Particularly a pandemic, as we saw, has impact on the economic development of the world.
Doesn't mean that you react the same way. But 911 is.
We all have seen it. You know, so it's synchronised that moment, though they might differ.
The shocks that were considered real shocks internally for the organisation, then what might be the global shocks?
Welcome to Global Shots, the podcast of the Oxford Mountain Program on Changing Global Voice.
My name is John Aitken and I'm a research fellow in international relations.
And in this podcast, we're going to explore how international organisations deal with global shocks.
Global shocks are all around us, from humanitarian emergencies to war, financial crises to pandemics.
So how can international organisations respond to them, adapt to them and survive such turbulent times?
To find out, we are entering the conversation with leading figures from these organisations,
to find out how they're affected by crisis and turbulence, what lessons they draw from the past, and what future prospects they have.
Today, we're going to talk about peacekeeping at the United Nations.
The UN's Department of Peace Operations distinguishes between peacebuilding, peacemaking, peace enforcement and peacekeeping.
The latter was designed in 1948 as an instrument to help countries torn by conflict to create the conditions for lasting peace.
As the UN itself puts it, we've all seen images of U.N. peacekeepers wearing characteristic blue helmets.
Their deployment depends on a decision by the Security Council, which has the power to send out peacekeeping troops.
Following Chapter seven of the U.N. charter, peacekeeping is not uncontroversial.
Peacekeepers have been involved in cases of sexual assault and rape and peacekeeping failures
to prevent genocide in Rwanda and in Bosnia have led some to dismiss peacekeeping altogether.
Yet, in a conflict ridden world, thinking about how peacekeeping can learn from its past successes and failures is arguably essential.
To discuss this question. I'm joined by the former chief of U.N. peacekeeping policy at one.
So today I have the privilege of speaking to Dr. Ron Assad,
one who is a peace and conflict expert with now two decades of experience working for U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world.
Most recently, Renata has been the chief of U.N. peacekeeping policy and best practices,
and she also was the director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research from 2018 to 2020.
She is, in other words, a leading peacekeeping and development expert.
So hello and welcome to Global Sharks. Renata, it's an honour to have you.
It's great to be with you, YOUNG And hello to you.
Maybe just very briefly in your own words, why do you think thinking about these kinds of global shifts and changes global shocks,
why that matters for the organisations that you're familiar with and that you've been working for?
I mean, first I would say that what I felt working in peace keeping that was both a reflection of a consensus by
a significant number of states and organisations around a problem and possibly how to respond to that.
So therefore if that instrument of international order, if that instrument of states is going to be effective, both in maintaining legitimacy,
in reflecting where consensus around ideas are and in being able to adapt to crises as understood by those that essentially drives the tool,
then it needs to be assessing and constantly able to navigate change.
So there's a legitimacy dimension, there's a representation dimension, and then there's an effective delivery dimension.
And so I think that's why peacekeeping and I would argue all crisis management instruments need to have that adaptability now,
of course, and will come onto it whether you adopt in a long and slow and gradual way what you adapt to shocks and sudden changes.
They're obviously different drivers.
So there are currently 12 peacekeeping missions around the world, the biggest of which being MINUSCA in the Central African Republic,
U.N. Mission, South Sudan, Monaco and the Democratic Republic of Congo and MINUSMA in Mali.
You have yourself work as chief of development coherence for the U.N. Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan and as a team leader for the UN's integrated operational teams for Asia and for Mali.
And during your time working in these posts. What would you say was the most challenging shock and or more protracted
conflict that you had to deal with that you and your co-workers had to manage?
And what were its practical consequences for the mission and for the organisation?
I mean, I think what's interesting for me and when I think back on my time in peacekeeping, if I think about what were the big shocks,
they might defer the shocks that were considered real shocks internally for the organisation.
And by that I mean Secretariat and Staff and Peacekeeping.
Then what might be the global shock? So let me give you an example.
Let's talk about global shocks. The financial crisis of 2008, for example.
That was a shock for the world, its suddenness, its contagion, its relative speed.
It saw effects on U.N. peacekeeping were not immediate, however.
Why? Because those budgets were planned in advance of the peacekeeping support account works on a two year cycle.
And those systems were in place. Those mandates were authorised.
So that lack of pressure on financing, pressure on funds actually started to only be felt, I think, from 2010.
And in fact, even you could argue that financial crisis can lead to heightened demand for U.N. peacekeeping through contributing countries,
make money from sending the troops. 30% of peacekeeping budget goes on salaries to to contributing countries for their forces and their equipment.
