Doing less with less? Peacekeeping retrenchment and the UN's protection of civilians agenda

Introduction

On 20 March 1993, the French general Philippe Morillon entered the besieged Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica with a small contingent of UN soldiers and 175 tons of food and medical supplies. “You are now under the protection of the UN forces,” the UNPROFOR commander announced to the town’s frightened, starving residents, “I will never abandon you.” Srebrenica proved to be a dramatic early example of the potentially devastating consequences of the gap between the promises of UN peacekeepers to protect vulnerable civilians and their limited capacities to actually do so. The enclave was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, and some 8000 men and boys were killed in the aftermath, after having sought—and been ultimately denied—protection at the local UNPROFOR base. When Philippe Morillon visited Srebrenica in 2010 to pay his respects at the memorial site, he was effectively run out of town by angry survivors of the massacre. ¹

The year 2019 also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, a far costlier failure on the part of UN peacekeepers to prevent atrocities against civilian populations. Collectively, the Srebrenica and Rwanda tragedies shook the institution of peacekeeping to its very foundations, and fuelled a strengthening consensus around the conviction that the UN can never again stand idly by in the face of atrocities. In addition to the moral and humanitarian imperatives underpinning the PoC agenda, the concept has also become a powerful legitimizing device for peacekeepers deployed on “conflict management” operations. In contexts such as South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), protecting civilians has been the primary justification for ongoing (and costly) deployments in states lacking either a peace to keep or a viable peace process to implement. The first UN Security Council Resolution to explicitly instruct peacekeepers to protect civilians came in 1999 (with the UNAMSIL Mission in Sierra Leone), and two decades on, most peacekeeping missions now contain PoC mandates. At the same time, dozens of countries—including leading troop- and police-contributing countries (T/PCCs)—have signed onto the Kigali Principles on the Protection of Civilians, aimed explicitly at closing the gap between the promise and the practice of protection. Similarly, the Declaration of Shared Commitments on UN Peacekeeping Operations issued in September 2018 as part of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative—and now supported by the signatures of some 150 UN member states—both re-affirms the importance of protecting civilians in peacekeeping contexts and promises to more closely match mission mandates and mission resources. ²

Our core contention in this paper is that, in fact, the opposite is happening. Exercises such as the A4P have become bogged down by, among other things, a failure to transcend chronic dissensus on fundamental questions such as who the UN should protect and how it should protect them, while mounting pressures on peacekeeping missions to be lean and efficient are widening, not narrowing, the gap between mission mandates and mission resources. Combined, both trends are jeopardizing the UN’s already-tenuous ability to protect the vulnerable in peacekeeping contexts. To be sure, PoC—which entails everything from predicting and pre-empting attacks against civilians to reforming state-level security institutions—has now become part of the normative landscape of peacekeeping, and is unlikely to disappear as a core element of what is expected of peacekeepers in contemporary conflict environments. Yet while PoC has emerged as one of the defining tasks of modern peacekeeping, ³ and is increasingly the standard against which the success or failure of peace operations is measured, the growing gap between promise and performance with regard to PoC stands to have serious implications not only for vulnerable conflict-affected populations, but also for the credibility and legitimacy of UN missions among those they are mandated to protect.

Making sense of the peacekeeping reform agenda

Attempts to adapt peacekeeping operations to the increasingly challenging contexts in which they operate have occurred episodically over the past two decades, with decidedly mixed results. As the latest of these initiatives, A4P draws heavily on previous iterations—most notably the 2000 Brahimi Report, the 2015 Advisory Group of Experts (AGE) report on the UN peacebuilding architecture, the report of the 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), and the 2017 Cruz Report on improving peacekeeping security. As early as 2000, the Brahimi Report flagged the disparity between ambitious peacekeeping mandates and available resources, and called for the adoption of stronger measures to protect civilians, paving the way for the institutionalization of a “protection norm” within UN peace operations. ⁴ The report’s emphasis on achieving credible deterrence also foreshadowed the use of more robust force postures in peacekeeping operations.

