Québec Undergraduate Security Conference Research Paper

The dichotomy between normative goals of UNAMID and local realities in Darfur

Résumé

The United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNA-MID) epitomizes the first operationalization of the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm in the security agenda of the United Nations and was initially framed as a success. The international civil society advocacy under the “Save Darfur” coalition played a primordial role in the mission’s establishment and successfully challen-ged the realist assumpt-ion that the states’ self-interestedness trumps the moral imperatives for humanitarian interven-tion. However, this paper shows that, at the time of operationalization, the mission’s effectiveness was inhibited by the dichotomy between these normative demands and the local realities of Darfur. The normative demands of the internati-onal civil society, influ-enced by the new R2P norm, were instrumental in the creation of UNAMID, but this led decision-makers to ignore the local realities of Darfur, primarily characterized by Khar-toum’s obstructionism and the structure of the hybrid mission. This has not only hindered the effectiveness of UNAM-ID’s practical implement-tation but also contri-buted to the alienation of the prospect of peace in Darfur. The case of Darfur reveals that implementing R2P faces practical and structural constraints because acti-vities are not framed according to the local realities.