So you had both a sort of potentially incentive.
I'm not saying that incentive alone, but it's a it's a financial income for for certain countries.
Similarly, countries concerned about crises in the implications of instability and turbulence may have
perhaps had attitudes or been willing to consider the deployment of peacekeeping forces.
And I'm thinking of particular about that period and the significant activism in places like Cote d'Ivoire,
Liberia, Sierra Leone and so West Africa peacekeeping at that time.
So you didn't see an immediate crisis to begin.
Arguably, the financial crisis for peacekeeping happened after about 2012 as Departments of Foreign Affairs in the world
sort of received from their finance ministries less budget as the pressures on budgetary spending grew and the,
let's say, financial crisis that the U.N. faced and U.N. peacekeeping was most marked with the arrival of the Trump administration into.
2017 and the refusal of the Trump administration to pay its quota or supported Jew of peacekeeping.
The Arab Spring, I would argue, was more of a shock.
Again, less to perhaps the UN peacekeeping instrument in the immediate term.
Perhaps more to the UN development instruments.
Issues around how close were they to whole state authorities?
What was the appropriate role of the UN in the face of public protests for change in regimes that were partially or non democracies?
How to respond to that? Those demands from the street.
And I think that was more a political and a development and a human rights crisis for the organisation than a specific peacekeeping.
However, the long term lag effect of the Arab Spring became very much felt with the peace operation in Libya, a special political mission,
and then particularly the destabilising impact that it had on the Sahel with the opening of free flow of weapons being significant,
increase of weapons of munitions, of smuggling of of all sorts through and across the Sahel, and the implications that had for for Mali in particular.
But if I just in conclusion say that some of the more bigger threats that I felt sort
of shook the system to its core were not those what you might call macro shocks,
but shocks of perhaps more micro nature.
So I would say the US led invasion of Iraq was a political crisis for the and that really drove significant wedges in the U.N.,
created tension between the UN leadership and the US,
and then of course led to the deployment of of a UN political mission and the 2003 canal bombing.
That was quite a shock for the UN in terms of understanding itself to be a target,
forcing it to rethink issues around its impartiality, its perception of its impartiality, its role, mission protection, etc.
A seminal crisis was the 2010 Haiti earthquake that not only led to a huge humanitarian crisis,
but also led to the collapse of the UN headquarters and the death of peacekeepers.
Including this the mission leadership of that crisis and how to respond to the calls to
lead a humanitarian response while you yourself are a victim of that that incident.
And then third, I would say the Rwanda and the provinces genocides.
The impact of that had UN doctrine and thinking, particularly around peace operations,
reform that led to the Brahimi Report 2010 and comprehensive rethinking of the role and purpose of of U.N. peacekeeping.
And then particularly, of course,
ultimately the are to the responsibility to protect doctrine and placing protection of civilians at the heart of operations.
So I'd be interested in making sure that we distinguish between what I would call shocks that
are perceived as shocks within the system and then perhaps more macro global shocks that impact,
but over a much longer lead time. All right.
So essentially, we're making a drawing, a distinction between shocks to the operational structures of the of the U.N. itself and its deployments,
its missions, and how that changes its own thinking, reflections on how to improve those operations.
And then, on the other hand,
shocks that are sort of generally globally happening and then with a time lag affecting the UN's capabilities and capacities to to actually engage.
Can you maybe think of an example of a sort of concrete moment in your experience,
how that actually changed constraints or sort of leeway in operational considerations?
Yeah. So let's take the financial crisis first of 2008.
To some extent, it appeared initially to respond and to confirm the approach that U.N. peacekeeping that try
not approach U.N. peacekeeping had been taking about the importance of tackling root causes,
about issues around preventing conflicts before they happen,
about economic deprivation being a long term cause of instability that could lead to a major armed conflict.
So to some extent, I think the UN peacekeeping and it was right around that time in 2008 that the first attempt to
publicly communicate the UN peacekeeping doctrine of the so-called capstone project came out.
So there was there was almost a sense of, see, we've been telling you these things that issues around operational issues,
around significant human need have destabilising effects, including the threat of conflict, and the UN must respond to that.
And also the Security Council Member states must respond.
So to some extent it was a it was seen as a we were right moment as the fallout of the budgets started to impact UN peacekeeping,
you started to get much greater scrutiny from about 2012 13 on the part of Member States in the past of General Assembly,
financial and budgetary bodies as to how large peacekeeping operations should be, what should be a component of them.