Two decades after the Brahimi Report, however, the institution of peacekeeping still struggles to reconcile the political and military halves of its soul, while the notion of “protection through coercion” remains deeply controversial among UN member states. The HIPPO Report may have emerged in part, as Louise Andersen suggests, as a corrective to a perceived militarizing impulse in its call for the UN to embrace the “primacy of politics” in recognition that sustainable peace cannot be achieved by military means alone, but rather requires broader political solutions that address core conflict causes. ⁵ At the same time, the HIPPO Report insisted that peacekeeping must become more “field-focused” and “people-centred” to better engage with and protect local populations. ⁶ The thematic overhaul outlined by the High-Level Panel, specifically its articulation of a more inclusive, integrated, and holistic understanding of “sustaining peace”—a theme which provided the centrepiece of the AGE Report—represented an endorsement of what Richard Gowan has referred to as the “politics–protection–peacebuilding triad,” ⁷ and specifically of the notion that peacekeepers cannot protect civilians indefinitely in the absence of political strategies, which in turn must necessarily and meaningfully engage both national and local stakeholders.

Countering the HIPPO's primacy of politics theme with an emphasis on the primacy of force, the 2017 Cruz Report contended that the UN and many of its T/PCCs have become “gripped by a ‘Chapter VI Syndrome’ that leads them to plan and deploy peacekeeping operations without a full appreciation of security risks in the field and the operational approach needed to address them,” and which has led directly to a dramatic rise in peacekeeper casualties in recent years. ⁸ Cruz and his co-authors insisted that, in order to confront the sources of insecurity plaguing conflict-affected environments (and conflict-affected populations), traditional principles of peacekeeping must be adapted to enable UN forces in volatile contexts to use overwhelming force, to be proactive and pre-emptive, and to exercise military dominance around bases and areas of operation. Crucially, the Cruz Report also called on UN leadership at all levels to be held accountable for failing to adapt to high-risk mission environments, and for failing to ensure that only properly-trained and adequately-equipped troops are deployed into such environments. In partial response to such concerns, both the Security Council and the Secretariat have recently turned their attention towards accountability and performance issues, generating both an action plan on improving peacekeeper security and accountability which addresses many of the Cruz Report’s concerns, as well as a thematic Security Council Resolution (2436) on accountability within peace operations. ⁹

While the A4P initiative nods to all of these themes, it is also the product of a particular geopolitical era, and its scope appears to have progressively narrowed—with key elements either downgraded or jettisoned—as a result of both the unreconciled tensions noted above (and Secretary-General Guterres’s efforts to secure collective endorsement for A4P nevertheless), and downward budgetary pressures on UN peace operations within a more generalized climate of multilateral frugality.

Peacekeeping reform and the future of PoC

Barring an abrupt reversal of current geopolitical trends, it seems clear from the foregoing discussion that the future of peacekeeping will be leaner—possibly meaner—and driven more by the particularities of multilateral budget deliberations than by the realities of conflict-affected environments. Despite the stakes involved, the inherent complexity of contemporary conflicts, and a deepening recognition that war-to-peace transitions demand long-term, integrated, and context-sensitive strategies (à la “sustaining peace”), current peacekeeping reform debates have been notable for their shrinking horizons. This back-to-basics sentiment is captured by Boutellis and Novosseloff’s observation that “the age of large, unwieldy, multidimensional missions might be gone,” replaced by a new era of smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive missions. ³¹ Beyond the drive to shrink peacekeeping’s footprint, however, it is less clear that the current reform effort is guided by a clear strategic vision, or even a coherent narrative beyond the generic call to make peacekeeping missions “fit for the future.” Absent such a vision—and a clear-eyed effort to articulate how smaller missions can have bigger impacts—it appears inevitable that fewer resources will translate into less field-level capacity.

Given the extent to which existing peace operations already struggle to protect populations at risk, the current trend towards lighter-footprint (and lighter-ambition) peacekeeping has obvious implications for the broader PoC agenda, and for the ability of specific missions to close the gap between the promise of protection—and the expectations of conflict-affected populations—and their ability to deliver. In the context of the current reform debates, it is already possible to detect growing reticence vis-à-vis PoC, not least in the A4P's retreat from the HIPPO's earlier emphasis on field-focused and people-centred peace operations. Similarly, Alison Giffen has suggested that the relatively “meagre” language on PoC contained within the Declaration of Shared Commitments may in fact signal weakening resolve on the part of UN member states, and an erosion of what had been a growing consensus—evident in Security Council mandates—that “the effective protection of civilians by peacekeeping operations in the short-term was inextricably linked with achieving peace in the long-term.” ³² At the field level, budget cuts are already beginning to bite, especially in the DRC, where the MONUSCO mission has lost both civilian staff and aviation assets and, in the words of a recent CIVIC report, “no longer expects to be able to offer adequate protection to civilians by maintaining a presence in all priority areas that are insecure.” ³³ In the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), while the MINUSCA mission has mostly been spared large budget cuts, it has been obliged to cut civilian positions, including human rights monitors and community liaison assistants, to accommodate additional troops within its current budget. ³⁴ At the same time, the most recent mandate renewal processes added additional mandated tasks, with no new resources, to a mission that is already “over-stretched and out-gunned.” ³⁵

