The UN Community Liaison Assistants in the United Nations Discourse and the Local Turn Literature

As presented in the previous chapter, the United Nations considers the attacks on Kiwanja in 2008, among many similar experiences in the Congo and other missions, as the starting point for the creation of the Community Liaison Assistants. During this event, linguistic and cultural barriers become an obstacle to the protection mandate that the role of an interpreter/translator can overcome. In this chapter, I explore two intertwined movements between the UN discourse on protection and the local turn in the specialized literature on peace operations to understand how the CLAs are located within the Protection of Civilians agenda. This chapter’s main argument is that either through the UN discourse or through the local turn literature, there is no deep questioning of the role of translation and interpretation in the relations between actors in peace operations. Consequently, as I will show throughout the book, that undermines the UN’s objectives when creating the CLAs. Translations are seen as neutral and impartial, a simple way of communicating and/or dealing with the Other, and the CLAs remain romanticized as if the linguistic and cultural translation/interpretation could faultlessly fulfill their mediating role in the context of MONUSCO and other missions. Furthermore, the category of ‘local,’ as opposed to the ‘international,’ is part of both discourses as a heuristic device in favor of tolerating cultural difference. The problem of communication, according to the UN, involves a technocracy that places the CLAs as a tool to be used by peacekeepers. The problem of cultural in-difference following the local turn constructs a reification of cultures where the relationship with the Other can be mediated and perhaps solved by cultural translation.