And that had interesting implications around debates, around civil affairs activities,
issues around how large should the human rights component be, functions that might be considered protection of civilians type functions.
Those functions in mandates and in mission plans became much harder to defend.
And while you tended I can recall, for example,
defending a budget for the mission in Mali at one point and having a huge expenditure item around infrastructure projects for
accommodation for large troops and significant outsourcing of huge contracts for the construction of camps that sailed through.
I think it was something in the region of over 9 million without even a look, a second look,
but calling for the idea of a driver and one protection of civilians Affairs officer with particular
focus on child protection became a source of huge contention and almost held up the budget for refusing.
So it wasn't even in the scope, but it was the idea of what can we trim down?
And then of course, that entered into the whole debate that you saw that increasing tension between
states about concepts of sovereignty versus human rights versus to how invasive,
let's say, or intrusive should U.N. peacekeeping be? So I think that was an example.
Another example, I would say,
and that became particularly notable after the arrival of the Trump administration and its decision to not pay its 28% stake.
That led to a shortfall, obviously, but it also led the Security Council to start to demand a significant review of every peacekeeping operation.
So rather than than just renew mandates as a sort of matter, of course, as an annual to the council, start to demand significant reviews.
And I can remember going to Lebanon in 2017 to review the UN peacekeeping operation there as part of a multidimensional team.
And I was trying to understand what were the sources that we were looking at because there was no particular election hadn't happened.
There hadn't been a we were not sort of at a point of inflection.
When you review a mission plan and its priorities,
the particular source of irritation on the part of the member State concerned in this case us had been
the idea somehow that they'd come to see from seeing literature of the UN mission being distributed,
magazines that peacekeepers were just spending money on these so-called quick impact projects.
Quick impact projects were small portions of money that were given to troops contingents so
that they could spend some money in terms of building relationships with the community.
And then this particular. Instance, it was pictures of Italian forces making pizzas prior to the engagement with the local community.
And this was considered indicative of the the wastage and the crisis that UN peacekeeping have.
So I felt that one of the implications of that practically were that we all became entirely shrinking down our perspective
on micro details and micro budgets and micro activities at a time when a much broader challenge was beginning to happen,
which is to what extent are UN peacekeeping operations having effective change?
To what extent are they delivering on their mandates?
What of the some broader trends that are happening around them in their regions in a region like Lebanon,
with Syria, with the inflow of refugees, or in the case of Mali, with a much broader regional crisis?
It became much harder to address those questions.
And I recall that in 2016 to about 2018, the debate almost centred entirely on sexual exploitation and abuse issues.
So issues around the conduct of peacekeepers and issues around the costs of the wastage of U.N. peacekeeping.
And while I don't dispute that those issues aren't important.
I felt that we missed an important opportunity to assess, to measure, and to begin a conversation of what was working and what was not.
And I think we saw that crisis play out in the last few years in the Sahel and particularly, but also in the Congo.
Right.
So you've given us a lot of insight on how different kinds of shocks with some kind of time lag affected the capabilities of UN peacekeeping forces,
but also just simply very practical kinds of constraints.
Do you think that there were moments where some of these shocks also presented
opportunities for for the UN peacekeeping forces precisely to innovate its operations?
Yeah, undoubtedly. Let's take the situation of the Arab Spring.
And so I deployed to Syria in 2012 as part of a very short lived, temporary military cease fire observation mission from about May to August 2012.
I think what I find very interesting about that was it revealed to me a couple of things.
First, there was analysis on the ground by U.N. actors and particularly by U.N. development
actors and humanitarian actors about the potential for crisis in that country.
And that was coming from about 2010, and that we saw, for example, a U.N. Peace Human development report,
WFP, warning of the that the harvest had not been good for a series of years.
Warnings of food crisis, warnings of the lack of economic opportunities for young people throughout the Maghreb.
But I'm talking specifically about Syria and also a trend to watch the significant
speed of urbanisation in that country and the tensions that was producing between urban
rural together with the Assad government economic policies that move sort of move away
from the subsidies that his father had provided to rural communities in terms of bread,
sugar and certain basic materials and basic goods.
So I found that very interesting because that was a real opportunity we felt, to try to shape the narrative from the debate in the Security Council.
So I recall that a lot of our cables and reporting we had our mandate to report every two weeks to the
Security Council was very contentious operation where we were trying to draw attention to societal pressures,
to longer term issues, to tensions in and around specifically and in particular governance, social and economic challenges.
