Engaging with Communities: The Next Challenge for Peacekeeping

The protection of civilians from the worst ravages of war is a dilemma that international bodies have sought to address for decades. However, despite lessons learned from the atrocities of Rwanda and Srebrenica, among others, civilians are still not only adversely affected by armed conflict; they are too often directly targeted.

Ultimately, national governments must have the will and capacity to protect their citizens, and nationally driven peace building and security sector reform processes need to be supported more than ever. In the interim, international peacekeeping remains a critically important and unique tool for protecting civilians and can mean the difference between life and death for thousands of vulnerable people.

Where governments are unable or unwilling to fulfil their responsibility to protect civilians, peacekeeping operations may be mandated to provide direct protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence. In such circumstances, communities have a legitimate expectation that the presence of peacekeepers means that they will be protected. Failures by governments or peacekeepers to protect civilians, when they do occur, come at an enormous human cost.

Protecting civilians is no easy task, in particular, when violence is ongoing, numbers of peacekeepers and resources at their disposal are limited, and the most vulnerable communities are located in remote, isolated areas. The absence of interpreters, including female interpreters, makes it difficult to understand the concerns of communities and to effectively address the specific needs of women and children.

These challenges are further compounded by the inconsistencies in interpretation of civilian protection mandates and practices on the ground across peacekeeping missions. The understanding and commitment to protection of civilians varies widely from one senior in-country mission leadership to another. At the field level, individual battalions vary enormously in their willingness to engage with communities and to take robust action, and too often civilian staff is unwilling to be based in remote or isolated communities. A lack of clear guidelines and poor training and preparation of personnel means that too many peacekeeping units arriving to their country of deployment do not know what protection of civilians means or how it is to be delivered.

Moreover, international peacekeeping is coming under increasing pressure, with barriers arising to the daily performance of missions' work and even, as in Chad, to their presence on the ground. Too often, peacekeeping missions cannot rely on systematic political backing from the UN Security Council to ensure that they are able to perform effectively and to access politically sensitive locations.UN peacekeeping reform processes acknowledge many of these problems and are currently looking at how to ‘meet the challenges of today and tomorrow', including how to ensure peacekeeping mandates translate into ‘effective efforts on the ground'. Efforts are being made to address the need for clear direction to peacekeeping missions in fulfilling their mandate to protect civilians. Recent Security Council resolutions have stressed the protection of civilians should be a priority for peace keeping missions, and have focussed on specific steps towards that goal as well as assessment and implementation of best practices.

Despite these laudable initiatives, impact is slow to be felt on the ground by those who need it most – be it a Congolese woman in the Kivus or a Sudanese woman in Darfur. Yet, the perspective most often missing from discussions on protection of civilians has been that of the very people the peacekeepers are mandated to protect. Communities are the most qualified to assess the impact of peacekeepers' work on their own safety, have the most to gain from the successes, and the most to lose when missions fall short. Despite this, affected communities are rarely involved in the design, implementation or assessments of UN peacekeeping missions.

This report aims to support efforts to improve peacekeeping missions' efforts to better protect civilians. It highlights how engagement with communities is critical to managing expectations, to building trust between peacekeepers and communities and to ensuring peacekeepers are better able to understand and respond to threats to civilians in a given location. The nexus between the international community's efforts to protect civilians and the people who need their protection is often in remote and isolated locations; this report therefore reviews a number of recent initiatives undertaken by peacekeepers that show promise in improving communication between peacekeepers and communities and in the protection of civilians, and identifies the key factors that influence their success or failure in the eyes of communities.

The study draws on Oxfam's extensive protection experience and presence in conflict-affected communities. It is supported by field-based research in southern Sudan and the DRC, including interviews and focus group discussions with women and men in affected communities.