Everyday Protection: Learning from United Nations Protection of Civilians Sites

ABSTRACT ‘Protection of Civilians’ (PoC) has been a dominant focus of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions in recent decades. At the same time, ‘Protection of Civilians’ is a contested and ambiguous concept, with its practical meanings often established in the realities of implementation. The introduction to this special issue argues that ‘Protection of Civilians sites’ (established in South Sudan in 2013) are important for understanding how protection commitments and policies have worked in practice. Subsequent articles examine the everyday experiences of PoC sites, showing how this is a crucial lens for understanding PoC interventions in South Sudan and more widely.


Introduction
The protection of civilians during armed conflict has become part of the mandate of most UN peacekeeping interventions and keeping civilians safe has become a key criterion through which a UN missions' success is judged (Müller 2020).At the same time, 'protection of civilians' still remains a complex concept (Gilder 2023), and 'protection' has not only had divergent interpretations within the humanitarian and human rights communities but even within the peacekeeping community itself (Claire 2016;DuBois 2009;Orford 2011;Willmot et al. 2016).What does 'protection' in conflict really entail?How are policy decisions, which are based on normative assertions and compromises, implemented in the messy realities of everyday practice?Does a degree of ambiguity about the meaning of 'protection' at a policy level elevate the importance of its implementation?How do protected people experience and shape these interventions in their everyday lives?
The articles collected in this Special Issue address these questions by learning from the protection innovation of the 'Protection of Civilian' sites (PoC sites) in South Sudanan experiment in providing long-term sanctuary for civilians that involved civilians living inside UN peacekeeping bases during an ongoing conflict.When conflict erupted in South Sudan in late 2013, tens of thousands of people fled to UN bases for protection.site-by-site.A decade after the PoC sites opened in December 2013, the PoC site in Malakal remains although UNMISS is actively developing a strategy for its re-designation.
This was not the first time that the UN had experimented with protecting civilians by providing physically protected spaces, but it was unprecedented in scale and duration.It marked a significant departure from previous PoC practice (Bellamy and Hunt 2015).The PoC sites were also deeply controversial.While actors in UNMISS were fearful of their challenge to the sovereignty of the South Sudanese government, observers accused UNMISS of failing to provide safety or living standards and altering the social and political geography of South Sudan (Arensen 2016;Craze 2019).
Seven years after their inception, at the end of 2020, most of the PoC sites were redesignated as Internationally Displaced People's camps.Yet, the PoC sites remain a live policy question for the UN mission in South Sudan.A large PoC site remains in Malakal, with the population of the site continuing to expand (CCCM Cluster 2022a;2022b).The redesignated sites also remained densely populated.Furthermore, it is foreseeable that South Sudanese will again seek protection in the sanctuary provided by the UN peacekeeping bases.
In this introductory article, we situate the Special Issue's scholarly contributions on the PoC sites in broader debates and trajectories over PoC in UN peacekeeping missions.From the late 1990s, the UN Security Council (UNSC) moved substantially towards a PoC agenda.In 2019, eight missions, and the majority of peacekeepers, were deployed with a PoC mandate (Johnson 2019).While there is consensus among UN members that civilians should be protected in conflict, there remains serious disagreement over how this should be weighed against other UN commitments, including state sovereignty.These disagreements look likely to continue as tensions grow between veto powers in the UN Security Council.PoC has also continued to evolve in interaction with, and sometimes in opposition to, other norms, such as Responsibility to Protect (R2P) or a state-centric approach.This has resulted in 'ambiguity over the nature of obligation inherent' in PoC (Rhoads and Welsh 2019, 598).Providing protection through the provision of safe spaces has become a way to provide PoC without full-scale military intervention in the conflict itself.In this way, it is less interventionist and thus more palatable to more UNSC members (Orchard 2014).Therefore, the PoC sites that were developed in South Sudan are unlikely to have been an aberration but represent an evolving pattern in civilian protection.New shifts in global politics are challenging the consensus among UN Security Council veto powers that the protection of civilians is a priority.Yet, the popular moral consensus that prioritises civilian safety means that these debates and policies will remain.Therefore, evolving patterns in the protection of civilians need to be taken seriously, because the provision of protected spaces has a significant social and political impact on affected communities, as much as it does on policy.
