As debates around the African Union (AU)-United Nations (UN) partnership intensify ahead of the upcoming session of the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) and UN Security Council (UNSC) annual consultation, much of the focus of this partnership has become narrowly technical, centring largely on the implementation of UNSC Resolution 2719 on financing AU-led peace support operations. Financing modalities, accountability frameworks, and case-specific missions such as the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) or mediation efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan dominate much of the agenda. While these issues are important, this perspective risks obscuring the deeper rationale for the partnership: to deliver stronger peace and security responses, especially for the civilians most affected by conflict.
At its core, the AU-UN partnership is not just about burden-sharing. It is about combining the AU’s political legitimacy and proximity to African contexts with the UN’s normative frameworks, resources, and global authority. The upcoming discussions offer an opportunity to take a step back and reframe the conversation of partnership around the practice of protection (as delivered by intergovernmental operations) and ask how a stronger AU-UN collaboration could expand the protection toolbox and elevate people-centred strategies and closer engagement with local actors and civil society that go beyond military engagement.
Protection as the rationale
The AU and UN have both made protection a stated priority: the AU with its 2012 Guidelines and 2023 Policy on Protection of Civilians, and the UN through its own 2023 Protection of Civilians (PoC) policy issues by the Department of Peace Operations (DPO), and the 2020 DPO PoC Handbook, as well as through incremental learning via successive peacekeeping reviews. But too often, partnership discussions circle around how without reflecting on why. The why is protection: building missions that are people-centred, credible, and responsive to the needs of civilians.
Both institutions frame protection as a multi-dimensional task structured around tiers or pillars. The UN recognises three tiers: protection through dialogue and engagement, physical protection, and the creation of a protective environment. The AU recognises four pillars: physical protection, protection as part of the political process, rights-based protection, and the establishment of a protective environment. Their respective definitions of PoC also converge: the UN describes PoC as integrated activities by all mission components to prevent or respond to violence against civilians, including the use of force – where necessary. Similarly, the AU defines PoC as “encompassing physical, legal, and other protection activities consistent with its mandate and area of operations.”
However, as extensive research has highlighted, the key difference lies in implementation of their respective PoC mandates. While UN peacekeeping missions are generally constrained to using force only in self-defence or to defend their mandate, many AU-led peace support operations (PSOs) by contrast are more militarised and often mandated to undertake offensive operations alongside state forces to neutralise armed groups. This has earned them the classification of “peace enforcement” missions.
If the future of multilateral conflict resolution on the African continent is however to be increasingly AU-led, there is a pressing need to move beyond a primarily military normative framework. The UN’s own experience – such as in the DRC where the Force Intervention Brigade’s mandate for offensive operations often backfired – demonstrates the limitations and risks of overreliance on force. The AU should avoid replicating these pitfalls, and both organisations need to nuance their PoC definitions.
If the future of multilateral conflict resolution on the African continent is however to be increasingly AU-led, there is a pressing need to move beyond a primarily military normative framework
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To achieve this, both institutions must embrace the full spectrum of protection strategies. Armed deterrence – through patrols, quick reaction forces, or temporary bases – may remain one part of the response, but they are not sufficient alone. Protection needs to encompass a broader notion than harm mitigation or force alone – particularly in environments where missions are politically constrained, under-resourced or facing significant access challenges. Hence, future missions should learn from current local protection practices that rely heavily on unarmed strategies, leveraging local knowledge and relationships to keep people safe.
Elevating civilian-led approaches to protections
To inform their strategic PoC practice, future AU-UN missions can take inspiration from the work of local civil society in this field. Civilian-led approaches, including unarmed civilian protection (UCP), are already practiced by local communities and international non-government organisations (NGOs) who make use of, among other tools, protective presence, accompaniment, community-based early warning systems, local ceasefire monitoring and local mediation in some of the world’s most volatile environments, driving local protection where multilateral actors are often unable or unwilling to deploy.
However, community-led protection remains disputed within the wider policy space. Critics often caution that community-led protection is idealistic or overly romanticised. While it is true that, in moments of acute crisis, communities may call for external security forces, this does not diminish the relevance of unarmed strategies to protection.
Sudan provides a good example of the latter. The country has one of the worst humanitarian and protection crisis worldwide. In engagements with community members of El Fasher and Tawila, some express the desire to see the deployment of a UN mission (even specifically referring to “peacekeeping”) as one of their key demands. But precisely in contexts like Sudan where the prospects of an imminent peacekeeping force are frail, (partly because of the difficulty of bringing warring parties into a peace process that could create the political and operational conditions needed for a mission to materialise), people are not sitting idle. Communities are taking matters into their own hands to meet their protection needs – most notably through Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – a country-wide network of local humanitarian responders who, by December 2024, have provided a lifeline in serving the 11.5 million people displaced by the civil war.
This is the key lesson: local communities are not waiting for outside intervention to seek safety – they are leading the way in setting up the type of local humanitarian response systems tailored to their immediate security contexts. Crucially, what they ask is not to be left alone, but rather to be recognised as protection actors in their own right. The protection strategies they drive without guns provide something armed actors often cannot: legitimacy, early access and the social infrastructure for sustaining peace long after international forces withdraw.
This is the key lesson: local communities are not waiting for outside intervention to seek safety – they are leading the way in setting up the type of local humanitarian response systems tailored to their immediate security contexts
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Why this matters now
This is not an abstract policy discussion. At a time when conventional multilateral missions – particularly those deployed by the UN – face a deep legitimacy crisis and are losing ground in some of the world’s most volatile settings, we are at a critical juncture. Hence, we must view the intensified AU-UN partnership not just as a political and operational necessity, but more importantly as an opportunity to rethink what protection means, how it is implemented and whose knowledge shapes it.
A decade ago, the HIPPO report had already emphasised that humanitarian and civil society actors, working with some of the most vulnerable groups of conflict-affected communities, must be recognised as essential protection agents, rather than merely adjuncts to military or police components, and that they have immense value to contribute to the field.
The AU, with its dense conflict management track record and institutional memory, has valuable lessons to offer, but it is equally important to draw on the strategies, experiences, and innovations of local communities, civil society networks, and grassroots protection actors. Looking to the future and with foreseen UN financial backing secured, it now must chart a protection path forward that moves beyond force and toward models that are inclusive of grounded, credible, and community-driven approaches.
Lesley Connolly is the Regional Policy and Advocacy Manager at Nonviolent Peaceforce. Imane Karimou is the UN Representative for Nonviolent Peaceforce.
