Engaging with Communities:The next challenge for peacekeeping

This report aims to support efforts to improve peacekeeping missions’ efforts to better protect civilians. It highlights how engagement with communities is critical to managing expectations, to building trust between peacekeepers and communities and to ensuring peacekeepers are better able to understand and respond to threats to civilians in a given location. The nexus between the international community’s efforts to protect civilians and the people who need their protection is often in remote and isolated locations; this report therefore reviews a number of recent initiatives undertaken by peacekeepers that show promise in improving communication between peacekeepers and communities and in the protection of civilians, and identifies the key factors that influence their success or failure in the eyes of communities. The study draws on Oxfam’s extensive protection experience and presence in conflict-affected communities. It is supported by field-based research in southern Sudan and the DRC, including interviews and focus group discussions with women and men in affected communities.