Engaging with Communities: The Next Challenge for Peacekeeping

This document on United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces was prepared to support efforts to improve the peacekeeping missions’ efforts to better protect civilians. From the summary: "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...." It was prepared by Oxfam GB (Great Britain).

The document intends to identify best practices, as well as some clear gaps in existing practice, through interviewing communities affected by violence and reporting recommendations. Its recommendations are particularly directed towards the UN “New Horizon” process - which is assessing the major policy and strategy dilemmas that face UN peacekeeping. As stated in the document, "Communities interviewed were united in their desire for more dialogue and communication with peacekeepers....Communities, humanitarians and peacekeepers have therefore welcomed the inclusion of Community Liaison Interpreters [CLIs] who build relations with communities and help peacekeepers to better understand the concerns of the local population....Initiatives that seek to improve civilian protection include different types of patrols - night patrols, market patrols, firewood patrols - which communities indicate are highly valued....Emergency hotlines, trialled in DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] and Chad, which enable communities to directly call peacekeeping bases have also facilitated better communication between communities and peacekeeping missions....Some missions have endeavoured to develop mechanisms to better obtain and share information for more effective analysis of threats. These include the use of Joint Protection Teams, which bring together civilian and military personnel, and reporting matrixes...."

Specific to certain strategies are the following:

• Telephone hotline systems need dissemination strategies for numbers and explanations of use, particularly dissemination to women. Confidentiality is cited as key to reducing risk and vulnerability through the systems.
  
• Civilian staff needs improved access to communities in field locations.
  
• Civilian police have the capacity to help create an additional bridge between military and civilian culture.
  
• Impunity should be addressed through an accountability system.
  
• An adequate number of language assistants, including women, with training and tested language skills are needed to bridge language and gender barriers.
  
• Radio information dissemination about security is a key to strong communications.
  
• Information management must include mapping of information sources and ensuring that there are clear channels for information-sharing with built-in feedback mechanisms.
  
• All staff needs ongoing training, including gender training to enhance the protection of women.

The study found that characteristics of success include initiatives:

• "responding to direct requests from communities or to specific identified protection needs;
  
• developed by peacekeepers on the ground to address specific needs and gaps, often in consultation with communities;
  
• creating links between communities and peacekeepers, and between peacekeepers and other actors in the field;
  
• obtaining, channelling, and using information effectively; and
  
• combining the strengths of a variety of actors (civilian and military, humanitarians and communities) to make best use of the different skills and capacities that they bring to the task."

Recommendations to improve protection of civilians by peacekeepers include the following:

Missions should:

• engage communities from the earliest phases of preparation for deployment and continue through the life of the mission.
  
• ensure that different parts of the mission (civilian, military, and police) work together effectively.
  
• develop public communications strategies to ensure that communities are aware of the role, activities, and limitations of the mission.
  
• ensure that tools and initiatives developed and/or implemented at field level have clear objectives and include mechanisms for measuring impact, including through consultation with the community. These should be evaluated so they can be appropriately adapted to other relevant contexts.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) should:

• demand accurate assessments of achievement, including communities’ perception of their own safety.
  
• be prepared to provide robust political support to enable missions to access vulnerable communities and to fulfil their civilian protection mandate.

The DPKO [Department for Peacekeeping Operations] needs to:

• ensure appropriate recruitment (in particular of women) as well as training and deployment of civilians in the field.
  
• institutionalise and systematise best practices and ensure necessary resourcing for these to continue.