Protecting Civilians: Mission Critical or Mission Impossible?

UN iconography around the protection of civilians in conflict contexts tends to be disarmingly reassuring. In one striking – if not atypical – image, a lightskinned and lightly-armed peacekeeper stands silent watch as an African woman goes about her daily business of gathering wood. Beyond the gendered and neocolonial tropes that are hard at work in this particular photo – evoking ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ – the message conveyed is one of quiet professionalism, with the UN’s thin blue line unthreateningly keeping out-of-frame dangers at bay, enabling everyday life to carry on. While the protection of civilians (PoC) in conflict-affected contexts has become increasingly central to contemporary peace operations, in reality the exercise of armed international agency in defence of the vulnerable has a decidedly uneven track record, and peacekeeping itself has proven to be an awkward and imperfect instrument of protection. Too often, despite strong mandates authorizing ‘all means necessary’, peacekeepers have failed to act, with disastrous consequences. Sexual abuse and exploitation scandals, in which peacekeepers prey on the very populations they are sent to protect, have also continued to plague UN operations and undermine their credibility with host populations. And even in cases where the UN can justifiably claim to have been instrumental in saving thousands of lives – as with South Sudan’s PoC sites – in circumstances