The Community Liaison Assistants and the Politics of Translation in UN Peace Operations’ Protection Discourses

So far, the discourse on the 2008 attacks in Kiwanja has been introduced at the beginning of each chapter to highlight different directions when discussing how the UN understands its protector role in peace operations and its imagined protected and enemy counterparts. This chapter aims to discuss what I have hinted throughout this book as the politics of translation of protection discourses. By re-naming how the UN attempts to center its interpretation on protection as a translation effort, I intend to emphasize the non-existence of any of the categories discussed in the previous chapters a priori of their performance. That means that there is no international/local or protector/protected/enemy, civilized/savage/barbarian before the attempt to stabilize these representations through translating these discourses.