“Their priority is not the people of Somalia,” a Somali woman who had recently fled to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya said about peacekeepers in her home country. “It is the government and themselves.”
Unfortunately, this view is not uniqu Read More...
The last two years have seen a surge in peace operations. As the data in this review shows, UN deployments grew by 8.5% in 2013 and 2014 to involve over 100,000 soldiers and police officers. In the same period, NATO drew down its presence in Afghanis Read More...
A year ago, when the Secretary-General put forward the idea of a new review of peacekeeping operations, he naturally referred to the Brahimi report. He argued that as the 15-year anniversary of that report approached, it was necessary “to take stoc Read More...
The goal of the Global Peace Operations Review is to provide the most comprehensive overview of multilateral contributions to peacekeeping, conflict prevention, and post-conflict peacebuilding. In doing this, our objective is to take a focus on all p Read More...
The array of tools the UN has developed to prevent, manage and resolve conflict has expanded in recent years. They are being deployed in new formats, from political missions and small peacebuilding teams, to large observer missions and multidimension Read More...
Does U.N. peacekeeping matter? President Barack Obama believes that it does — and he has advocated the cause more forcefully than any of his predecessors since George H. W. Bush, who once looked to the U.N. to help forge a “new world order.” Th Read More...
If UN peacekeeping operations are “at a crossroads” as the Secretary-General told the Security Council on 6 April, then it is a policy and linguistic roundabout. This is the same phrase that a senior official used to describe the Brahimi report i Read More...
Recent adaptations of peacekeeping practice are bringing into question the role of civilian components in UN peace operations, notably the human rights sections.
When António Guterres succeeds Ban Ki-moon as UN Secretary-General, many problems will Read More...
The need for a greater emphasis on conflict prevention is a common theme of the major reports of 2015 on peace operations, peacebuilding, and UNSC Resolution 1325. It is a broad subject area that cuts across the wide spectrum of peace operations. Co Read More...
As the clamour grows for a woman to be chosen as the next Secretary-General, other high-level staff appointments have been quietly but steadily defying the UN's longstanding goal of gender parity. Seemingly unnoticed, this year's selections for Read More...
European forces have played a very limited military role in United Nations (UN) peace operations in Africa over the last two decades. In some periods, European personnel have accounted for less than 2% of the blue helmets on the continent. Yet there Read More...
The Global Peace Operations Review is a website providing analysis and data on the spectrum of issues surrounding global peace and security, including civilian-led peacemaking and peacebuilding as well as uniformed peacekeeping by the United Nati Read More...
This is the second edition of the Global Peace Operations Review (GPOR) annual compilation. It is the first to collect a full year’s worth of content from the website in a single publication. Using an online platform allows us to constantly innovat Read More...
A slew of recent reviews, such as the high level panel on UN peace operations report (HIPPO report), the 2015 review of the UN peacebuilding architecture and the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, have all put people at the front and center of Read More...
Throughout its public discourse, the EU keeps expressing a strong commitment toward supporting the UN in maintaining international peace and security. This includes habitually recommitting to deploying the EU Battlegroups.
There have been many calls Read More...
On its 70th anniversary, the United Nations finds itself at a crossroads. Old and new threats, challenges and risks to international peace and security are increasingly testing the ability of the organization and the efficacy of the instruments avail Read More...
Les critiques à l’égard du maintien de la paix des Nations Unies, de ses Casques bleus, sont nombreuses et font souvent, plus que ses succès, les gros titres de la presse nationale ou internationale ; le maintien de la paix subit les railleries Read More...
Les Casques bleus face à une nouvelle crise de croissance ?
Contrairement aux pronostics faits à la fin des années 90, le maintien de la paix n’a cessé de s’accroitre depuis, au point d’atteindre un nouveau pic de déploiement, avec la mi Read More...
Gender issues are now a regular feature of the international community’s approach to promoting peace and security. Two high-profile reports recently issued by the UN – on peace operations and the organization’s peacebuilding architecture – in Read More...
United Nations (UN) missions’ inaction in response to civilian killings by government troops in Darfur, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has precipitated international outcry and raised concerns on viability of UN missions in Read More...
The United Nations had entered the 21st century”, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous told troops at a 2013 ceremony for the first deployment of observation drones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2014, Secretary-Gene Read More...
For years, the UN Secretariat said caveats were not allowed in peacekeeping operations. Mentioning them was a kind of “taboo”. They existed on the ground but were rarely acknowledged at the political level in New York. But when operations faced a Read More...
In Bentiu and other protection of civilian sites in South Sudan, the UN peacekeeping mission performs all the functions of a state within a state. With the help of humanitarian partners, it feeds, protects, and organizes those displaced by a bitter i Read More...
On 1 January 2017, a new UN Secretary-General took office. From day one, he will be responsible for more than 100,000 uniformed and civilian personnel on some 24 peace operations. The report of the 2015 High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operation Read More...
This is the seventh essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of Multilateral Envoys in Peacemaking.
The idea that “peace processes must be well-supported politically, technically and financially”, as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon sta Read More...
In 2015, multiple reviews of the UN’s peace efforts have added to the collective realization that UN peace operations – designed in the 1990s to support post-civil war peace deals – may have reached their limits for maintaining international pe Read More...
An era of UN peacekeeping ended on Good Friday, as the organization’s fifteen-year old mission in Liberia (UNMIL) closed shop. This follows the termination of the UN missions in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) last summer and that in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in Read More...
More than two decades ago, the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in An Agenda for Peace highlighted the necessity of regional support “to lighten the burden of the Council”. He called it “a matter of delegation”. One organization tha Read More...
Weighing in at just under five pounds, the 417-page Global Study on the Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, released last month, is nothing if not ambitious. Its expansive subtitle – “Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Read More...
All peace operations are political. Ian Martin wrote an essay with that title in CIC’s first Review of Political Missions in 2010. It is unsurprising, then, that the report of the High-Level Panel on Peace Operations of which he has been a prominen Read More...
This is the second essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of multilateral envoys in peacemaking.
Out of the at least 51 multilateral envoys deployed in 2013 to address conflict situations around the world, 28 envoys from different multil Read More...
Triangular cooperation is an idea that has been around for many years. It is supported by many, feared by some, but so far it has never been really implemented. The concept has now been resurrected by the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operati Read More...
During the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President Barack Obama chaired two summits – the first on peace operations on September 28, and one the following day on counter-terrorism. His participation in both demonstrated the level of commitm Read More...
The renewed crisis in South Sudan is turning into a decisive test for the United Nations. There is a growing international outcry over reports that local forces raped and killed civilians almost in front of UN peacekeepers. The Security Council has s Read More...
In April 2015, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced that he would be seeking a third-term of office—a move that his opponents decried as unconstitutional. Protests and clashes between opposition supporters and security forces followed. A Read More...