A peacekeeping mission may deploy without peacekeepers

A planning scenario written inside the peacekeeping literature imagines a mission established with a full monitoring mandate and nobody deployed in the mandate area at all. Observation would be carried out by fixed sensor masts, long-endurance drones and a remote analysis cell in a duty station on another continent, reporting to the same council, on the same schedule, as a mission with ten thousand people in it.

The pressure that produces the scenario is budgetary and political rather than technological. Troop contributors have become harder to find, host governments less welcoming, and assessed contributions arrive late or not at all. A mission that deploys nobody cannot be asked to leave, cannot be accused of misconduct by its own personnel, and costs a fraction of one that does. On paper, it is the only version of the institution that survives the next two decades intact.

From the mandate area it would read differently. The scenario's own annex describes a village that has had a mission presence for a generation. For the people living there, that presence is not a strategy. It is a barrier, a logbook and a man who writes your name down when something happens. The mast cannot be asked a question. The logbook can.

Under the scenario the village would gain better information and lose the only address it had. The complaints mechanism would become a telephone number and a form, in a language chosen centrally, and the nearest human being with the authority to decide anything would be a flight away. The protection would remain in the mandate. It would stop being somewhere you could walk to.

“Coverage would improve,” a planning officer would say. “We would see more of the area, more of the time, and put fewer people at risk doing it.” Asked what a family should do at night when a vehicle stops outside the house, the officer would say the incident would be recorded within minutes.

Deterrence in the field has never been mainly about firepower. Peacekeeping contingents are lightly armed by design and rarely in a position to stop anything by force. What they supply is presence — a person who is there, who will be there tomorrow, and whose being there makes an act both inconvenient and visible. Sensors do the visible part superbly. They do not do inconvenient.

The scenario is unfunded, unadopted and, its authors would insist, a warning about what shrinking budgets produce rather than a proposal for producing it. The uncomfortable part is that every separate element in it already exists somewhere. The scenario only removes the one thing the rest was built around: somebody standing there.