We make the case that scholars and policy makers should focus on the 'everyday' experiences of protection of civilians policy and practice.For once the 'protection of civilians' mandates in UN peacekeeping missions have been consistently ambiguous.The function of this ambiguity is partly to allow political consensus within the UNSC.It also leaves an inherent uncertainty about how PoC mandates should be implemented (Holt, Taylor, and Kelly 2009, 4;Pantuliano and Svoboda 2016;Wilmot and Sheeran 2013).As a result, the reality of protection is left to be worked out in everyday practice.Highlevel uncertainty shifts responsibilities downwards to those who carry out PoC 'on the ground'.As a result, people working for UN missions are never just implementers of instructions from the top; they always have to translate and interpret (Autesserre 2014, 25).To understand what ambiguity has meant for a major PoC operation in South Sudan, we take an 'everyday' approach to studying the protection of civiliansrooted in the daily lives and perspectives of those who live and work in the PoC sites.Scholars have successfully used an 'everyday' lens to study humanitarian and UN interventions (e.g.Autesserre 2014;Hilhorst and Jansen 2010).We apply this lens to understanding 'protection' as a specific aspect of UN peacekeeping activity.PoC sites are a striking case study to explore how ideas about protection are put into practice.While the PoC sites were a major innovation, it is only in their everyday application that we can fully understand their consequences.
Another important reason for focusing on everyday protection is to pay attention to the impact of the PoC sites on socio-political struggles that can shape civilians' safety over the long durée.The delivery of PoC sites has reconfigured the social lives of internally displaced persons who are seeking sanctuary: people have been removed from their land, exposed to new structures of militarised protection, placed in new spatial configurations of housing and new relations with family and neighbours, subjected to UN governance and in many cases the PoC sites have provided them with their first experiences of markets and urban spaces.Civilians fleeing the traumas of war have lived in extremely difficult circumstances with great uncertainty about the future and amidst complex legal, administrative, and humanitarian challenges.In the everyday, PoC interventions slice across social worlds.Policy and practice do not occur in a vacuum but interact with ongoing social and political struggles playing out in specific contexts and communities.It is only by paying attention to the real impact of these interventions on people's lives and expectations that we can confront the urgent question of whether they make people safer.Therefore, we approach the PoC sites as a protection 'arena' to examine the constrained and political interactions of an array of different actors in the everyday (Hilhorst 2018).If protection is never simply a legal principal or abstract concept, but a project driven by a diverse network of actors in the arena (Cropp 2019, iii), then the most meaningful way to understand protection is to trace how it is worked out through everyday practices.It is at this level that decisions must be made, ambiguities resolved, and the actual meaning of PoC decided and enacted.
The experience of the PoC sites in South Sudan also includes important lessons for the ongoing debates about the future of UN peacekeeping missions in Africa (International Crisis Group 2023).In 2023, there was growing open opposition to UN peacekeeping missions in the countries where they operated.In June 2023, the Mali government requested the UN Security Council to immediately withdraw the UN peacekeeping mission from their country and the Council agreed (UN 2023).The UN peacekeeping mission in Mali has been one of the largest peacekeeping missions in the world (International Crisis Group 2023).The Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, another large mission, has not lost support from the national government but has faced local, violent opposition (News Wires 2023).Protesters complained of the mission not only failing to help Congolese, but also harming them (Sengenya 2022).This overt opposition is temporally overlapping with an increased, general polarisation in the Security Council between the veto powers which is likely to make it increasingly difficult to get consent and mandates passed.
For these debates, the South Sudan PoC sites are important in two ways.Firstly, international policy makers and publics in recent decades have increasingly judged the UN, and UN peacekeeping missions, on their ability to keep civilians safe.The PoC sites were an innovative way to provide protection and, therefore, policy makers and scholars need to critically assess their success and impact on those they tried to help.Secondly, ambiguity in mandates has long been a tactic to get agreement in the Security Council.As the veto powers become politically polarised, diplomatic teams and UN officials will likely continue to use ambiguity as a tool to achieve some consensus.The experience of the PoC sites in South Sudan sheds light on how the ambiguous policies at the highest levels of the UN impact the everyday lives of civilians.

