Calendar of Events

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During Protection of Civilians Week 2023, check back here for the recommended reading for each day and topic.

IPI Project: Action for Peacekeeping +
IPI is undertaking a series of research and convenings around the A4P+ priorities, including publications on the following: political strategies and the protection of civilians, accountability for crimes against peacekeepers, UN peacekeeping and CPAS, countering misinformation and disinformation in peacekeeping environments, TCC perspectives on capabilities, mindsets, and accountability, and A4P+ monitoring and implementation. Read more>>

IPI Project: Protection of Civilians
IPI provides a space to gather member states, UN officials from headquarters and field missions, and researchers to build a common understanding of POC in the context of UN peace operations and across the UN system. Through research, convening, and outreach activities, IPI’s POC project seeks to provide lessons learned from the field and support the Secretariat in analyzing the challenges facing the UN system. Read more>>

Monday, May 22nd

Forced Marriage by Non-state Armed Groups: Frequency, Forms, and Impact
This paper introduces an original dataset tracking forced marriage in armed conflict and uses the data and illustrative examples to divide forced marriage in armed conflict into three types: member–member forced marriage, member–civilian forced marriage, and civilian–civilian forced marriage. This dataset can be a tool for policymakers and practitioners to understand the impacts of forced marriage in armed conflict and better design prevention strategies and survivor-centered responses. Read more>>

UN Peacekeeping and Protection of Civilians from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence
This report examines how missions are implementing their mandates to protect civilians from SGBV, including CRSV, and assesses good practices, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. The report draws on lessons learned from the UN missions in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the DRC (MONUSCO). Read more>>

Expanding Conceptions of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence among Military Peacekeepers
This issue brief explores how the UN system currently understands CRSV and SGBV, how this understanding affects the responsibilities, roles, and perceptions of military peacekeepers, and how UN policies—especially those focused on military women’s participation in peacekeeping—might be more inclusive. Read more>>

UN Peacekeeping Operations and Gendered Threats to the Protection of Civilians
This paper examines how peacekeeping missions conceptualize and define gendered threats to civilians at the field level and explores the way mission-level POC strategies frame the juncture of gender and POC, how missions identify and analyze gendered POC threats, and the coher­ence and sustainability of their approaches. Read more>>

Tuesday, May 23rd

The Primacy of Politics and the Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping
This report examines how UN peacekeeping missions’ POC and political work are understood in relation to one another in terms of planning and operations and provides an overview of entry points for better connecting their work, including in mapping and analyses, planning and strategies, negotiated agreements, the creation of enabling environments, and local-level processes. Read more>>

Global Observatory: Protection of Civilians
Follow the GO's analysis and insight on the topic of protection of civilians, including the dedicated #POCat20 series. Read more>>

Wednesday, May 24th

An Unfinished Agenda: Carving Out Space for Humanitarian Action in the UN Security Council’s Counterterrorism Resolutions and Related Sanctions
This policy paper considers how the Security Council’s counterterrorism resolutions and related sanctions regimes can continue making progress to better protect humanitarian action. It describes the council’s main streams of work on counterterrorism and discusses the impact of these measures, as well as the incorporation of language relevant to IHL and humanitarian affairs, on impartial humanitarian activities. Read more>>

Making Sanctions Smarter: Safeguarding Humanitarian Action
This policy paper focuses on the impact of sanctions regimes in four countries: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. It aims to assist the Security Council, relevant UN organs, UN member states, humanitarian actors, and other stakeholders in ensuring that humanitarian activities are safeguarded in contexts in which sanctions regimes apply. Read more>>

Safeguarding Humanitarian Action in Sanctions Regimes
This issue brief explains the various ways in which sanctions regimes can impact humanitarian action, identifying several factors that make it challenging to resolve, laying out some avenues for progress, and highlighting where more could be done.
Read more>>

Enhancing the Protection of Civilians through Conventional Arms Control
This brief provides an analysis of the actual, and potential, contribution of conventional arms control and related activities to POC within the context of UN peace operations—both peacekeeping operations and special political missions, and identifies concrete examples of how arms control-related activities can be better leveraged by UN peace operations to ensure the more effective protection of civilians. Read more>>

Strengthening Data to Protect Healthcare in Conflict Zones
This paper examines why data on threats to and attacks on healthcare in conflict is important to protection, advocacy, and investigation and how it can be improved and harmonized. It provides an overview of existing data-collection efforts—namely, the Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA) and the database produced by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) in partnership with Insecurity Insight—and identifies challenges and gaps at both the policy and technical levels. Read more>>

Thursday, May 25th

Toward an Environmental and Climate-Sensitive Approach to Protection in UN Peacekeeping Operations
This issue brief discusses how peacekeeping operations can better factor environmental and climate-related security risks in planning and implementing protection-related activities, and suggests that UN peacekeeping operations include environmental and climate security considerations in their assessment, planning, and implementation of mandated activities related to protection through a whole-of-mission approach and in close partnership with the UN country team and the host government. Read more>>

The UN’s Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic
This paper provides an overview and assessment of the UN system’s response to the COVID-19 infodemic four areas: monitoring harmful information related to COVID-19; dispelling false information and providing authoritative information; building information resilience; and setting the agenda. Read more>>

Strategic Communications in UN Peace Operations: From an Afterthought to an Operational Necessity
This issue brief analyzes the current strategic communications practice in UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions, exploring why strategic communications are increasingly important in the contexts where missions are deployed and the external and internal challenges missions face. Read more>>