Set amid a rapidly changing backdrop, our roundtable discussed the many systemic challenges to UN peacekeeping. The session was part of the ‘Future Force‘ conference held in The Hague, 9-10 February 2017, co-organised by Ortrun Merkle, Diego Salama and Pui-hang Wong of UNU-MERIT.
Speakers from the worlds of academia, diplomacy and the military, including the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations of the UN mission in Mali (MINUSMA) livestreaming from the field, discussed a range of issues — including the challenges of hybrid missions, lessons learned from stabilisation mandates, the importance of the UN Peacebuilding Commission to the peacekeeping architecture, and the need to keep up with technological innovation.
They also covered the extensions of mandates. Should peacekeepers be mandated to fight violent extremism? Should peacekeepers have a role in refugee crises? And how best to improve the training of peacekeepers to ‘stay ahead of the curve’?
The session contributed to policy-relevant work on the new and emerging realities of UN peacekeeping, particularly ongoing missions with a stabilisation mandate. Missions like MINUSCA in the Central African Republic, MINUSMA in Mali, MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and UNAMID in Sudan.
Below our speakers share their views on the current and future challenges to peacekeeping and the session itself.
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JOOST DE WOLF, NETHERLANDS
Col. Joost de Wolf, Maritime Plans at NATO
A core theme of this session was the need for an integrated approach, of inter-disciplinary learning. How far do you agree with this summary?
Of course we all have our different interests, and here I’m talking about military persons and people that come out of civilian life in the United Nations.
But we all have the same interest at the end of the day — and that is about making the world a safer place and more pleasant to live in. Here I think we can do a lot more and the only way we can do that is by making sure that we understand what we’re talking about and these sessions help in that way… So we talked about technology, about food safety, about military operations. You should understand that each of us is just a very small part in the puzzle. But all together we can make that puzzle if we really, really want to.
The title of the conference is ‘Future Force’, but there wasn’t a huge amount of future focus in the session. What do you think should have been in the session that was perhaps missing, for example in terms of scenario planning for the 2020s?
Well, to be honest, I’m not that interested in this respect in Future Force – because that’s about using force and that’s the aspect that I think is the least important if we’re going to make this place into a better world. However, that’s another topic, I think, and more into the military realm, which, if you’re talking about United Nations operations to me, is less important.
WALTER DORN, CANADA
Walter Dorn, Professor at the Canadian Forces College and Chair of the Master of Defence Studies programme at Royal Military College
A core theme of this session was the need for an integrated approach, of inter-disciplinary learning. How far do you agree with this summary?
I felt we had a great combination of intellectuals plus operators who are all working towards the same goal. And from that we can have differences that really enrich the discussion. I learnt about the Mali operations from somebody who is actually in Mali — which was a successful demonstration of how we could use remote technology to bring in panellists from actual operations.
Many creative ideas were used for this convergence between the SDGs and peace operations – which is a new concept for me – so I appreciated the coming together of the fields of security and development. Apart from that, there were many small details that really enriched the discussions.
The title of the conference is ‘Future Force’, but there wasn’t a huge amount of future focus in the session. What do you think should have been in the session that was perhaps missing, for example in terms of scenario planning for the 2020s?
It’s very typical that we don’t look too far into the future because it’s so difficult to know what the future looks like. So we concentrated mostly on progress and on improving effectiveness in the very near future, over the next year, including concrete steps that could be taken this year in 2017.
Looking to future peace operations, I see highly technological operations whereby a range of sensors are used to do verification, where the UN has much better situational awareness, where you could even use advanced technologies for better power generation in remote areas – like solar and wind power.
So there are such great possibilities for peacekeeping in the future, especially combined with the steady advance of technology, you can start to consider things like the robo-peacekeeper, which can go places where it’s too dangerous to put human beings (and what are the drawbacks of that). It’s not going to be entirely positive. These are disruptive technologies that will have both positive and negative applications, so I think we can look forward to an exciting future where peace operations will be transformed, but to look at it only from the point of view of the opportunities and not the threats would be a mistake.
