Neglecting Local Realities: the Negative Impact of Protection in Abyei
The United Nations Security Council created the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (unisfa) in June 2011 to monitor the ceasefire and the demilitarisation of Abyei. The deployment of unisfa has led scholars to argue that unisfa’s protection of civilian operations and predicted favourable troop-to-population ratios have contributed to its noticeable success. However, the dynamics in Abyei have changed over the last few years, with an increase in inter and intra-communal violence. This has acclimated the mission being faced with new forms of criminality, violence and actor dynamics—such as the use of local and neighbouring militia for hire. Drawing on an interpretivist analysis of data generated from the single case study of unisfa, the paper argues that unisfa’s inability to use force at the start to protect has led the mission over time to entrench itself further inwardly, leading to patterns of passive response(s) to protection matters. As a result, unisfa implementation of Protection of Civilians (poc), neglects localisation realities producing further negative effects. The overreliance on the two-dimensional lens inhibits the mission’s ability to tactical evaluate, pivot and redeploy diverse tools that can support a response to protection issues. Consequently, unisfa’s failure to adapt to an evolving conflict environment allows dissatisfied communities to take matters into their own hands, resulting in further loss of trust in the mission.
The United Nations–African Union Partnership and the Protection of Civilians
The landscape of peace operations in Africa has transformed over the past decade, including a marked increase in African-led peace support operations (PSOs). Since the early 2000s, the African Union (AU) and UN have evolved distinct, albeit parallel, conceptual and operational approaches to the protection of civilians (POC). While the UN views POC in peacekeeping as a whole-of-mission objective, with military, police, and civilian components prioritizing POC and proactively protecting civilians, the AU views itself as contributing to the protection of civilians primarily by neutralizing armed groups and establishing a protective environment. These differences raise important questions about how POC will be upheld in the context of the UN-AU partnership. This report examines the operational differences between UN and AU approaches to POC, assessing their respective advantages and limitations. It highlights how African-led PSOs tend to be more able and willing to use force to respond to outbreaks of violence and to contain aggressors but have less sustainable and flexible financing than UN peacekeeping operations. Meanwhile, UN peacekeeping missions with POC mandates have more robust civilian and police components but may lack rapid response capabilities. To strengthen their partnership on POC, the two organizations should leverage their comparative advantages, acknowledge their respective limitations, and work toward an approach to POC that is tailored to each context.
New frontiers of diplomacy: Building relationships with uncomfortable actors in a changing world
What constitutes effective and reliable diplomacy in today's world?
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire: Geopolitical upheaval and democracy under strain
The regional neighbourhood of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, two of West Africa’s most stable democracies, has become increasingly volatile. Drawing on empirical data from fieldwork carried out in Accra and Abidjan in June 2025, this report highlights a set of cross-cutting and interlinked issues that Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have to navigate. This report is part of a project financed by the Norwegian MFA.
Thea Virginia McConnell
Thea is a research assistant at NUPI in the Research group for defense and security, and a master’s student in political science at the University...
Converging Global Norms and Institutional Policies with Bottom-Up Approaches to the Protection of Civilians
The participation of the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) in the protection of civilians (PoC) has shown that their respective experiences have evolved and helped to support the ideals of PoC. PoC is considered a key indicator to the success of the UN mission, and the concept has grown in relevance across activities of the UN. Equally, over the last two decades, the AU Peace and Security Council has increasingly mandated and deployed Peace Support Operations (psos) to prevent and respond to human security threats and mass atrocities on the African continent. However, the existence of Ad hoc Security Initiatives (asis) and Enterprise Security Arrangements (esas) that are swifter at deploying to areas of insecurity allows affected states to use forces within and across their borders to attempt to deal rapidly with protection concerns. The use of asis and esas for protection concerns differs from large UN and AU operations, which rely on a clear mandate, policy, guidance, and principles developed from built-up experience. The article explores the nature and use of asis and esas and asks whether these new operations can provide better civilian protection outcomes. It explores how asis and esas can adopt PoC guidelines from the AU to allow for better protection and PoC in the specific environments where asis and esas operate. Finally, the article proposes ways asis and esas can integrate the AU PoC policy into their operations.
Consolidating African-led Peacebuilding Efforts
While the United Nations (UN) holds the primary responsibility for securing global peace, it increasingly emphasises the importance of partnerships with regional organisations. In practice, this means the UN often engages only once peace has been brokered. The wider international community looks to leading regional organisations, such as the African Union (AU) in the case of Africa, to take the lead in peacebuilding. As such, the AU has emerged as a key actor — mobilising international support for peacebuilding across the continent, while also driving the development of significant localised initiatives and anchoring these in state institutions towards advancing peace and stability. However, in persistent, violent conflicts, peacebuilding efforts often take a backseat. Stabilisation frequently takes centre stage, while policymakers focus on immediate humanitarian priorities and the prevention of further violence. As a result, peacebuilding in Africa is rarely uniform across states. It is often concentrated in capitals and urban areas, producing long-term effects that may exacerbate tensions and inadvertently reinforce the very disparities that initially sparked conflict. Peacebuilding is not a neutral process. It can maintain and entrench existing social structures, framing democracy as the sole driver of change while overlooking peacebuilding as a space of political contestation, negotiation and tension, and one that confers or denies legitimacy. This study examines African-led peacebuilding efforts that seek to address conflicts’ structural contradictions and root causes. It calls for a rethink of regional organisations’ approaches to peacebuilding in complex stabilisation environments, advocating for a more adaptive regional peacebuilding strategy that acknowledges its deep interlinkages with stabilisation.
Guns, Butter and Karl Polanyi: Securing Europe in the post-neoliberal world
Trump 2.0 has contested and sought to upturn the so-called liberal international order. Within Europe this entailed leveraging geoeconomic dependence to force NATO members to publicly commit to spending 5% of GDP on defence and the EU into an asymmetrical trade deal. Europe is thus undergoing a guns versus butter debate that threatens the social contract and the solvency of Europe. Taking stock of the scramble across Europe to keep NATO keeping on - and drawing upon research that explores the transnational and economic roots of the rise of the far right - this essay argues that to effectively respond to Trump 2.0 and stem tide of anti-democratic currents will require rethinking contemporary EU economic doxa – imperfectly captured by the term neoliberalism. Such a reckoning should involve a systematic reconsideration of how far and how deep markets and market logics should be institutionalised within European societies. In short, Europe should seek to proactively shape the emerging post-neoliberal trend to seek to ensure that what comes next retains the existing order’s stated commitments to democracy, tolerance, and human dignity. Conversely, failure to rethink Europe’s commitment to neoliberalism risks strengthening those that are convinced the status quo embodies little worth salvaging.
Governing nature and the making of world order
How have efforts to govern nature and address urgent global environmental challenges shaped, transformed or undermined processes of world ordering? Chapters in this book explore how efforts to govern nature have transformed – or are transforming – how we understand and practice world politics. Bringing together a team of contributors from around the world, the book traces this inquiry across diverse international policy fields, from security and peacebuilding through science cooperation and governing ecosystems to the politics of economic growth. Taken together, the book offers a conceptually ambitious and empirically grounded account of how the governance of nature and the making of world order intertwine and calls for a research agenda to attend to the growing impact of this interrelationship.
Governance by indicators and the re-politicisation of expertise
States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.