Concluding Remarks

While the United Nations uses the notion of protection almost ubiquitously when constructing discourses to legitimize its many interventions, there is still a constant attempt to re-define this concept, as its meaning cannot be fixed. In its peace operations, the UN frames its actions “in the name of protection,” but stabilizing this interpretation of its presence and authority on the ground clashes with other understandings of what protection entails and the distribution of its socio-political roles. In this book, I have shown how ambivalent the UN discourses on protection are, stressing the unproblematized notions of translation that entail the Community Liaison Assistants’ task when mediating linguistically and culturally the relationship between the local population and the UN. In other words, I have explored the representations applied to the CLAs in UN documents to problematize how the UN imagines this unique staff to be able to aid in centering the meaning of protection according to the UN’s interpretation. As my concluding remarks, therefore, I propose tracing the steps taken throughout this book and considering its limitations, contributions, and possible ensuing paths.