As the landscape of global peacekeeping evolves, the UN is increasingly sharing the security burden with regional organizations and ad hoc coalitions. These non-UN missions sometimes deploy alongside UN missions through a wide range of cooperation arrangements termed “partnership peacekeeping.” However, it is unclear how this trend toward partnership peacekeeping will impact the protection of civilians (POC), which is not a central component of most non-UN missions.

This issue brief examines how partnership peacekeeping influences civilian protection by drawing on data from more than seventy intrastate conflicts in Africa from 1993 to 2023. It evaluates how UN and non-UN missions, operating both independently and in parallel, affect violence against civilians. The analysis reveals that both missions led by the UN and by the African Union and European Union (analyzed together) are associated with a reduction in violence against civilians by non-state armed groups, while other non-UN missions do not significantly reduce civilian targeting. However, non-UN missions appear more effective in limiting state violence against civilians, and parallel deployments of UN and non-UN missions do not enhance civilian protection beyond when the UN deploys alone.

These insights challenge the assumption that partner-led peacekeeping can fully substitute for UN-led operations. As the UN rethinks its peacekeeping role in response to shifting global dynamics, it needs to preserve its multidimensional approach to POC while ensuring that partnership models are designed to mitigate, rather than exacerbate, risks to civilians.