Within this broader context, therefore, in what follows we reflect on the future of PoC in an era marked by both austerity and restrained ambition, with an emphasis on the two fundamental (and hitherto unresolved) questions of who to protect and how to protect. Following some initial reflections on the tensions inherent in the very notion of peacekeepers protecting civilians in conflict contexts, we consider the two dominant strands of the current PoC debate—protection through projection and protection through presence—through the lens of the growing preoccupation with efficiency and accountability that is taking hold across the UN peace and security architecture.

At its core, protecting civilians in conflict contexts is an exercise in triage. As the HIPPO Report observed in 2015, “the reality is that many missions with protection responsibilities are currently severely under-resourced,” and current trends will only widen this resource/responsibility gap. ³⁶ Even the largest UN operations, therefore—including MONUSCO in the DRC and UNMISS in South Sudan—cannot hope to offer sustained security provision across more than a small fraction of the conflict-affected space, and lack the sophisticated intelligence capabilities required to anticipate and pre-empt atrocities before they happen. Faced with the overwhelming geography of vulnerability, therefore, in which peacekeepers cannot be everywhere that populations are threatened, missions are invariably forced to make difficult choices about who they can and cannot protect. Beyond mission-wide efforts to protect certain categories of “the vulnerable”—child soldiers, women, and the internally displaced, for example—resource constraints already push missions into reactive, whack-a-mole forms of protection. MINUSCA's efforts to shift forces from old hotspots to new ones, for example, have left security vacuums in vacated areas that have been filled by armed groups, setting the stage for renewed cycles of violence. ³⁷ In South Sudan, conversely, the early decision to protect civilians fleeing violence at UN bases has created semi-permanent PoC sites, which have monopolized the lion’s share of mission resources since the war re-erupted in late 2013, making it nearly impossible to offer protection “outside the wire,” where the vast majority of vulnerable South Sudanese reside. More generally, the South Sudan example underlines that protection triage unfolds within mandate language that requires a mission to protect civilians only “within its capacity and areas of deployment.” ³⁸ In other words, priority is to be given to protecting populations at imminent risk where and when the mission is in a position to do so. Indeed, the most egregious protection failures of recent years—the attacks on the Juba PoC site in 2016, or a recent incident in the CAR in which as many as 100 IDPs were shot and burned alive ³⁹ —have involved allegations that UN forces were present but unwilling to intervene; such incidents, to put it mildly, reflect poorly on the UN peacekeeping brand, and have seriously eroded the UN’s standing and reputation among host communities.

Finally, and relatedly, peacekeepers themselves must also be considered within the broader “who to protect” calculus. As noted above, force protection has become a hot-button issue within UN circles in recent years. In its call for UN troops to use “overwhelming” force and to “dominate” territory in high-risk environments, the Cruz Report injected fresh energy into the debate around the strategy of “defence through offence” in peacekeeping contexts, even as it has been criticized for trying to push the UN too far down the fraught path of peace enforcement. ⁴⁰ While the Cruz Report underlined that risk-aversion—and the unwillingness to use force—on the part of both mission leadership and military contingents remains a key obstacle to effective force protection, ⁴¹ risk-aversion also leads contingents (as in the two examples highlighted above) to privilege self-protection over civilian protection both in crisis situations and more generally. In Mali, for example, widely cited as the world’s most dangerous peacekeeping mission (with more than 200 fatalities since 2013), PoC efforts have been seriously curtailed by widespread insecurity, which continues to confine most contingents to fortified compounds most of the time. While understandable—no country wants to see its soldiers come home in body bags—it remains the case that a generalized discomfort among major troop-contributing countries with riskier, more “robust” forms of engagement continues to represent a serious impediment to the fulfilment of PoC mandates. This is also why unfolding debates around performance and accountability, discussed in further detail below, are so contentious, and are likely to deepen existing divides between the countries (now mainly from the Global South) that staff peace operations and those (mainly from the Global North) that pay for them.