UN Protection of Civilians: Ambiguity as characteristic
South Sudan's PoC sites emerged in the context of a moral consensus in the UN and member states around the need to protect civilians, as well as a pervading ambiguity about what protection of civilians means and entails.This section argues that this ambiguity can be understood as a strategy to gain consensus, implying that this ambiguity will remain commonplace at a policy level and that the everyday will be key in the resolution of such ambiguity.
Following the catastrophic failures to protect civilians in the 1990s in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, the UN vocally and explicitly grew its commitment to a PoC agenda partly to rebuild its moral authority after these events.Since 2000, almost all peacekeeping missions have had PoC as at least part of their mandate (Johnson 2019).At the same time, how this commitment to PoC interacts with other UN principles and especially state sovereignty, has remained deeply contested between member states, including UN Security Council veto powers.The tension between PoC and state sovereignty is particularly acute when state governments themselves threaten civilian safety.Member states have sought to limit interventionist approaches to civilian protection not only for geopolitical reasons but also for practical concerns over domestic politics.For countries contributing peacekeepers, the desire to comply with the broad, popular moral support for civilian protection is tempered by the national popular demands for troop safety when serving overseas.Robust peacekeeping operations put troops at more risk, and the use of force is routinely avoided by troop contributors (Adamczyk 2019, 5).As a result, a 2014 review of UN peace operations with PoC mandates showed force had almost never been used by peacekeeping units to protect civilians.
Important for debates about the relationship between PoC and state sovereignty has been the development of PoC alongside the related principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (Hunt 2019;Rhoads and Welsh 2019).R2P was a more radical proposal by some UN member states that allowed intervention without host state permission (Deng 2010;Mamdani 2010).Various UN member states actively opposed R2P and China prevented its inclusion in resolutions, forcing R2P advocates to make the concept more agreeable over time (Gifkins 2016).After the controversial 2011 interventions in Libya, many member states returned to highlighting that protecting civilians was the primary responsibility of the state (Rhoads and Welsh 2019, 611-612).In this context, PoC, in contrast to R2P, provided the UNSC with a more fluid concept that could incorporate a more cautious approach that included layers of state consent.This condition of state consent allowed a broader consensus of support among the UN's membership for PoC (Hunt 2019;Rhoads and Welsh 2019).In 2010, when the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) provided conceptual and operational guidance on PoC, its three-tiered conceptualisation of the norm emphasised support to the host state and introduced options for protecting civilians without using force (Rhoads and Welsh 2019).
Various norms and practices have evolved to allow PoC to appear consistent with state sovereignty.Firstly, UN peacekeeping mandates require the approval of states in the UNSC.Secondly, host states agree to these mandates and the UN mission must enter and comply with a Status of Force Agreement with the host government.While missions authorised under Chapter VII do legally allow force without host-state consent, many UN members states and the Secretariat see consent as politically essential (Rhoads and Welsh 2019, 603).Thirdly, the troop-contributing countries retain authority over their troops.Fourthly, PoC documents have emphasised that civilian protection is primarily the responsibility of the state.At the same time, other UN member states, including the USA, have continued to push for a more interventionist interpretation of PoC.In 2015, an intra-state initiative hosted in Kigali advocated for the possibility of the use of force without host or troop-contributing state consent.They also pushed for accountability and disciplinary actions if missions failed to act to protect civilians (Foot 2020, 103).
In the context of the ongoing debate about PoC, the UNSC often leaves this concept ambiguous.The UNSC repeatedly outlines in resolutions the mandates of peacekeeping missions in very brief terms, leaving vast ambiguity about what their operationalisation means (Rhoads and Welsh 2019, 602).This ambiguity can be understood as a deliberate strategy to allow acceptance of PoC by UN member states and specifically UNSC members (Wills 2009).Vague mandates have often been a political necessity; vagueness means that states can hold contradictory ideas about their meaning without contesting or vetoing them (Bode and Karlsrud 2019).
