Found and Lost in Translation: Centering Protection Through Interpretations, Positionalities, and Tactics

Interpretations of the attacks in KiwanjaKiwanja in 2008, either by the UN or academics and the international media, appointed MONUCMONUC’s inability to protect Congolese civilians as a setback for the mission’s mandate. This chapter advances the notion of translation as a movement in which the UN gets lost and tries to find itself when it concerns protection discourses and the CLAs’ consequential role. To accomplish that, it discusses how the idea of protection in the PoC discourse entails the division of roles between those who protect, those who are protected, and the enemies that need to be annihilated to ensure a protective environment. That way, such roles need to be translated and stabilized to all socio-political actors, putting the UN (while aiding the host state) as the ‘protector’ whereas the local population falls into the other two groups. In doing so, the UN also needs to find a way to distinguish who in the local population is the ‘protected’ and who is the ‘enemy,’ in which the CLAs are expected to assist. Yet, the UN discourages the peacekeepers from relying too much upon their CLAs since they cannot be fully trusted, given their possible ties with the ‘enemy.’ This socio-political imagination, I argue, makes sense in COIN tactics that are part of UN stabilization mission doctrines, such as MONUSCO.