Doing less with less? Peacekeeping retrenchment and the UN's protection of civilians agenda
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020915209 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Timothy Donais,Eric Tanguay |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
Doing less with
less? Peacekeeping
retrenchment and
the UN’s protection of
civilians agenda
Timothy Donais
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Eric Tanguay
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Abstract
The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ant
onio Guterres’s Action for
Peacekeeping initiative represents the latest in a series of efforts to make the UN’s
peace and security architecture “fit for the future.” The Action for Peacekeeping
initiative, however, has exposed two seemingly contradictory tendencies at work in
contemporary peacekeeping. On the one hand, peacekeeping operations are increas-
ingly expected to be lean, efficient, and performance-focused. On the other, expansive
protection of civilians (PoC) mandates, which entail everything from predicting and pre-
empting attacks against civilians to reforming state-level security institutions, are
becoming increasingly central to contemporary peacekeeping. In this paper, we will
suggest that as currently framed, the UN’s peacekeeping reform agenda—driven at
least in part by downward budgetary pressures—will inevitably increase the gap
between promise and performance with regard to PoC, with serious implications for
the credibility and legitimacy of UN missions among the populations they are mandated
to protect.
Corresponding author:
Timothy Donais, Wilfrid Laurier University, GlobalStudies, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario,
N2L 3C5, Canada.
Email: tdonais@wlu.ca
International Journal
2020, Vol. 75(1) 65–82
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020702020915209
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Keywords
Peacekeeping, protection of civilians, UN reform, Africa, conflict management
Introduction
On 20 March 1993, the French general Philippe Morillon entered the besieged
Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica with a small contingent of UN soldiers and 175
tons of food and medical supplies. “You are now under the protection of the UN
forces,” the UNPROFOR commander announced to the town’s frightened, starv-
ing residents, “I will never abandon you.” Srebrenica proved to be a dramatic early
example of the potentially devastating consequences of the gap between the prom-
ises of UN peacekeepers to protect vulnerable civilians and their limited capacities
to actually do so. The enclave was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995,
and some 8000 men and boys were killed in the aftermath, after having sought—
and been ultimately denied—protection at the local UNPROFOR base. When
Philippe Morillon visited Srebrenica in 2010 to pay his respects at the memorial
site, he was effectively run out of town by angry survivors of the massacre.
1
The year 2019 also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rwandan geno-
cide, a far costlier failure on the part of UN peacekeepers to prevent atrocities
against civilian populations. Collectively, the Srebrenica and Rwanda tragedies
shook the institution of peacekeeping to its very foundations, and fuelled a
strengthening consensus around the conviction that the UN can never again
stand idly by in the face of atrocities. In addition to the moral and humanitarian
imperatives underpinning the PoC agenda, the concept has also become a powerful
legitimizing device for peacekeepers deployed on “conflict management” opera-
tions. In contexts such as South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC), protecting civilians has been the primary justification for ongoing (and
costly) deployments in states lacking either a peace to keep or a viable peace
process to implement. The first UN Security Council Resolution to explicitly
instruct peacekeepers to protect civilians came in 1999 (with the UNAMSIL
Mission in Sierra Leone), and two decades on, most peacekeeping missions now
contain PoC mandates. At the same time, dozens of countries—including leading
troop- and police-contributing countries (T/PCCs)—have signed onto the Kigali
Principles on the Protection of Civilians, aimed explicitly at closing the gap
1. John F. Burns, “Aid trucks arrive in a Bosnian town after Serbs yield,” The New York Times,
20 March 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/20/world/aid-trucks-arrive-in-a-bosnian-town-
after-serbs-yield.html (accessed 7 March 2019); Daria Sito-Sucic, “Women force French former
general from Srebrenica,” Reuters World News, 3 September 2010, https://www.reuters.com/arti
cle/oukwd-uk-bosnia-srebrenica-general-idAFTRE6823BD20100903 (accessed 22 February 2019);
a video of Philippe Morillon addressing the enclave’s residents can be found at: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=PNSjidJNdeQ (accessed 20 February 2019).
66 International Journal 75(1)
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