The vagueness of UNSC PoC mandates has significant implications for the implementation of PoC.It has been described as a 'quagmire' (Gowan 2015), and a process of 'muddling through' (Curran 2017).Plus, the UN ends up promising sweeping, unrealistic protection (Laurence 2019;Rhoads 2016;Suarez 2017).Importantly for this Special Issue, it also means that peacekeepers on the ground are left to interpret central tenants of PoC (Bode and Karlsrud 2019;Lie and de Carvalho 2010;Pantuliano and Svoboda 2016).Force Commanders, as well as individual UN peacekeepers, humanitarians, and even community leaders become 'unofficial brokers, translating official frameworks in order for them to align with the often-divergent agendas of non-state armed actors' (Cropp 2019, iii).Podder and Roy have also observed how ambiguities have impacted peacekeeping troop behaviours (Podder and Roy 2022).Therefore, this ambiguity both empowers those on-the-ground, and burdens these actors with unclear expectations (Wilmot and Sheeran 2013, 538).As members of UN missions are left to interpret what protection means, the only way to assess the character and substance of UN policy on protection is to observe how it is enacted in everyday decisions and actions.
With growing disunity between the Security Council's permanent members, there is also a growing concern in the UN about declining support for PoC.For example, in March 2022, the UN Security Council failed to adopt a text about civilian protection in Ukraine because of disagreements about the intention of the text and, ultimately, the meaning of Protection of Civilians (UNSC 2022).
The UN, interventions in South Sudan, and the evolution of 'Protection of Civilian' sites Our Special Issue centres on the everyday of PoC through a focus on the South Sudan PoC sites.Many events that surround the histories and experiences of these PoC sites have resulted from UN peacekeepers and force commanders in South Sudan interpreting ambiguous UNSC mandates and PoC policy.
UNMISS was formally formed at South Sudan's independence in July 2011.At the same time, many of UNMISS's staff and infrastructures had much longer histories as part of the UN Mission in Sudan which was established in 2005.At the inception of UNMISS, its leadership emphasised peace and protection through building the new state of South Sudan.The assumption was that the Government of South Sudan would provide protection to the population.This reflected the state-centric interpretations of PoC in the UN, as well as widespread international support for the new South Sudanese government.The state-building agenda did encourage the development of UN bases across South Sudan.At the same time, UNMISS's PoC strategy included no guidance on what to do if government security forces were the main threat to civilians (Hemmer 2013).
UNMISS's interpretation of PoC soon proved to be problematic and Millar has written in detail about the failure of the mission (Millar 2022).In 2012, civilians were threatened both by the eruption of conflict and by the government's violent suppression of protests.Initially, UNMISS was limited in its capacity to protect civilians (United Nations 2015) and the Mission continued to interpret PoC as primarily the role of the government, stating they would support PoC by increasing government capacity (Secretary General 2012, 6).This was despite it being increasingly apparent that the government itself was embroiled in conflicts that were endangering civilians (Schomerus and Allen 2010; Small Arms Survey 2013).At the same time, the government's threat to civilians led some UNMISS staff in bases in Wau in December 2012 and then in Pibor in January 2013 to offer thousands of civilians short-term protection on these UN bases (UNMISS 2012;2013).Yet, at the time of this short-term protection on bases, there was internal disagreement over whether bases should be used for PoC (Hemmer 2013).
In December 2013, a political dispute inside South Sudan's ruling party caused violence to break out in a barracks in Juba (Johnson 2014).The next day saw heavy fighting in Juba and door-to-door killing of civilians by pro-government forces (Human Rights Watch 2014).Over the next ten days, Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) units in Bor, Bentiu, and Malakal divided and turned these towns into sites of heavy warfare.Civilians were threatened by the government and emerging opposition forces.In this fast-evolving context, UN peacekeepers and commanders could no longer maintain an interpretation of PoC that focused on the government providing protection.UNMISS had no force capacity to offer protection outside of their bases (Johnson 2019).Many South Sudanese ran to the UN bases in Juba demanding protection, and frightened civilians started to force themselves onto the bases.It remains unclear if it was the UNMISS leadership that sanctioned the opening of the gates of the Juba UN bases to civilians; some UNMISS staff from the time describe it as the decision of an on-duty UN policeman responding to the reality at the gates.Irrespective of who decided to open the gates, large PoC sites developed in Juba, Bor, Bentiu, Malakal, and Wau.In 2015, the Bentiu PoC site housed over 120,000 people when government offensives drove people from rural areas in southern Unity State (IOM 2016).
