Since the tragic bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq in 2003, a concerted effort has been made to improve and strengthen security arrangements across the UN system. However, too often, security issues are perceived as primarily technical matters that are not prioritized as strategically and politically important.
This report takes stock of the strategic impact of safety and security for effective peace operations by outlining the evolving, increasingly hostile security context into which operations are being deployed and its implications for personnel.
The authors assess existing UN management structures, policies, and processes to identify potential areas of reform. As they examine the diverse range of challenges and considerations for improving security of UN peace operations, they argue that effective security is about protecting UN personnel while enabling, not limiting, operational activity.
The authors offer the following recommendations for UN member states and the Secretariat to improve safety and security in UN peace operations:
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Jean-Marie Guéhenno, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group and the former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, offered a bold observation to an IPI audience about the United Nations. “The UN, sadly, is a very risk averse organization,” he declared. “It’s much better not to take risks for a career at the UN. But it’s much better for the UN to take risks.”
Drawing upon his own tenure as Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations from 2000-2008, a period of unprecedented growth for peacekeeping, he lamented the difficulty for UN leadership to “take some calculated risks,” because of an organizational culture which discourages them from doing so.
“I do believe it is very important for leaders in the UN to encourage risk-taking up to a point,” he said. “Intelligent risk-taking. Often it’s not the case if the staff feel that if they do something wrong, they will be hanged. It is not good. They have to be encouraged to take that risk.”
Discussing his new memoir, The Fog of Peace, on July 14th, Mr. Guéhenno explained the book’s title. “It was important in a book to convey the fog of action, the confusion, and uncertainty,” he said. The title also served as a metaphor for the haze of decision-making in peacekeeping operations. “That is at the heart of peacekeeping,” he said. “It’s all about tradeoffs. It’s about taking some risks, measuring them. But you only know in hindsight whether you have been right or wrong.”
Mr. Guéhenno’s reflection on his time in office remains pertinent, and he identified and offered solutions for key challenges facing peacekeeping operations. While recognizing that peacekeeping inherently involves the use of force, he said force itself should not be overdone.
“Force could never achieve by itself any political result,” he said. “It can be one element in a much broader strategy. If it is anything more than that, it is bound to disappoint.”
He also noted the need to set realistic goals at the outset of a peacekeeping operation, declaring, “The idea that through force you are going to stabilize a country is an illusion.”
Developing his thoughts on force and intervention, Mr. Guéhenno emphasized the importance of his having left Europe for New York. Here he interacted with a diverse group of leaders at the UN that changed his perspective on the concept of sovereignty.
“We have to understand the position of weaker countries,” he said. “The only thing that they have to assert themselves, to protect themselves from the enormous imbalance of power, is this concept of sovereignty, and that should be acknowledged.”
Continuing with the theme of sovereignty, he commented on calls for the UN to return to a focus on prevention, instead of continually addressing conflict after it breaks out. But, he conceded it would be have to be done with care.
“Countries are like human beings,” he said. “They don’t like checkups. They don’t like being told they are not doing well, that they need a treatment.”
He went on to praise UN regional offices as one means of doing so, “provided the person in charge of the office is the right person. This is a way for the UN to go to a country without flagging too much the country is in a state of crisis.”
Looking ahead, Mr. Guéhenno identified a key challenge for the next UN Secretary-General, to be elected in 2016. As the nature of conflicts is changing, he said, the UN must adjust as an organization to enable taking a more holistic view of the challenges before it.
“You need to look at all the levers you have, the troops, the political, the development, and see how you orchestrate them in a way that will maximize the influence of the UN,” he said. “I think the UN presently is not very well organized to do that.”
He concluded by recommending “having some kind of a planning capacity that is independent of any particular department, that looks at those issues in a comprehensive way, without thinking ‘Oh, it’s peacekeeping, it has to be peacekeepers,’ ‘it’s political, it has to be a political mission.’”
He argued that an independent planning commission could enable the UN to overcome the “silo” mentality of its various departments, to instead act as one by looking “at a situation on its merit, and not on its bureaucratic merit.”
As the UN is being examined by various high-level reviews for its 70th anniversary, Mr. Guéhenno reminded the audience that though a humanitarian organization, the UN should not shy away from politics.
“If we do not have a good understanding of the political dynamics of the situation in which we are getting engaged, we are unlikely to make headway,” he said. “And the biggest weakness of any UN deployment, or any deployment for that matter, whether it is the US or the UN, any deployment, is the fact that there is not a serious understanding of the dynamics of the country.”
Further, he questioned the nature of the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Security Council, where the latter can politicize justice by threatening referral to the Court.
“When you see justice as a pressure point, not justice for justice sake, you are in trouble because justice cannot be turned on and off. It should not be. Justice is about justice, it is not a pressure point.”
As the nature of conflict has changed to become both more transnational and involve more non-state actors, Mr. Guéhenno’s final piece of advice for the UN was to remember its origins as a forum for dialogue. “I think, for the United Nations, one essential is to be prepared to talk to anybody who is prepared to talk to the United Nations,” he explained. “And that means sadly that a number of interlocutors will not be reachable because at the moment they would not accept to talk to the United Nations, they would kill whoever wants to talk to them. But this has to be, in my view, the posture.”
