“UNAMID is just like clouds in summer, they never rain”: local perceptions of conflict and the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping missions

This article considers how local perceptions of conflict dynamics interact or fail to interact with incident reporting in UN peacekeeping missions. Interrogating encounters of the hybrid United Nations/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) with local populations through interview data collected among Darfurian refugees in Chad, the article posits that localized perceptions of conflict differ in important ways from interpretations by UNAMID. It further argues that in order to effectively carry out the core mandate of protecting civilians, the systematic inclusion of local knowledge into UN-produced datasets is vital for any UN peacekeeping mission.

This paper was originally published by Taylor & Francis.