and also set more realistic expectations. For example, the PoC mandate of a peace operation can be the basis to take a more confrontational role with host governments that are perpetrating violence against their citizens, giving missions some critical distance from state security services and increasing the UN’s visible impartiality. As illustrated above, doing so will require the UN to walk a fine line between gaining ‘distance’ from host states without losing their consent altogether.²¹ In missions with stabilisation mandates that often include close cooperation with national armies and police, PoC can offer a way to also hold them to account. Protection can also be more overtly used as a way to measure progress on a peace process, holding all parties accountable for reducing risks to civilians and helping to build justice systems and support a transitional justice strategy that will outlast the peace operations’ tenure in the country. While there is likely to remain tension between competing priorities, under these conditions and when conceptualised broadly to include the third tier of ‘creating a protective environment’ (discussed above), PoC can be considered as a compatible framework to be used alongside other peacebuilding interventions in fragile settings.

When killing continues and populations need saving, protection from imminent harm will need to be the unambiguous priority for peacekeepers – particularly at times as a substitute for government unwillingness or ineptitude. However, unless the distractions, distortions and dilemmas identified herein are acknowledged and strategies for managing them put in place, then it is likely that durable protection outcomes will continue to prove elusive and UN peace operations will struggle to avoid the PoC trap. Ultimately, POC should provide a bridge from the short-term goals of peacekeeping (reductions of violence, improvements in the security of civilians, confidence in the peace process) and the longer-term peacebuilding needs of a country.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers, the editors and Dr Shannon Zimmerman for their constructive feedback and helpful suggestions that helped us refine this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Part of this work was supported by the Australian Research Council through the DECRA fellowship [DE170100138] and Discovery Project Grant [DP1601022429].

Notes

1. The interviews cited in this article were conducted as part of research approved by the RMIT University College Human Ethics Advisory Network (Approval reference #: CHEAN B 21048–08/17). In accordance with this approval, informed written or verbal (on interview recording) consent was obtained from all participants. All interview data in this paper are anonymised and non-identifiable.

2. Author interviews – Goma, 2018.

3. Author interviews – Goma 2018.

4. Author interviews – Juba 2018.

5. Author interviews – Bamako 2017, Goma 2018, Juba 2018, Bangui 2019

6. Author interviews – Juba 2018 (NB: one UNMISS staff spoke of ‘rebranding’ a section’s work to ‘make it sound more like POC’).

7. Author interviews – Juba 2018.

8. Author interviews – Goma 2018.

9. Author interviews – Juba 2018.

10. See: ‘The Well-Fed Dead in Bosnia’, The New York Times, 15 July 1992. Famous line: ‘What good will it do for them to have food in their stomachs when their throats are slit?’’

11. A recent study, for example, has shown that a large uniformed presence can have a perverse effect if in stabilising the situation they create the conditions ripe for organised crime to flourish that can actually lead to new or even increased levels of violence against civilians (see: Di Salvatore 2019)

12. Author interview – New York 2018 (with OIOS consultant Civil Affairs SS report author).

13. NB: It is important to note that conditions within the POC sites are often terrible but the point stands that the incentive structure works against people leaving and returning to their homes.

14. Author interviews – Juba 2018.

15. Author interviews – Juba 2018, Goma 2018.

16. For detailed exposition of these symbiotic relationships, see: Day and Hunt (2020).

17. Author interviews – Juba 2018.

18. Author interviews – Goma and Kinshasa 2018.

19. Author interviews with residents of PoC sites, UN agency heads, and South Sudanese experts – Juba, Bor, Malakal – 2018.

20. NB: Recent study showing that UN’s legitimacy, vis-à-vis indigenous or regional (read: African) alternative mediators, will be critical here (see: Duursma 2020).

21. The authors are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this formulation.

22. For example, the UN’s own ‘Future of Peace Operations’ Project which commissioned numerous papers analysing plausible scenarios for the next 5–10 years. See: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/future-of-peacekeeping