The State of UN Peacekeeping: Lessons from Congo The article considers the state of UN peacekeeping through the prism of its long-running operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Focusing in particular on the challenges raised by use of force and the protection of civilians in conditions of on-going armed conflict, it argues that UN field operations must be aligned much more closely than they have been over the past fifteen years to political and diplomatic efforts aimed at securing

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... able political settlements to internal conflict. The issues raised by the history of the UN's troubled mission in Congo are deeply relevant to the wider discussion of the organisation's role in the field of peace and security. In October 2014, with the end of his second term as secretary-general of the United Nations well within sight and the 70 th anniversary of the organisation fast approaching, Ban Ki-Moon announced the establishment a High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations. The panel, chaired by Jose Ramos-Horta, former President of Timor-Leste, was asked to provide "a comprehensive assessment of the state of UN peace operations today, and the emerging needs of the future." 1 The last such review had been led by Lahkdar Brahimi, some fifteen years earlier. 2 It was time for an update: "The world is changing and UN peace operations must change with it if they are to remain an indispensable and effective tool in promoting international peace and security." 3 The present article examines the state and challenges of UN peacekeeping through the prism of its long-running operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 4 It is premised on the view that the troubled history of the UN's involvement there since 1999, while it is a story that is of interest in its own right, also raises wider issues about the UN's role in international peace and security, issues that go well beyond the discussion of how best to reform and improve the UN's machinery for peacekeeping. The article is especially concerned with two sets of issues arising out of the UN's Congo mission, both of which go the heart of the larger strategic question of whether and how UN peacekeeping can be made to serve as an "effective tool" in the field of peace and security. The first of these concerns the use of force in UN peacekeeping and, more specifically, its utility in terms of advancing the protection of civilians (POC) in armed conflict. When peacekeeping first emerged as a distinctive activity of the UN in the 1950s, one of its chief and defining characteristics was the "prohibition against any initiative in the use of force." 5 Along with the principles of consent and impartiality, this attachment to the minimum use of force except in self-defence came to constitute the core principles of socalled classical peacekeeping. Ever since the horrors of Angola, Somalia, former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the first half of the 1990s, however, a combination of normative, operational and political pressures has prompted a shift -evident in policy debates, operations and