Learning to Build Peace?

The United Nations, Peace Operations and Organizational Learning

Project context

Multidimensional peace operations such as those in Kosovo, Timor-Leste, Liberia and Haiti have emerged as the most ambitious, complex, costly and risky task a changing United Nations has assumed after the end of the Cold War. The tremendous growth both in the number and scope of UN peace operations has multiplied the challenges to doctrine and practice in areas as diverse as public security, judicial reform, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR), economic reconstruction and coordination of a vastly disparate set of actors both internationally and on the ground. The evolution of UN doctrine and guidance and the organization's capacity to collect and integrate lessons learned was hardly able to keep up with the rapid pace of expansion. While the issue of the UN’s (in)ability to learn ranks increasingly high on the agenda of policymakers in both New York and national capitals, we know surprisingly little on the UN’s capacity for organizational learning on peace operations, and about learning in international organizations in general.

Project objectives

For the decade since the start of the implementation of the Brahimi report in 2001 until 2011, the project was guided by the following questions: How have the UN’s doctrines and guidelines on peace operations evolved? How has the UN (not) learned from past experience and new knowledge? Which factors facilitate or hinder organizational learning? To this end, we developed a framework for analysis for a detailed process tracing of organizational learning in a single case study zooming in on four different focal issues along the areas of security, governance, welfare and cross-cutting challenges:

• in the area of security, we focused on the work of UN police in providing public security and the reform, reconstitution and (re)building of local police in post-conflict settings;
• in the area of governance, our focus was on judicial reform in post-conflict environments, from the choice of interim legal frameworks to (re)building judicial systems;
• in the area of welfare, we concentrated on programs aimed at the reintegration of ex-combatants; and
• finally, the project looked into the cross-cutting challenge of mission integration, efforts to create a coherent strategic approach to planning and program delivery within DPKO-led peace operations and together with other UN actors.
  

The project broke new ground both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we developed a framework for analyzing and operationalizing organizational learning, a concept that had largely remained at the metaphorical level. This framework was tailored and applied to an international organization, adding a political dimension to a field that was mostly focused on corporations. In doing so, we brought together approaches from International Relations with organization theory -- a literature so far underutilized for both the analysis of peacebuilding and the study of international organizations in general. At the same time, our study contributed to correcting one theoretical weakness of the existing literature on peacebuilding which (according to one prominent observer) "paid relatively little attention to the conceptual foundations of peacebuilding itself, or the basic premises upon which these operations are based."

Empirically, the study was one of the first to open up the "black box" of the UN peace operations bureaucracy by means of an empirically rich process-tracing of (non-) learning. At the same time, the results were relevant for the practice of UN peace operations (eg, questions on the design of learning systems at DPKO and other departments or agencies).

Project outputs

The project's main product was a book providing a theoretically informed, empirically rich narrative of the UN's learning record in peace operations in the post-Brahimi period. Released in 2011, the book is titled The New World of UN Peace Operations: Learning to Build Peace? (Oxford University Press). Along the way, we also published articles in peer-reviewed journals and policy publications as well as a number of conference papers.

As part of an earlier project in 2006 that was also generously supported by the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF), we developed the basic research framework on which our current work is based. Our pilot study on organizational learning in the UN peace operations bureaucracy is available for download here. For more information about the pilot project, please click here.