Editor’s Note: Deep thanks to Professor Peter Hoffman for organizing the New School’s “UN summer study” course and for, once again, allowing us to share ideas on a topic close to our hearts with such a diverse group of younger people. As I remind such audiences on a regular basis “it is your turn now” to direct this leaky ship, to practice the skills and values that can move forward the confused and volatile species we have become. I especially honored this group for exploring options through this course to do exactly that.
I want to begin today by pointing out that the UN has changed significantly regarding the presence of NGOs since we started down the road of UN engagements, indeed even since the end of COVID. Some delegations, even those who appreciate our work and our “fairness” have championed a system where states are more firmly and fully in charge while the rest of us have to scramble to have voices and proposals heard, a condition which was rarely an issue pre-Covid as a range of our publications and co-hosted UN events over 20 years would attest. It’s been a tough slog in some ways being at the UN since the onset of Covid, even as lots of our NGO colleagues, like ourselves, lost much of what we once had during those pandemic months. Many left the system. For better or worse, we have yet to do so.
We’ve tried as best we know to make our modest contributions over 20 years while preserving our independence and taking the UN’s full policy ecosystem into account rather than branding around specific activities for which we could get funded. We’ve also kept a low profile understanding that change occurs at the UN when states own a proposal, not when NGOs make a proposal. That said, we have been deeply involved previously in monitoring of Arms Trade Treaty negotiations, in the promotion of gender lenses on disarmament and atrocity crime prevention, in efforts to create broader support for the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission, in identifying hopeful projects opening space for more diverse civil society involvement in UN conference rooms, and much more. Perhaps our most visible contribution was through the promotion of what we called a “UN Emergency Peace Service,” supported by the late Sir Brian Urquhart and other UN luminaries, which was envisioned as a standing, rapid-response capacity which could serve as both a deterrent to and an effective, prompt response to outbreaks of atrocity-level violence.
To that end, we held conferences and consultations on every inhabited continent and penned numerous publications including “Standing for Change in Peacekeeping Operations.” The news in all of this is that the project did not survive into the present. This was OK as the actual point of UNEPS was to help move the international community and regional organizations to assess key aspects of peacekeeping in the transition to more effective, protection-oriented commitments. The point was not to draw attention to ourselves or to promote our work as being somehow more “fundable” or valuable than other initiatives of its kind. We were clear from the beginning that if a UNEPS-style service was ever to see the light of day, it would not be us who would liberate the idea in all its complexity from its conceptual shadows.
Our Concerns
Between the creation and current transition of our UNEPS proposal, and happily so, DPKO (now DPPA) officials and experts have largely addressed our collective concerns. They have fixed many force generation and peacekeeper training challenges, addressed abuses alleged to have been committed by peacekeepers, helped streamline to some extent reimbursements for troop and police contributing countries, added layers of protection and medical access for peacekeepers, embraced revised mandates related to elections, protection of civilians and climate change impacts, initiated substantial efforts to diversity peace operations especially by gender, eliminated some if not all deployment “caveats” which limit mission performance, minimized the environmental footprint of large operations such as MONUSCO in DR Congo, and taken with renewed seriousness the importance of ensuring that peacekeeping deployments are closely tied to viable political processes. All of this is good and important work and we are grateful for it.
Moreover, while peacekeeping’s relationship to human rights abuses and the prevention of atrocity crimes remains to some extent a work in progress, the decision to prevent the direct military engagement of peacekeepers with terrorists was, at least in our view, a wise one. Ultimately the point of peacekeeping is to allow for transitions which lead to political settlement while enhancing the ability (and the will) of national and regional forces to maintain their own protection functions and address their own security threats, including from terror and other armed groups.
This last contribution is not without controversy as more and more countries seem to be deciding on security-related alternatives to UN peacekeeping, some of that via enhanced domestic capacities which may not quite be ready for prime time, but some of that through agreements with the Russian entity formerly known as the Wagner Group and other external players. What these entities seem to have in common is a willingness to suspend human rights concerns in the name of countering national security threats from terrorists and other armed groups, a suspension which UN peacekeepers may not indulge and which we would not wish for them to indulge.
Especially since the transition between peacekeeping as primarily guarantors of truce/peace agreements to a more robust mandate for protecting civilians, threats to peacekeepers have grown dramatically. Increasingly we send peacekeepers into highly volatile environments with daunting protection needs and threats and challenges emanating literally from all directions. Efforts to engage communities, especially now by women peacekeepers constitute an important dimension of the work, but high levels of peacekeeper casualties on an annual basis speak to training deficits among troop contributors but more to challenges related to discerning friend from adversary in multiply uncertain and often hostile contexts.
At the end of the day, while peacekeeping is not a substitute for viable political processes, it is also not a substitute for failures regarding our primary commitment to conflict prevention. I grew up in a family of multiply deployed military personnel. I heard all their stories, some of them quite gruesome, some of which you all could probably replicate from your own cultural and national contexts. As arms flow in all directions, as climate change and resource extraction fuel local tensions and food insecurity, as the scales of inequality continue to be tipped in favor of people like me (for absolutely no reason), prospects for conflict prevention often appear dim. But it is effective conflict prevention which holds the greatest promise for effective civilian protection, for children spared trauma and recruitment, for women spared sexual violence while trying to conmfort children they cannot feed, for men spared participation in the armed violence which accomplishes little beyond shortened or ruined lives.
Prevention isn’t sexy, but it should be noted that much of the international community has, from our vantage point at least, become exhausted from trying to protect, trying to deliver, trying to restore and reconcile once armed violence has been given license. We humans have some significant blind spots that we refuse to examine, one of which is related to our propensity for metaphorically deciding to close barn doors only after all the horses have escaped. If your generation is to avoid mass trauma, if you are to have the funds you need to promote justice and healing rather than cleaning up after what seems like endless messes of criminality and violence, if you are to be able to raise children without armed guards and gas masks, then we need to collectively show more maturity and courage, to commit to readjusting the established order of things when that order is unable to deliver, to privilege prevention rather than endless reconstruction of the rubble of armed violence, to make a better and stronger case for a world less inclined to disruption and violence hosting people more inclined to relinquish destructive habits and otherwise encourage their better selves.
We can do this together. We can do this separately. But we must do it. And, to belabor an otherwise obvious point, time is decidedly not on our side.
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