He added that to foster constructive dialogue, it is essential to talk to everyone on all sides of an issue, “and I think Western governments, in that respect, have not had the right policy. Because if you have a policy that you talk to anybody that is willing to talk, then talking does not become legitimization.”
IPI Senior Adviser for External Relations Warren Hoge moderated the conversation.
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Research Fellow of ELIAMEP Dr Filippa Chatzistavrou discusses the new agreement signed in Brussels and the Grexit probability in an article she wrote on Alterecoplus. The article is available here.
Research Fellow of ELIAMEP Dr Eleni Panagiotarea discussed the Greek crisis on Bloomberg. The interview was given on 13 July 2015 and is available here.
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Ambassador Gert Rosenthal told an IPI audience July 13th that a new review published that day had focused in on excessive “fragmentation” in UN peacebuilding activities.
Ambassador Rosenthal, who serves as Chair of the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture, said the report proved “different parts of the organization are not working well together.”
Ambassador Rosenthal, a former Guatemalan Foreign Minister, learned much about the intricacies of the UN system through a long diplomatic career in which he served as the his country’s Permanent Representative to the UN from 1999-2004 and again in 2008-2014, when Guatemala was on the Security Council. He opened the panel discussion by stating, “The whole thrust of our report is to overcome the fragmentation, and introduce a little more coherence into the work of the house.”
Ambassador Rosenthal also made the point that funding for peacebuilding is inadequate. “It really is remarkable that we dedicate more than $8 billion a year for peace operations,” he said, “but we dedicate a small fraction of that for anything we call peacebuilding, so we would like to have a better balance.”
Anis Bajwa, a member of the advisory group, pointed out that peacebuilding, to be effective, must be sustained over a period of time after a conflict ends. “Just ensuring that the guns go silent is not enough for building peace,” he declared.
Explaining the choice of title for the report, “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace,” Mr. Bajwa emphasized the need to do more to prevent conflict. Peacebuilding is an activity of “the whole cycle of peace and conflict, and it should not be associated only with post-conflict situations,” he said. “That’s why we have preferred to call it ‘sustaining peace’ in our report, rather than just ‘building peace.’”
Asked whether the report dealt with enhancing women’s participation in peacebuilding, Saraswathi Menon, also a member of panel, answered, “The Peacebuilding Commission probably could do more in advocating gender equality, women’s rights, and women’s empowerment as part of national peacebuilding priorities.” She added that it was necessary for the Peacebuilding Commission to address “the impact of conflict on women, the contribution that women themselves make, and the need to address the specific needs of women and girls.”
The Peacebuilding Commission was created in 2005, and this assessment evaluates how the institutions are performing 10 years on. It also comes as many other high-level reviews are being conducted at the UN, for the organization’s 70th anniversary.
Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support, said that one area where peacebuilding had made progress was in its relationship with regional organizations. “Certainly last year, the Peacebuilding Commission, I think, stepped up quite significantly the relationship with the African Union,” he said, “and through that political relationship, also the substantive work that was going on, in actually addressing illicit transfer of funds, the issue of national revenue generation, etc.”
A key point made by all of the speakers was that different aspects of peacebuilding responsibilities lie across the UN system, with a myriad of departments. The General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, and their subsidiaries, lack both the capacity and funding to communicate their shared responsibilities to each other in a way that might create informed, organization-wide planning for peacebuilding, the speakers argued.
That is why the Peacebuilding Commission has unique potential, as Ambassador Rosenthal described it. Looking ahead to the reform the commission should be contemplating, he said, “What we really need is for the Peacebuilding Commission to be able to fulfill the role of a bridge, which would bring together the peace, the human rights, and the development.”
IPI Senior Adviser Youssef Mahmoud moderated the conversation.
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In den USA gibt es bislang allenfalls Ansätze einer Debatte über die längerfristigen Folgen des Krieges im Osten der Ukraine für die europäische Sicherheit. Dabei geht es in erster Linie um die bilateralen Beziehungen der USA zu Russland, die Zukunft der Nato sowie den Stellenwert der nuklearen Abschreckung. Multilaterale Institutionen und Normenwerke jenseits der Nato – nicht zuletzt die Organisation für Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit in Europa (OSZE) – spielen in der amerikanischen Fachdebatte dagegen nur eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle.
Angesichts der Verhandlungen über den Verbleib Griechenlands in der Eurozone blieb dem Europäischen Rat vom 25./26. Juni 2015 so gut wie kein Raum für das eigentliche Gipfelthema, die Weiterentwicklung der Gemeinsamen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik (GSVP). In Anbetracht der Krisen und Konflikte an ihren Außengrenzen steht die EU jedoch nicht nur im Inneren vor einer Bewährungsprobe. Außenpolitisch muss sie sowohl eine thematische Spaltung (Flüchtlingsproblematik vs. russische Aggression) wie eine geographische (Süden vs. Osten) verhindern und mehr Integration in der Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik wagen. Die im Vertrag von Lissabon vereinbarte Ständige Strukturierte Zusammenarbeit (SSZ) ist dafür das geeignete Vehikel. Deutschland sollte es durch konkrete Kooperationsvorschläge nutzbar machen.