The PoC sites can be compared to large IDP camps, with some important differences.As they were located in UN bases, they were subject to the 'inviolable status' of the Mission, as laid out in the 'Status of Forces Agreement' with the host government.Despite being physically within the territory of South Sudan, PoC sites were therefore under the control and authority of the UN (Briggs 2017b, 23-24).A visible way in which this meant they were different from IDP camps was that the UN mission provided a militarised form of protection to their residents through fortification and the constant presence of peacekeepers patrolling the perimeter (Briggs 2017b, 25).In addition, as these sites were under UN control and authority, their very existence challenged the South Sudanese government's sovereignty over all its territory.As a result, the South Sudanese government and high-level UN actors were always eager for them to close fast and be temporary.Despite this militarised type of protection (which humanitarians have often been cautious of) and despite high-level demands for the PoC sites to be very short-term, the mission developed a unique partnership with humanitarian actors to provide aid in the sites (Johnson 2019).The PoC sites in South Sudan delivered a combination of aid and security, in a sometimes uneasy and unusually partnership between humanitarian and peacekeeping actors.Previously, civilian protection via safe spaces had resulted in a failure to protectincluding the 1991 'safe haven' in northern Iraq, the 'safe areas' in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and the 'safe humanitarian zone' in Rwanda in 1994.In contrast to such dramatic failures in the 1990s, the South Sudan PoC sites from 2013 to 2022 do appear to have saved tens of thousands of lives and to have provided a way for civilians to survive the deadly years of war in which 190,000 were killed in the first five years alone (Checchi et al. 2018).
At the same time, while the PoC sites in South Sudan do appear to have saved lives, they were not a perfectly safe sanctuary.PoC site residents experienced attacks on the sites, violence when they left the sites and insecurity within the sites.The PoC sites were vulnerable to violent attacks from armed groups (Paddon Rhoads and Sutton 2020).While this only happened on rare occasions, these attacks were deadly.In April 2014, armed youth attacked the Bor PoC site killing at least 47 people (UNMISS 2015) and, in February 2016, SPLA and pro-government militia participated in large-scale fighting in the Malakal PoC site (Craze 2019, 63-70).In July 2016, when an episode of large-scale violence took place in Juba between government and opposition forces, there was significant violence against civilians in the PoC sites (and two Chinese peacekeepers protecting the sites were killed) (Spink and Wells 2016).In addition, when people left the sites, they often faced violence and harassment by these and other armed groups.PoC site residents were routinely harassed, arbitrarily taxed and raped when they left the PoC sites to carry out essential tasks such as collecting firewood (Craze 2019, 52, 64).Men especially feared leaving the PoC sites as they feared being accused of being rebels and being killed or imprisoned.Inside the PoC sites, there were also daily insecurity and protection challenges.PoC site residents responded by opening chiefs' courts and various other means to ensure self-protection (Ibreck and Pendle 2016;Paddon Rhoads and Sutton 2020).The extremely restricted nature of the PoC sites exacerbated trauma and mental health crises (Amnesty International 2016).All sites suffered from poor basic living standards, overcrowding and inadequate educational and other services (Spink 2019).They were criticised for concentrating humanitarian responses in a few locationsand for being an extreme example of the 'bunkerisation of aid' in conflict (Briggs 2017b, 44;Duffield 2010).
In relation to the national conflict, providing protection on UN bases resulted in largescale population movements and the traumatic urbanisation of previously rural populations.The sites impacted social geographies and the geographies of conflict.Arguably, they have had a role in stripping people of their land and extending class inequities (Craze 2019).The long-term implications for people's safety in South Sudan are still unclear.