At the time, however, there was a strong narrative that we were not going to, you know, that this was about internationalised civil tensions.
You had Russia and U.S. opposing views.
You had the Western tensions around you with the Assad regime ever since the assassination of Hariri in Lebanon.
And so as a consequence of sort of not much interest in assessing these,
but one factor that I do think the development that the Arab Spring drove for
the UN was really a consideration of do we have across the system analysis,
but we're not bringing it to play collectively together. And it drove quite a bit of thinking about how to get better integration of analysis,
and that was led under the centralised in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General
to start to have much more shared analysis and more thinking so that
political responses are informed by these longer term trends that other parts of
the House and in particular development and humanitarian actors were spotting.
So it did lead to beginning to think about much more system wide analysis.
In the UN system within these conversations, are historical analogies drawn as well, or is that a background saying,
Well, yes, we're drawing obviously on our experience from the past, but not necessarily explicitly?
How would you answer that? On the whole, I've tended to think that some of the historical analogies are not helpful.
And so let's take, for example, Libya in 2011 12.
There was, I think, by the proponents of protection of civilians some false conclusions or analogies made with the Kosovo scenario.
So we were going to avoid a potential significant threat to protection of civilians by supporting a NATO led intervention.
And that was itself begged questions to the extent the scale of the threat,
certainly at a rhetorical level and in some cases actions Gadhafi did on these forces Act Libyan protesters.
But it did build this sort of idea that you could get it fast.
You could have a NATO led, primarily an aerial mission, and it would be quick.
So that's, I think, an example of of a historical analogy that might be a bit skewed.
And then this idea that the lessons of Rwanda and.
KREPON, it's meant that you had to drive a response quickly when civilians were under imminent threat of danger.
I think the problem with that is that it drove this idea of never ending peace operations,
because there was always or there's quite often a set of civilians under threat and under imminent threat of violence.
And distressing as that is, there's a sort of an infinite perpetuity of UN crisis interventions that there simply isn't the political will,
nor even the operational material capacity to to to respond to at all times.
And in the case then of Libya, I was also struck with the historical analogy.
One of the analogies, the historical lessons that were drawn was that Libyans remember the UN positively
from its experiences of decolonisation in the immediate period after World War Two.
Therefore, they will be favourably disposed to the United Nations because there's a sort of a historical mindset of appreciation to the UN.
And while I don't know enough about Libya to to say if that's indeed true or not,
I think one always needs to be very careful as an outside actor about how the
extent to which any domestic population feels good about any set of actors,
regardless of their statements, wills or dispositions.
And and I think that's when historical analogies are drawn or badly drawn.
So historical analogies on the whole, to not be drawn too much,
they tend to be quite short term and I'm not sure they're always effective because they're very
externally focussed and based on how we understood the issue as opposed to a deep reading,
an analysis of the country or the conflict in question.
Let's go back to Mali for just a second.
Since we're talking about lessons being drawn, what's the bottom line of a particular operation, of a particular mission?
How do we learn from that in order to deploy missions more effectively in the future?
Of course, in the case of Mali, what's on the horizon is withdrawal, despite ongoing tensions.
We know that in 20 1314, the U.N. launched its MINUSMA mission.
Since then, however, more Malians have joined insurgent groups.
Fatalities have increased.
Over 300 MINUSMA personnel have been killed, and I think only UNIFIL in Lebanon has been more faithful to peacekeepers and the mandate has run out.
The UK and Sweden have already pulled out early. France suspended its its own counter-terrorism operations.
So it looks it looks like another case of withdrawal despite ongoing tensions.
And perhaps there are signs of change or signs of the UN learning from this.
But I'm wondering what your perspective on that is. Are lessons already being drawn?
How does this work? Is there an ongoing conversation trying to sort of already evaluate Mali?
Are there signs that the UN is trying to reform based on that kind of experience?
I think Molly was a chronicle of a death foretold for many in the U.N.
It was one of the most contentious missions to set up.
It was highly divisive inside the U.N. system.
And the debates were at the time exactly around the issues that have continued to plague the operation and plagued the situation,
which is, is there a peace to keep or are the peacekeeping operations there for purpose of facilitating,
enabling and supporting an agreement between warring parties, or are we there to assist a legitimately elected state defeat militarily threat?
There were many who felt that even if the latter was the case, that the Malian state faced an existential threat.
And you must remember, of course, in 2012, it really was a pure crisis situation in Timbuktu with significant human impact.