Both the reality of ongoing budget cuts and the prospects for a leaner peacekeeping future have also sharpened the terms of debate around the “how” of protection. This new reality has raised difficult questions about what concepts such as efficiency—as a corollary of lean—might mean in the context of civilian protection. In the absence of clear metrics around either the scope of protection or how it might reliably be measured (especially given that when protection works, nothing happens), it remains difficult to undertake with any confidence cost–benefit analyses of specific protection strategies. As a consequence, debates over how peacekeepers might deliver the most protection with the fewest resources are still very much alive, both at the policy level as well as at the level of individual mission leadership. ⁴²

Broadly speaking, “how” questions in the context of PoC may now be distilled down to two increasingly distinct approaches, which echo the HIPPO/Cruz Report divide outlined above: protection through projection; and protection through presence. While in principle the two are complementary—indeed, they collectively comprise the three tiers of the Department of Peace Operations guidance note on PoC—the context of shrinking resources has increasingly established them as alternatives, with the latter more focused on long-term presence, local-level engagement, and non-coercive, “people-centred” protection strategies, and the former increasingly associated with the more militaristic approach to protection most forcefully articulated in the Cruz Report. The two also fall on either side of the UN’s longstanding divide around the utility—and the legitimacy—of the use of force in the context of peacekeeping operations. The idea of projecting robust military force in order to neutralize (to use the euphemism du jour) armed actors threatening civilian populations is anathema to advocates, including key UN member states, of the organization’s more traditional, impartiality-first approach to peacekeeping. Conversely, proponents of force projection argue that civilians cannot be protected without a willingness to confront—with deadly force if necessary—the armed actors that constitute the root causes of insecurity in conflict-affected contexts. Regardless of the merits of each position, if current trends continue, the reality is that protecting through either presence or projection will be increasingly beyond the capacity of individual missions.

MONUSCO is the canary in the coal mine in terms of both the viability and the limits of the projection model of protection. In the DRC, the shift from presence to projection has been a case of making a virtue out of a necessity, as budget cuts and troop reductions left the mission with little choice but to reconsider how to cover the country’s vast terrain. The principle underpinning the protection through projection model, as Fred Carver has noted, “is that fewer troops can maintain an equivalent amount of control over a larger area by closing permanent bases and instead having a more mobile force which is able to pop up when required in order to project influence.” ⁴³ In principle, then, the trade-off is between fewer bodies but more of the air assets required to enable a reduced force to be both more mobile and more responsive. In reality, however, MONUSCO has had to cope with less of both, as budget compressions have squeezed both travel budgets and aviation assets (despite a modest uptick in the latter in 2018). Financial constraints have, for example, left some of MONUSCO's helicopter units incapable of being in the air for more than an hour per day, significantly limiting their utility. ⁴⁴ The clear implication, as one MONUSCO official noted, is that “if you do protection [through] projection but without the means to make it work, you are setting yourself up for failure.” ⁴⁵

Similar dynamics are playing out in other mission contexts, where the ethos of agility underpinning the projection model has also been complicated by longstanding bureaucratic hurdles that lead to slow response times to fast-changing situations. In one recent incident in the CAR, for example, it took mission personnel five days to secure permission to do a reconnaissance flight over an area where violence had broken out. ⁴⁶ At the same time, a reduced field presence—both civilian and military—also limits the ability of missions to develop the kinds of situational awareness, necessarily grounded in relations of trust built over time with local communities, required to be able to anticipate crises and project force in ways that offer meaningful, timely protection to vulnerable populations. And even when force projection is successful, there is little to prevent an incident from re-igniting once a temporary peacekeeping presence is withdrawn. Indeed, this has been a key lesson learned by UNMISS in South Sudan: mission-mediated agreements to address local-level conflicts can quickly unravel in the absence of ongoing engagement. ⁴⁷ To such considerations must be added previously noted concerns about the impact of excessively robust peacekeeping postures on broader efforts to establish peace; as Jake Sherman has noted, there are very real concerns that an over-reliance on force, whether in the interests of protection or of stabilization, “inhibits the UN’s ability to play the role of honest broker in negotiating peace and contributes to direct attacks on the UN by armed groups.” ⁴⁸