Between 2013 and 2022, as hundreds of thousands lived in the PoC sites, the UN continued to have shifting and often ambiguous responses to PoC sites.When UNMISS initially opened their gates, the UNSC was moving towards supporting the more robust protection stance of UNMISS.In May 2014, UNSC Resolution 2155 shifted the UNMISS mandate to make protecting civilians the priority and increased its troop numbers (Rolandsen et al. 2015, 94;Security Council 2014).However, the UN and UNMISS quickly showed caution.From the outset, UNMISS was concerned about the length of people's stays in the PoC sites; the Government of South Sudan called for the PoC site closure in the first weeks of 2014 1 .UN documents written since the PoC sites formed have repeatedly highlighted that protection on bases should be temporary, for the 'minimum duration possible' and only during the 'threat' (UN Department of Peace Operations 2019, 15;2020, 166-167).When David Shearer became UNMISS Special Representative of the Secretary-General in 2017, he promised to lead a re-evaluation of UNMISS's protection presence and emphasise peacebuilding (UN Department of Peace Operations 2020, 43-44).From 2020, peacekeeping infrastructure and peacekeeping patrols were slowly reduced and then removed from the PoC sites, despite significant controversy and protests by PoC site residents and humanitarians over this decision as violence against civilians was increasing across the country.During this process, UNMISS effectively handed control over the sites to the very forces (and even specific commanders) that the sites' residents had fled from (Craze and Pendle 2020;Gregory and Gorur 2020).

The everyday of protecting civilians
The articles in this Special Issue are by authors who agree, in common, on two key things that are important for understanding PoC.Firstly, we all adopt a focus on the everyday in the PoC sites as the authors share a conviction that the everyday is the keyway to understand PoC policy and the implications of the ambiguity of the PoC concept.A growing body of scholarly work has established the importance of the 'everyday' for understanding humanitarian interventions, transitional justice, and peacebuilding.There has long been a scholarly interest in the micro-dynamics of power as experienced through the mundane, unexceptional and everyday life (Enloe 2011;Foucault 1991).A focus on the everyday has shown that norms and meanings, even in places like the UN Security Council, are shaped through practice (Bode 2018;Bode and Karlsrud 2019).
De Certeau also highlighted the need to not only notice structures of power that are enacted in the mundane but also the quotidian ways in which society resists such structures of discipline (de Certeau 2013).An 'everyday' lens allows to us notice the microscopic, routine ways in which people evade structures of power and to reshape their lived experiences.In relation to humanitarian interventions, realising the limitations of studying only top-down policy or technical programming, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ways humanitarian practice is made and transformed by actors 'on the ground'be those humanitarian practitioners, but also by local stakeholders, 'beneficiaries', or international actors (Autesserre 2014;Fernando and Hilhorst 2006;Mac Ginty 2014;Macdonald 2017;Rességuier 2018;Sutton 2018).This work has been partly rooted in a 'local turn' in peace and conflict studies (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013), and has been an insightful way to study peacekeeping missions (Autesserre 2014;Jennings and Bøås 2015).The everyday is 'the mesh of social relations and socioeconomic and political constraints of their daily lives' (Riano Alcala and Baines 2012, 387).It is a lively space of struggles over power, belonging, and identity, that often is a site for violence.It can also be a 'site of agency in politics' (Richmond 2009, 572).Through the everyday, humanitarian policy and practice, intersect with existing social and political contestations.There are quotidian ways to evade structures, but they are not always successful.
Secondly, the articles in this Special Issue also all approach the PoC sites as a protection 'arena', where different actors shape the policy, practices, and politics of aid interventions.This 'arena' is best made visible through a focus on the everday.We follow Hilhorst in seeing an 'arena' in such contexts as infused with complex negotiations, politics and transformation that shape the outcomes of humanitarian assistance (Hilhorst 2018, 46).This helps to show how interventions are part of a local landscape.They 'do not operate outside of societies but are embedded in local realities' and are fundamentally relational in character (Hilhorst 2018, 43).Importantly, it is about the realities of governance during uncertain policy commitments, and not about abstract ideals.
