Using force to protect civilians. A comparative analysis of United Nations military protection operations

This thesis is motivated by two research gaps. First, while protecting civilians from physical violence is a priority task for almost every military UN peacekeeper, we still know little about how they have fared — in particular situations, across time, and in different UN missions — when force was used to protect. Second, we are mostly unaware of the causal conditions leading to protection successes. These knowledge-gaps are largely attributable to the lack of updated event data suitable for systematically analyzing outcome variations in these operations across time and place. To start bridging these gaps, this thesis addresses two related research questions: i) to what degree have UN military troops provided protection to civilians under imminent physical threat in Africa between 1999 and 2017? and ii) what determines UN military troops’ ability to protect civilians from physical violence? First, by building a new dataset (UNPOCO) capturing core characteristics of 200 military protection operations at the tactical and operational levels in ten UN missions across Africa from 1999 to 2017, the thesis starts bridging the gap of missing systematic event data. Besides describing the core characteristics of an understudied phenomenon, the empirical mapping also facilitates an evaluation of variations in outcomes of military efforts to protect across time and locations. In response to the first research question, the outcome estimations indicate that UN troops in Africa have used force to protect civilians effectively on 76 occasions, alongside an almost similar number of failures. Importantly, these findings indicate that UN troops can use force to protect effectively, while there is also significant room for improvement. Nevertheless, the findings remain inconclusive, as the inconsistent quality of data hampers precise measurements. More worryingly, the mapping also exposes that UN troops only responded to a small percentage of events where civilians were in need of protection. Second, the study explores causal conditions that foster successful outcomes when UN troops used force to protect. Rather than looking exclusively at failures, it seeks to understand cases with more fortunate outcomes – military operations in which UN troops did protect civilians from imminent threats. Through a mixed-methods research design – combining quantitative and qualitative methods – the study finds that, once UN peacekeepers decide to intervene militarily, the ability to understand perpetrators’ motives and modus operandi for attacking civilians – and matching particular threats with tailored and timely military responses – often determine the extent to which UN troops achieve successful protection outcomes. However, the cross-case analyses are only able to explain about half of the successful outcomes. Supported by two qualitative case studies from the DRC and South Sudan, the thesis unearths other potential causal condition candidates, that facilitates UN troops ability to match the perpetrators of violence, including: host-nation support, force mobility and projection; the ability to escalate when deterrence fails; good troop-to-perpetrator ratios; and operational art. While these conditions may be case-specific, they do provide stepping stones for future explorations of generalizable conditions that increase the UN’s ability to protect. To date, most research has highlighted the UN’s inability to provide effective physical protection, stressing problems such as troop-contributing countries’ reluctance to use military force when needed, insufficient pre-deployment training, and a general lack of military guidance on how to protect most effectively. In contrast, this thesis shows that military UN peacekeepers can use force to protect civilians effectively from imminent threats. The findings point to the need to tailor operational concepts and military protection practices based on a better understanding of the threats civilians are facing. Moreover, more than being present in large enough numbers, UN troops must sometimes engage militarily with armed groups who deliberately attack civilians, and they must do so in ways that match the perpetrator’s aims and actions. In sum, the thesis provides new ideas to improve future military protection practices, as well as theoretical contributions to an understudied field of inquiry