While it may seem axiomatic that presence is a prerequisite for protection, in recent years the “protection through presence” narrative has expanded to incorporate not only conventional proximity protection strategies—from routine patrolling to the placement of temporary operating bases in volatile areas—but also non-coercive approaches. The latter set of approaches, in stark contrast to the more militarized tone of recent “projection” debates, collectively challenges the idea that protection is, or should be, overwhelmingly about the mobilization of armed international agency on behalf of voiceless, helpless populations. ⁴⁹ Consistent with the narrative of the HIPPO Report as well as with broader trends within peace and conflict research encapsulated by the so-called “local turn,” these narratives emphasize the importance of the hitherto-neglected agency of local communities themselves, and seek ways to empower such agency in the name of both protection and peace. Alex Bellamy and Charles Hunt have suggested, in fact, that since peacekeepers cannot build functional post-conflict societies on their own, their focus should be on facilitating “the creation of conditions that allow local communities and armed groups themselves to build peace.” ⁵⁰ Recent years have witnessed some notable experiments in community engagement at the field level, including the widespread use of community liaison assistants (CLAs) and community action networks (CANs) in the DRC and elsewhere. More generally, however, efforts to connect PoC to systematic strategies of community empowerment or to re-think PoC in terms of “protectors-with” rather than “protectors-from” remain at an early stage, even though missions with PoC mandates have been tasked with developing mission-wide community engagement strategies. ⁵¹

Despite the HIPPO Report’s twin declarations that such unarmed strategies “must be at the forefront of UN efforts to protect civilians” and that engaging with local communities “must increasingly be regarded as core to mission success,” austerity peacekeeping, and the retreat from the principles of “sustaining peace,” render the operationalization of such strategies ever more difficult. This is, in other words, a case of the budgetary tail wagging the operational dog, as missions lose the resources required to be able to protect through presence and through community engagement. Noting that MONUSCO's gender office in North Kivu—a region where sexual violence remains pervasive—was staffed for years by a single UN volunteer, Séverine Autesserre has recently suggested that even at existing funding levels, the reality of “too few people on the ground … makes it difficult for the UN to even scratch the surface of its mandates.” ⁵² Cuts to UNAMID, the hybrid UN/AU mission in Darfur, have already led to the suspension of the mission’s efforts to promote local-level reconciliation and dialogue, while more generally the operational components that underpin field-level engagement with local communities—especially civilian personnel and travel—have been systematically cut in recent years. ⁵³ While community engagement strategies are arguably more cost-effective—and ultimately more sustainable—than strategies rooted in the UN’s questionable ability to exercise military dominance, the window for testing this proposition empirically may be rapidly closing.

In practical terms, of course, it is impossible to fully separate the coercive from the non-coercive dimensions of protection, or to view either as a fully-formed alternative to the other; indeed, a key comparative advantage of any UN mission is its capacity to combine both in context-appropriate ways. For all the criticism the Cruz Report has attracted, for example, it remains the case—as Rwanda demonstrated—that there is little alternative to coercive means of protection in the midst of massive human rights violations. At the same time, in most mission contexts, the viability of non-coercive protection strategies remains fundamentally dependent on the protective environment provided by armed peacekeepers. In South Sudan, security protocols prevent UN Civil Affairs staff—who carry out many of the mission’s community engagement activities—from travelling beyond UN compounds without a military escort in insecure areas. ⁵⁴ More generally, peacekeeping with less presence has potentially profound implications for the work of CLAs and CANs, and their role, individually and collectively, as vital links between missions and vulnerable communities. In the DRC, for example, those CLAs considered to be mission staff are prohibited from deploying to so-called “red” areas unless there is a secured UN base nearby; likewise, shrinking mission footprints leave members of CANs increasingly vulnerable to reprisals from local armed groups who may view them as collaborators, or worse. ⁵⁵ Ultimately, therefore, there is a fundamental—and growing—disconnect between the Declaration of Shared Commitments' rhetorical support for “inclusive and participatory approaches” to peacekeeping and the diminishing capacity of the UN’s most important missions to be able to engage with the very communities they are tasked with protecting. While organized hypocrisy may be an inevitable feature of the UN system, this particular example risks widening the gap between the promise and the practice of PoC to the point of being unbridgeable.