RICHARD PONZIO, USA
Dr. Richard Ponzio, Non-Resident Fellow and Project Director at Just Security 2020, Global Commission, Stimson Center
A core theme of this session was the need for an integrated approach, of inter-disciplinary learning. How far do you agree with this summary?
With half the participation of this conference being military professionals, and two of our panellists, the types of questions asked really went deep on the role of the blue berets – the peacekeepers – the traditional leaders of these operations. What they’re doing with technology now, in terms of intelligence gathering and fighting against armed terrorists groups, which is a whole new area for peacekeepers to work in, we brought in a little about policing.
My own background, though, is on the civilian side and while the rhetoric was very strong about two decades go, about the need to work together – civil / military integration – now it’s much more meaningful because we’re really beginning to understand each other. Even some of the innovations that military peacekeepers are involved in today: civilians are more and more working hand-in-hand and the best example is the whole protection of civilians. You’re not going to help local populations who are in harm’s way unless you have both civilian responses as well as the military side; I think we’re really moving into the next generation of integrated missions today; it’s much more than just a nice, rhetorical flourish.
The title of the conference is ‘Future Force’, but there wasn’t a huge amount of future focus in the session. What do you think should have been in the session that was perhaps missing, for example in terms of scenario planning for the 2020s? You mentioned a forthcoming initiative from the new UN Secretary-General; will that be a reference point for UN peacekeeping in the years to come?
Yes, ‘Sustaining Peace’ is going to be an organising framework for the next generation of integrated approaches, to really ensure we have the civilian capabilities alongside peacekeepers and the police. But what was missing in our session, which is at the heart of Sustaining Peace is an emphasis on prevention and new tools. The military looks at it through the lens of intelligence gathering and being able to deal with a threat before it really emerges and gets out of hand. We’re talking in particular about avoiding atrocities and large-scale violence against civilians, and there’s a ton of work happening.
Previously it was all about ‘early warning’; now it’s more about ‘early action’, and this next generation will be about sustaining peace. It will be extremely important that we update our various tools and instruments, so that civilians are providing information at the same table as military intelligence gatherers to prevent conflicts, and that was only talked about on the margins of our session. We were focusing more about getting the post-conflict stage right. Well, why not focus on preventing conflict from taking place from the get-go?
ANNE FLASPÖLER, GERMANY
Dr. Anne Flaspöler, Researcher at UNU-GEST and Postdoctoral Researcher at EDDA
A core theme of this session was the need for an integrated approach, of inter-disciplinary learning. What new things did you learn from this session, from sharing a platform with people from such different backgrounds?
What I learned specifically, given that we had the colonel from Mali, was getting a much better idea of the practical challenges that they are actually facing, and how dealing with the many complexities things are never straightforward. For me, as someone interested in training, that has many implications.
The title of the conference is ‘Future Force’, but there wasn’t a huge amount of future focus. What do you think should have been in the session that was perhaps missing, for example in terms of scenario planning for the 2020s?
Well, one of the themes was new technology and Prof. Dorn spoke quite extensively on that. With regards to current patterns of peacekeeping that are changing, including the importance of the military, but not giving them too much of the focus either, even though they are now stabilisation mandates. I think these are subjects that are not going to disappear and that will continue in our discussions even through the mid-2020s.
In terms of looking that far ahead, though, maybe there is a specific challenge for that in peacekeeping because it involves so many member states. It’s not down to one member state to say “Ok, for our future defence, this is what we’re looking for and this is what we’ll focus on. You have so many parties that are involved that maybe such a long-term future prediction is not really possible. Nonetheless, I think we can all learn from each other – academics, diplomats and military – and I think especially in a field like peacekeeping that’s really important because it involves so many different actors, so we need to listen to each other and share our perspectives.
CONFERENCE IMAGES
NOTA BENE
The opinions expressed here are the authors’ own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of UNU.
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UN Photo / Marco Dormino; UNU / S.Brodin / H.Hudson