The United Nations and the Protection of Civilians: Sustaining the Momentum

The protection of civilians (PoC) concept remains contested twenty-three years after the first PoC mandate. 
Current PoC frameworks used by the United Nations (UN) do not assist with determining applicable legal standards. They lead the UN down an unsustainable path that risks diminishing political support for PoC, especially within intense conflicts and following well-documented protection failures. 
With ever-rising expectations from communities under protection, the UN’s ‘Three Tiers of PoC Action’, and the complexity and dilution of PoC mandates under a whole-of-mission approach, it becomes challenging to determine what missions must do to protect individuals. 
Undertaking a major re-evaluation of PoC, ALEXANDER GILDER charts the progression of PoC mandates drawing on examples from several missions drawing out the diverse nature of PoC and subsequent activities. 
The article, titled ‘The UN and the Protection of Civilians: Sustaining the Momentum’ and published in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law, then argues that current definitions and practical applications of PoC have cast the net too wide, presented uncertainties, and leave PoC open to attack from Member States amidst a political climate of weakened support for collective security action. 
Instead, the discussion must shift towards a concise and shared understanding of what protection mandates entail for UN peace operations. 
The article suggests how PoC can be reconceptualized to distinguish a narrow and easily communicated minimum obligation to be placed on UN peacekeepers.
 
Alexander Gilder, The UN and the Protection of Civilians: Sustaining the Momentum, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, 2023;, krac037, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krac037

Building a Peace We Don’t Know? The Power of Subjunctive Technologies in Digital Peacebuilding

Much attention has been paid to how digital technologies affect peacebuilding through the production of information, data and evidence. 
While research has thus documented how digital technologies enable a sincere peacebuilding approach concerned with the hurtful past and present and how the world ‘really’ is, digital technologies can also play a role in enabling a subjunctive sensitivity for future worlds that ‘could’ or ‘should’ be. 
In his article titled ‘Building a peace we don’t know? The power of subjunctive technologies in digital peacebuilding’, ANDREAS T. HIRBLINGER explores how in peacebuilding, subjunctivity is produced through performative uses of digital technology that are primarily non-discursive and non-cognitive. 
Documenting examples from practitioners engaged inter alia in mediation, dialogues, peacekeeping, and ceasefire monitoring, the article, published in the journal Peacebuilding, introduces a compilation of subjunctive affordances and demonstrates their powerful effects: shepherding conflict stakeholders along the process, detaching them from hurtful content, reframing their perspectives on the world and envisioning possible futures, as well as unlocking existing social structures and evoking new ones through digital communitas.

Andreas T. Hirblinger (2022) Building a peace we don’t know? The power of subjunctive technologies in digital peacebuilding, Peacebuilding, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2022.2154957

Peacekeeping, Mediation, and the Conclusion of Local Ceasefires in Non-State Conflicts

Peacekeeping operations are commonly deployed in response to intrastate armed conflicts between a government and one or more rebel groups. 

This means that the majority of contemporary peacekeeping operations are deployed in countries with fragile governments and places where multiple non-state armed actors are vying for power and where relations between different communal groups are highly polarized. 
Yet, most studies focus on the impact of mediation and peacekeeping on armed conflicts between government and rebel forces, ignoring non-state conflicts among different rebel groups or communal groups. 
ALLARD DUURSMA’s article, titled ‘Peacekeeping, Mediation, and the Conclusion of Local Ceasefires in Non-State Conflicts’, aims to fill this gap in research.
The article theorizes on how military and civilian components of peacekeeping operations contribute to the conclusion of local ceasefires in non-state conflicts involving armed opposition groups or communal groups. 
A mediation-based logic suggests that civilian peacekeeping staff can provide technical support aimed at resolving conflict issues and engage with state officials to promote peace. 
A capabilities-based logic suggests that military peacekeepers can provide security during the negotiations, arrange logistics, and put military pressure on the conflict parties, all of which should make the conclusion of a ceasefire more likely. 
The analysis, published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, supports both the capabilities-based and the mediation-based logic. An instrumental variable estimation helps to account for endogeneity. 
“This article contributes to the literature on peacekeeping, mediation, and ceasefires through shifting the focus to non-state conflicts,” the author states.

Duursma, A. (2022). Peacekeeping, Mediation, and the Conclusion of Local Ceasefires in Non-State Conflicts. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 0(0).    
https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221148132

A Perturbed Peace: Applying Complexity Theory to UN Peacekeeping

To date, peacekeeping has been dominated by linear models of change, assuming that conflict settings can be addressed by elite-driven peace processes, gradual improvements to state institutional capacity, and development programming. 
However, ADAM DAY and CHARLES T. HUNT argue that complexity theory offers a far more accurate and useful lens through which to view the work of peacekeeping: conflict settings represent complex, interdependent socio-political systems with emergent qualities giving them the capacity to self-organize via feedback loops and other adaptive activity. 
Self-organization means such systems are highly resistant to attempts to change behavior via top-down or input-output approaches. In fact, peacekeeping itself is endogenous to the systems it is trying to change, often displaying the same kinds of self-organization typical of complex systems elsewhere, the authors write in the article ‘A Perturbed Peace: Applying Complexity Theory to UN Peacekeeping’, published in the journal International Peacekeeping. 
Drawing on experience working and conducting fieldwork in the UN peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the article argues that UN peacekeeping operations should view themselves as actors within the complex conflict ecosystem, looking to enable transformational change from within, rather than impose liberal Western models from without.

Adam Day & Charles T. Hunt (2022) A Perturbed Peace: Applying Complexity Theory to UN Peacekeeping, International Peacekeeping, DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2022.2158457