The sense was that the instrument to fly was not a peacekeeping operation, but rather a special political mission,
political effort to try to explore what the scope for some sort of politically negotiated solution was possible.
And of course, you had a long, long standing tension between the Tuareg communities and populations in the north.
So you had an ethnic tension that you had groups of people feeling that the central state
had failed and wanting alternatives to a Bamako led regime and system of governance.
That debate was really bitter inside the U.N. and some of it was intra bureaucratic concerns
with which department leads political missions and which department leads peacekeeping.
But I think it really stemmed from a fundamental concern that U.N. peacekeepers were
being deployed in a context to an environment for which the instrument was not designed.
As a consequence of that tension, it never amassed.
I would say the full support of perhaps the for all hands joining together of the mission.
I think there were some humanitarian entities that had some concerns about how close they wanted to be to the U.N. peacekeepers.
The U.N. peacekeeping operation was a vehicle for human rights presence and office and engagement,
but that human rights tension often came into conflict with the military and police sort of perception of themselves trying
to help the states under threat from various armed groups in independence seeking and or with more criminal agendas.
And the blurring of those agendas was very difficult.
So I would say that Mali was an example of a place where there was a lot of I told you so, I told you so all the time.
And we found it extremely difficult. I say that as needing a headquarters team, an integrated team of military police, civilian,
just to really sort of get that sense of buy in and support across the House at various points,
including amongst member states as well as different departments.
How have U.N. peacekeeping operations in practice depended on coordinating with other actors, other organisations?
And might that be sort of one way of thinking about better understanding crises?
Mm hmm. I just caution ASEAN from thinking that the challenges that peacekeeping faces is simply an information problem.
I mean, the assumption is that if we had a true understanding of what's really driving a conflict in country X or Y or Region Z,
we could then design the tools to come back to that. And I don't think that's the case.
But you are seeing a proliferation of crisis management actors and that has been taking place effectively since the end of the Cold War.
And if you think about the EU and the its early days in the Balkans,
the African Union in 2005, you have obviously across many subregional organisations.
In some respects the plurality is good because it potentially gives you a more range of options, right?
The problem is understanding and coordinating the plurality of initiatives.
And I think for example, if you see today in the case of Sudan or if you look at Ukraine or even if you think about Libya,
where you have a plurality of mediation initiatives, different people coming in,
all of them declaring that they're bringing with them a peace proposal. The jury is out.
But so far, I'm thinking that if you look at the case of mediation, if you think that take the Horn of Africa, if you take Libya to some extent,
if you take Ukraine,
even the plurality of mediating offers initiatives and actors has not helped any of those conflicts in the resolution of anything.
It's just led to reinforcement of the protracted sides.
The second dimension is even when you have agreement that coordination is challenging sometimes because the same party,
the same government state will take different positions in each and each organisation.
So in Libya, again, we saw even the African Union taking a different stand than the League of Arab States,
of which many of the state parties members were the same.
So I think it can lead to quite a difficult coordination and huge amount of effort get spent on coordination.
And if I think about my time in Afghanistan,
I think a huge part of that fault was we spent so much time negotiating with all the international actors on the ground there
that there was very little time spent talking and thinking and engaging with Afghans in some of the forces and actors.
How can peacekeeping operations learn from past experiences, past shocks, past crises to improve preparedness for the future?
I think collectively we need to have a response to crisis management where the drivers are not necessarily a political agenda.
And here I'm thinking, how do most people die today outside of significant large wars like Ethiopia recently, Ukraine today?
Most people die in countries like Mexico and in Venezuela.
If you look at violent deaths, I'm talking about violent deaths now and they're in non war scenarios,
but scenarios that look and feel a lot like war in terms of violence and in terms of threats to civilians.
We have very little tools to even think about that. Very little tools to even think about addressing it.
So it gets back to the question of how do we understand and even in Mali or Central African Republic,
why do we understand when the assumptions we've been making about peacemaking
and peacebuilding have centred around political agendas and power sharing,
where that may not even be the agenda, where the agenda might be a difference of economics, but greed.
We've had the greed and grievance debate for many years. It would behove this, I think,
to think a little bit about some of the instruments that we we might need to think
about responding to why conflicts are twice as protracted as they are today.
Thank you so much. You've been very, very generous with your time and it's been a wonderful conversation.
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You've been listening to Global Shots, the podcast of the Oxford Modern Programme on Changing global Borders.
My name is Young Haiti. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in international relations.
And I'm the host and producer of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Do have a look at the show notes for further reading on today's topic, as well as links to our website and social media channel.