Week 7
Another week down and another phase of research started. I finished the first phase of background research on South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic, and I spent the rest of the week shifting into phase two: Mission-specific data on UN Police activity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's incredibly difficult to find any information on UN Police data within those Missions. I kept running into dead-ends. On one hand, there are plenty of research papers on UNPOL personnel and their involvement in Protection of Civilian (POC) mandates. On the other hand, a lot of the data is either outdated, not specific to UNMISS, MINUSCA, or MONUSCO, or it doesn't include an in-depth explanation of what specific activities UNPOL personnel are completing. This week consisted reading hundreds of pages of literature with very limited payoff, not too dissimilar to law school (I love law school, I swear).
The most beneficial research I was able to find this week came directly from the Secretary General's Reports to the UN Security Council on each of the Missions. Although, even then, the data was not specific enough to be as helpful as I needed it to be. My one saving grace this week was my boss confirming that there's very little data out there in the first place; it's one of the reasons she's pursuing this specific research. She also made the point that some of the data isn't made available because of security reasons, which, in hindsight, does make sense.
I think that I'll probably shift away from UN primary sources and try to find older research papers on UNPOL activities. It might be beneficial in the future to take a look at the sources that those papers utilize and then build a literature base from there. I'm looking to continue this phase of research through next week.