The deep empirical research required to understand the everyday, especially in sensitive conflict environments, evokes various ethical dilemmas including the researchers' own positionality (Cronin-Furman and Lake 2018).The majority (but not all) of our contributions have been written by academics who are not from South Sudan and who have never lived in a PoC site.The politicised nature of the sites meant that South Sudanese entering them were viewed with suspicion, and occasionally threatened, by those inside and outside of these sites.As such, PoC sites are a difficult space for South Sudanese to conduct research in, while foreign (white) researchers can cross the sites' barriers with much greater ease (Balolage and Kayanga 2020).It is therefore important to emphasise that the perspectives presented in this Special Issue are partial and shaped by the authors' privileged positionalities.

Learning from Everyday Protection: Contributions of this Special Issue
This Special Issue goes beyond previous research to explore both how the PoC mandates were interpreted in the everyday of peacekeeping in the PoC sites and how the PoC sites interacted with existing social and political struggles.The creation of PoC sites had implications for civilians' immediate safety, but they also impacted on longer term socialites, that themselves have implications for protection outcomes.Protection was experienced not as something discrete from these other parts of life, but as an intervention that intersected with existing norms, expectations and structures of authority.
One of the most poignant observations in the Special Issue pertains to the interpenetration between 'local' and 'international' agendas and practices.The experience of being a 'protected' person or community is transformative.By the same token, the daily act of providing protection also has the potential to transform policy and create practices that travel up into international spaces and spheres.For example, Anine Hagemann's article shows this clearly through the example of UN personnel who had been given responsibility for implementing detention in PoC sites.Her article examines one of the most fraught issues faced by UNMISSwhat to do with people who commit crimes on the PoC site.These are individuals who must be 'protected' from the threat of violence in the civil war, and yet who may themselves pose a danger to others.The situation of being responsible for large numbers of civilians' safety on their own bases forced UNMISS to establish detention facilities (called 'holding facilities') in its PoC sites.Through detailed interviews with UN staff who were responsible for 'holding' people who posed a danger to others, Hagemann explores how 'holding facilities' emerged through a process of improvisation, as staff attempted to find 'the best bad solution' (Hagemann 2024).She also shows that UN staff's everyday practice was also shaped by experiences of other carceral systems where they had previously worked, such as the American prison system.She argues that it was not directives 'from above' but practiceworked out in the practically and morally ambiguous everyday demands of the jobthat later led to policies dealing with detention in PoC sites.
The article by Naomi Pendle, Alice Robinson, Andrew Apiny and Gatkuoth Mut also departs from the problem of insecurity and criminality in the PoC sites and discusses the dilemmas and everyday practice of legal institutions.Based on qualitative research in the Bentiu and Wau sites, their article establishes that UNMISS did not want to create courts or speak in the name of the law out of fear that this would further challenge the sovereignty of the South Sudanese government.At the same time, those living in the sites engaged in plural and overlapping legal jurisdictions, blurring spatial, social and legal boundaries between the inside and outside of the PoC sites.The PoC sites were spaces with a rivalrous plurality of actors who spoke in the name of the law, and PoC site residents sought legal redress from a variety of institutions.Yet, South Sudanese PoC site residents and legal actors did not always equate this legal power with sovereignty.Focusing on the everyday use of law in the Wau and Bentiu PoC sites, Pendle et al. explore the legal and political connections that existed along the trails that led from inside the sites to the surrounding towns, and how these legal trails remade relations between the PoC sites and the surrounding areas (Pendle et al. 2023).
Through her study of the everyday politics of protecting women and girls in the PoC site, Rachel Ibreck's article also grapples with the everyday experiences of peacekeepers, displaced chiefs, women and activists trying to apply international policies (Ibreck 2023).
Ibreck examines what happens when protection actors attempt to implement international commitments to end sexual and gender-based violence in warzones.The PoC sites offer a unique environment to investigate how gender protection policy plays out in practice in close proximity to UN structures and personnel.She finds that, even within a humanitarian space under the authority of the UN, sexual-and gender-based violence remained rife, and that engagement with local authorities and activists was key to promoting women's protection (Ibreck 2023).In the PoC sites, international agendas over human rights and significant achievements by women, are still met with the conservative stance of community authorities over cases of rape and domestic violence.Ibreck highlights the need for more engagement with local authorities and activists as it was impossible for the UN to impose protection.
