23 July 2008

IHT publishes GPPi op-ed on “Rescuing the blue helmets”

On 23 July 2008, the International Herald Tribune published an op-ed by GPPi’s Thorsten Benner, Stephan Mergenthaler and Philipp Rotmann entitled “Rescuing the blue helmets”. The piece alerts to the looming crisis of UN peace operations and puts forward several recommendations to UN member states and to the newly appointed UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy.

Recently, the Security Council sent peacekeepers into ever-more hostile environments while UN member states failed to invest appropriately into the support infrastructure for peacekeeping. As a result, UN peace operations have become dangerously overstretched. Pointing to the political and logistical difficulties that peacekeepers are facing in Darfur, and the likely inability of the blue helmets to respond robustly to any large-scale atrocities to be committed on their watch, the authors argue that “there is a risk of an all-out anti-UN backlash overshadowing the good work UN peacekeepers have done in exceptionally difficult circumstances over the past decade”.

To avoid having the good work of UN peacekeepers around the world undermined by the imminent failure of the largest and most expensive UN mission to date, the authors urge UN member states “to act now and give the new head of peacekeeping the tools and support necessary to pull UN peacekeeping back from the brink.”

In particular, Benner, Mergenthaler and Rotmann advise UN member states to:

• Clearly commit to the doctrine that a UN peace operation should only be deployed if there is actually a peace to keep
  
• Not send even more peacekeepers to Somalia or Chad without a credible peace process in place
  
• Expand military standby arrangements for peacekeeping operations as well as rapidly deployable teams of police and judicial officials
  
• Approve a permanent cadre of civilian post-conflict reconstruction professionals
  
• Increase the Secretariat's ability to gather and analyze intelligence, develop doctrine, draw lessons and provide training.

Directed to the new head of UN peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy, the authors recommend to continue his predecessor Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s efforts to professionalize peacekeeping through performance-based career development, better accountability, and knowledge management. Most importantly, however, both Le Roy and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon need to say "No" to UN member states when presented with impossible mandates.

The article was written in the context of GPPi’s two-year research project "Learning to Build Peace? The United Nations, Peace Operations and Organizational Learning", which is generously supported by the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF). Over the course of this project, the authors have conducted intensive field research both at UN Headquarters in New York and at the UN missions in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) and Liberia (UNMIL). 

To read the full article, please click here.

For more information about the research project, please see our "Learning to Build Peace?" project page. For further questions, please contact Thorsten Benner, Stephan Mergenthaler or Philipp Rotmann.

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