“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...
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...
This analysis was initially written for the Center on International Cooperation and the International Peace Institute as part of a series of internal papers for the High Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations.
The UN peacekeeping mission in the 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...
This is the third essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of multilateral envoys in peacemaking.
Special envoys are, by definition, agents appointed by a principal or a group of principals for a particular task. Yet their scope of power an 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...
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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...
Many practitioners believe that peacekeeping has become an increasingly dangerous undertaking in recent years. My research paper “Has UN Peacekeeping Become More Deadly? Analyzing Trends in UN Fatalities”, tries to get at the heart of this questi 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...
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...
This is the first essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of multilateral envoys in peacemaking.
Mediation was a central concern for the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations convened in October 2014. The group had a deliberatel Read More...
IND is Photoshop's version of Lorem Ipsum. Proin gravida nibh vel velit auctor aliquet. Aenean sollicitudin, lorem quis bibendum auctor, nisi elit consequat ipsum, nec sagittis sem nibh id elit. Duis sed odio sit amet nibh vulputate cursus a sit ame 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...
This is the sixth essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of multilateral envoys in peacemaking.
Envoys dispatched to make peace deploy with a bag full of assumptions. Those who send them believe the multilateral framework gives their emi 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...
Liberia is at a pivotal point in its transition to a peaceful democracy. In October 2017 the country will have its first ‘open seat’ elections. The incumbent, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, will step down and hand over power to the leader of on Read More...
The challenge of effectively building and sustaining peace has reemerged on the agenda of the United Nations as a priority issue. An Advisory Group of Experts concluded in their June 2015 Report that peacebuilding has been largely left as an after Read More...
When the decision [around Burundi] reached the level of the Assembly of Heads of States, it showed that in absence of consent there is no political willingness of African leaders to act against their own
Burundi has been moving toward greater instab 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...
The protection of civilians mandate in peacekeeping was a reaction to the challenges peacekeepers directly faced in Rwanda and the Balkans and more generally a reaction to the ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War world.
Fifteen years ago, the Brahimi Read More...
Changing Realities: New Dimensions of Peace Operations One month before launching the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations to examine the state of UN peacekeeping operations and political missions, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon remark 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...
| Alischa Kugel | One month before launching the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations to examine the state of UN peacekeeping operations and political missions, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon remarked the time had come to take st 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...
Applying Sustaining Peace Workshop 1
On 14 December 2016, NYU’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC), the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation (DHF) and the International Peace Institute (IPI) organized the first in a series of workshops in support of 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...
In January 2016, al-Shabaab militants attacked an African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forward operating base in El Adde, Somalia. They held the base for several days before the Kenya Defence Forces managed to reclaim it. Media reporting has und 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...
This is the fifth essay in a series of seven that looks at the role of multilateral envoys in peacemaking.
This series of essays was conceived to document and analyze the work of multilateral envoys, particularly their engagement in efforts to media 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...