Performing the Protection of Civilians Mandate: Experiences of African Military Peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Federal Republic of Somalia

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) became a central norm in international peacekeeping and often rationalizes the use of force in peace interventions. The successes, failures and ambiguities of the PoC mandate implementation were critically explored in academia and policymaking. Few studies, however, have attended to the views and experiences of uniformed peacekeepers, thus to those actors supposed to implement the PoC mandate. This report provides initial findings on peacekeepers' experiences. The findings build on 69 narrative interviews with United Nations and African Union military peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, in which we explored how military peacekeepers described and reflected upon their peacekeeping experiences and what they viewed as successes, shortcomings and challenges. The report tries to stay as close as possible to the narratives of the peacekeepers to provide readers with a glimpse into the ways peacekeepers talked about, rationalized, justified, challenged and reflected upon their deployment. We start by assessing peacekeepers' initial reaction when they received the order for the deployment to a peacekeeping mission. Second, we outline their experiences in performing the PoC mandate focussing on peacekeepers' own understanding of their roles as protectors of civilians and the challenges they described relating to civilians and differentiating them from combatants. Their role understanding is directly linked to the gendered character of peacekeeping which we discuss in a third section. Fourth, we outline how soldiers identified barriers, discussed the need to work with intermediaries and how this impacts the distribution of trust in peacekeeping before we finally show how peacekeepers thought about the request to find 'African solutions for African Problems'. Policy Recommendations Based on our findings, we propose the following recommendations for the training of future and returning peacekeepers and policy: • To foster language skills amongst peacekeepers especially when they are regularly redeploy to the same countries to improve everyday communication with and understanding of civilians. Improved language skills would not only avoid overly relying on a few interpreters or the host county's army for translation, but also create more opportunities for peacekeepers to engage with the host population to counter prejudices and attitudes of othering