Introduction

During the transition between the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), the United Nations (UN) created the role of the Community Liaison Assistants (CLAs) to aid the mission in following a mandate focused on the Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda. In this book, I take the CLAs as an analytical prism to debate how the UN aims to construct its protection discourse on the ground. That is done by investigating how the CLAs are expected to translate the UN’s notion of protection to the local population linguistically and as an internalizing move in other PoC-mandate-related activities. This chapter introduces the book’s main argument and analytical strategies.