Finally, this spirit of organized hypocrisy also permeates recent debates on peacekeeper accountability, particularly in the context of PoC. Read as a standalone document, UN Security Council Resolution 2436—which stresses the need to improve “posture, behaviour, leadership, initiative and accountability” within peace operations ⁵⁶ —is unobjectionable. Improving accountability for sexual exploitation and abuse, and for failing to intervene in contexts where civilian lives are demonstrably at risk, among those who wear UN blue is undeniably important in advancing the broader PoC agenda. So too is holding T/PCCs accountable for supplying professional, well-trained personnel and eliminating caveats on what such personnel can and cannot do. More broadly, however, in the context of the trends discussed above—most notably declining budgets and declining ambitions—SCR 2436 rings decidedly hollow. It also underlines not only the clear system-level disjuncture among those who set peacekeeping budgets, those who establish mandates, and those who implement them; but also the inability of the Secretariat —and the Secretary-General in particular—to bring all three elements into coherent alignment. ⁵⁷ As the representative of Côte d’Ivoire noted during one recent Security Council debate, echoing the frustration felt by many troop contributors, “without the right resources and skills to match their operational environment, it is difficult for contingents to discharge their mandated tasks. We cannot ask for more to be done with less.” ⁵⁸ Following the money remains a sound strategy for gauging institutional commitment to PoC priorities, and on that front the evidence suggests that the UN as a whole is becoming progressively less capable of delivering on the promise of PoC. In so doing, it is making an “impossible mandate” even more so. ⁵⁹ In other words, by insisting that field missions, including senior leadership, be held accountable for their ability to “work smarter” and indeed do more with less, the UN may be doing little more than setting itself up for further failure.

Conclusion

Peacekeeping policy, as Carver has argued, “continues to be dominated by the art of the possible,” and is “not a landscape which lends itself to sweeping changes or big bold new ideas but to ‘reformettes’ and to creativity in the margins of mandates and conceptual understandings.” ⁶⁰ This has certainly, and unfortunately, been the case with regards to the A4P agenda, which has been driven to a significant degree by shrinking budgetary resources, strengthening demands for performance and accountability, and the Secretary-General’s own search for the widest possible consensus. While continually attempting to negotiate the possible within an increasingly fractious multilateral landscape, the UN has been limited to pursuing largely technical, internally-directed reforms which may ultimately widen, rather than narrow, the gap not only between New York and the field, but also among member states. As a result of this tendency to default to piecemeal operational adjustments, the organization does not seem—at least not yet—to have an answer to the core question undergirding its own call to make peacekeeping “fit for the future”: namely, for what future will peacekeeping be fit? ⁶¹

As we have sought to demonstrate, the broader trends that are intersecting in the context of current debates around peacekeeping reform may also be conspiring to ensure that protecting civilians may not only be the most recent addition to the core principles of UN peacekeeping, but also the most short-lived. While it would be difficult for the UN to abandon outright its institutional commitment to protection of civilians—both politically because it has become normatively entrenched over the course of the past two decades, and practically because the Security Council has proven more adept at mandate addition than mandate subtraction—there is a real danger that the PoC agenda will suffer a slow death through attrition. Beyond the real and important debates about the relative merits of protection through projection versus protection through presence—which have revitalized the longstanding controversy over the use of force in peace operations and pitted the softer, structural approach of the HIPPO Report against the harder, spoiler-neutralization approach of the Cruz Report—the reality is that absent a reversal of current trends, field missions will lack the capacity to credibly deliver on either approach. In contexts such as South Sudan where the UN has demonstrably protected hundreds of thousands of vulnerable civilians, the UN’s eroding ability to “do” PoC obviously matters a great deal, and remains for many a matter of life and death. The fate of PoC will also be a crucial test case of whether there is in fact any substance to the multilateral resolve to “reach for excellence” that is at the heart of the A4P agenda. Indeed, with regard not only to PoC specifically but also to peacekeeping more generally, it is worth wondering whether “lesser, smaller, cheaper” is really an adequate response to the persistent range of complex challenges with which the UN continues to grapple in some of the world’s most troubled and dangerous environments.