Alongside 'protection', the category of 'civilian' is also an operationally ambiguous term for PoC interventions (Williams 2013, 290).In South Sudan, the definition of 'civilian' is especially complex and politicised because of a long history of insurgency and state interference in local conflicts (Kindersley and Rolandsen 2019).The question of 'who is a civilian' has been extremely contentious for UNMISS because of accusations that combatants have sought safety within the sites (Briggs 2017b, 88).In their article in this Special Issue, Sutton and Stuppart's focus on journalists and humanitarians in the Juba PoC site shows that 'civilian' is not a bureaucratic or legal category worked out at a distance, but an identity negotiated in the everyday (Sutton and Stupart 2023).This is especially true in cases of people who do not fit the usual image of the 'civilian' or 'IDP'.Sutton and Stupart's focus on 'civilians who engage in professional tasks', such as journalists and humanitarians, illustrates how these civilians used a variety of strategies to negotiate safety and protection in the PoC site.Through these strategies, we saw the fluidity and micropolitics of the 'civilian' category itself.
A major set of findings revolve around the insight that PoC site residents did not experience 'protection' as a neutral set of programmes and policiesthey experienced 'protection' through the way the intervention transformed their lives and interacted with pre-existing social structures and struggles.Diana Felix da Costa develops this point through a case study of how contestations about 'youth' were reshaped by the context of Bentiu PoC site (Felix Da Costa 2023).She finds that intergenerational tensions were heightened in the PoC site.This was partly because elders attempted to retain a gerontocratic order, but importantly, protection actors also became players in these 'internal' struggles because they attempted to intervene to control the behaviour of young people, who were considered a disruptive force in the PoC site.She observed a collusion between certain elders and the protection intervention to govern the actions of young people.Zoe Cormack's (Cormack 2023) article explores the impact of the PoC site on a very different aspect of everyday life: funerary practice and mourning.Death was a daily occurrence in the PoC site, but usual practices of burial and funerary rites were significantly disrupted with serious practical, emotional and spiritual consequences for displaced people.Her analysis focuses on temporality and shows stark differences in how time was experienced by residents on one hand and the humanitarian system on the other.She shows that displaced people were concerned with maintaining and protecting the long-term future of their kinship networks and communities in the aftermath of death on a catastrophic scale.The practical aspects of how death was managed also revealed that there were moments of accommodation between the humanitarian intervention and bereaved IDPs.The article demonstrates that conditions of 'protection' impacted all aspects of social life and that the everyday of protection is shaped by existing social norms.
Together, our studies in South Sudan's PoC sites demonstrate that the ambiguous Protection of Civilians of this UN mission significantly impacted everyday experiences of protection for those civilians that the mandate was trying to keep safe.Peacekeepers were left to interpret ambiguities and ended up making policy from below (Hagemann 2024).Everyday experiences of these policies for PoC site residents intersected with existing contestations and hierarchies of power (Felix Da Costa 2023;Ibreck 2023).In the everyday, these peacekeepers decisions were interacting with and again being remade by the expectations and norms of those seeking safety, with some practices clearly co-created and, at least, partially collaborative (Cormack 2023).It also meant that experiences across sites varied significantly (Pendle et al. 2023).
Our Special Issue shows that it is impossible to separate the social impacts of interventions from the way they are mediated through everyday practice and experience.The PoC sites have transformed the social, emotional, and political lives of civilians within themas well as those who deliver protection.Therefore, it may sometimes seem as if the everyday has a dual meaning across this issueto mean both the shaping of policy and practice and the effects of these policies on those living within (and closely connected to) the PoC sites.This dual meaning is intentional because the two aspects are linked and influence each other.Many of these consequences are far reaching both in their effect on society and politics in South Sudan, and on the global practice of protecting civilians.
Member states and organs of the United Nations remain uncertain about the future of the innovation of the UN PoC sites, and even about the future of UN peacekeeping missions.At the heart of future decision-making must be a willingness to understand the actual impact that previous missions and PoC site policies and practice have had on the lives of those they try to keep safe.An everyday perspective is key to inform these decisions.
Notes 1. Observations of aid actor meetings, planning and conversations by Pendle in Nairobi (Kenya) and Juba (South Sudan) in 2014.