Tag Archives: conflict prevention

A Generation of Engagements on Peacekeeping Operations, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Jul

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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Partisan Appeal: Making Space for Conflict-Related Mediation, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Oct

In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you’ve heard the other side.  Euripides

A judge, replied the Empress, is easy to be had, but to get an impartial judge, is a thing so difficult. Margaret Cavendish

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. Ken Liu

The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.  Stanisław Lem

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here and now. Sharon Salzberg

[We live] rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in fantasies and dreams. Ernst Cassirer

All roads taken lead us only to ourselves.  Kilroy Oldster

This was another busy and mostly virtual week at the UN in New York as all six General Assembly committees began their work to craft resolutions corresponding to core UN priorities:  disarmament and the rule of law, human rights and financing for sustainable development, special political missions and moving remaining territories towards self-governance.  Watching this process over many years, we lament that the relationship between these carefully-crafted global norms and concrete improvements in the lives of constituents is not always apparent and certainly could be made more so, especially to the constituents themselves.   

Beyond the committees, two events stood out for me given my own interests and biases.  The first was an event organized by our friends and partners FIACAT together with the European Union focused on cementing recent trends towards the abolition of capital punishment, a particularly noxious remnant of a time when we believed more fervently in the “value” of vengeance and retribution, when we acceded to the alleged “right” of the state to take life without recourse to accurate assessments of guilt let alone to the evolving sentiments of the public.  A case now in Oklahoma involving one Julius Jones who most assuredly did not commit the crime for which he is being held – often in solitary confinement – and for which he might actually be executed is only one of too-numerous instances demanding a rethink of an irreversible punishment within those dwindling number of states (including my own) that continue to employ it.

The other discussion of note took place in the Arria Formula format of the Security Council, wherein this week  Germany, Vietnam, Switzerland and Belgium sponsored a discussion on “Mandating peace: Enhancing the mediation sensitivity and effectiveness of the UN Security Council.”   Such mediation is encouraged under Article 33 of the UN Charter as one of the “non-coercive” tools available to the UN and especially to Council members  in discharging their duties to maintain international peace and security.  This particular discussion was based on a report crafted for this occasion by researchers at Notre Dame University with the same title as the event itself.

This Arria Formula sparked high levels of attention from the entire UN community.   As we have noted in the past, UN member states are becoming increasing nervous about a Security Council that is often frozen by its own internal controversies, by the willingness of the permanent members to ignore resolutions they seek to impose on others, and by conflicts that are not addressed at sufficiently early stages and thus require coercive responses when less coercive measures – including mediation – could have put out the fire at a point when it could more easily have been contained. 

States have increasingly embraced the language of conflict prevention, and this to our mind has been a welcome development, at least on the surface.  So much hunger and displacement, so many disruptions of educational and health access are due to conflicts about which we have collectively dragged our feet.  And when we have gotten on top of specific threats, our recourse to the language of “condemnation” and the threat of sanctions – both Council-approved and unilateral – has had a predictably polarizing effect on conflict parties.  In an era where trust is at a premium and political interests are highly partisan, states increasingly recognize that coercive responses are likely only deepen the distrust we need to overcome if progress on preventing and resolving conflict is to occur and, indeed, if our entire multilateral apparatus is to achieve more than rhetorical victories over all that now afflicts us. Sadly this “all,” Turkey and other states reminded the rest of us at this Arria meeting, remains headlined by the “scourge” that is armed conflict.

During this session, one state after another enthusiastically advocated for mediation resources and other, early-applied, less coercive measures in response to conflict threats.  In so doing, many states such Costa Rica and Italy recognized that the background of mediators is one key to success, advocating for mediation that is both gender-balanced and gender-sensitive.  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines took this one step further, noting that where the application of resources such as mediation are concerned, “neighbors know best.”  Indeed, calls came throughout this discussion for mediation that prioritizes “what is happening around us in the here and now,” with special attentiveness to, as Finland noted, the increasing “complexities” that characterize conflict contexts.  And if the Security Council can fully grasp, as claimed by SRSG Haysom, that “negotiated settlements must take priority over imposed settlements” (though both can unravel), then mediators must be given space for flexible responses to shifting conflict circumstances and Council members who might be overly addicted to coercion must hold in mind the importance of  isolating mediators from responsibility for any subsequent imposition of sanctions or other coercive means.

Amidst calls from Portugal and others for regular deliberations on maximizing the value of mediation and other “Chapter VI” responses, it is important that member states be clear with themselves about the often-profound degree of difficulty in maintaining the integrity and independence of mediators given the current avalanche of partisan views and “minds made up” long before all relevant evidence and context have been considered.   We are indeed inclined, perhaps more than ever in our recent history, to “jump to conclusions,” to bend facts to suit our personal and political interests, to live in a self-authorized realm of “imaginary emotions,” illusions and fantasies. We have substituted out honest inquiry with conspiracies and rooting interests.  We have cashed out insights that could benefit all for the sake of biases that elevate partial truths to universal status.  And we are amply suspicious of the motives of others, even when it is our own motives that require closer scrutiny.

I have seen a bit of this tendency myself in years of counseling.  At the level of conflicted couples and “neighbors,” suspicion is often palpable.  People are quick to assume that mediators who struggle hard to maintain independence are actually giving in to partisan values and outcomes, that once the curtain of “what is best” is pulled, it will surely reveal grave mis-readings of the “history” that mediators allege (and often honestly strive) to understand.  Indeed, many of us nowadays spend so little time listening to persons and ideas that threaten or oppose us, so little time exploring self-accountability for festering disputes small and large, that we can barely imagine what non-partisan engagement might look life.  Too often, we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the mediators or counselors to “show their hand” and commit the errors that reinforce our fears of and reservations regarding discussions mostly shielding biased revelations.

During this Arria Formula, a German minister wondered aloud, as a response to the report under consideration, whether Council mandates on mediation, including in the context of peacekeeping operations, are simply “too political to succeed?”  Certainly they are often seen as such by conflict parties, especially those whose biases and rationales for ongoing violence have also been allowed to harden.   But this points to an even larger problem, one we at GAPW strive regularly to identify, and that is the hard road that inevitably leads us back to ourselves.

In the end, as important as carefully worded resolutions and carefully crafted mandates might be, we must take time to address the social climate that we have conspired to create, one enabling the growth of hyper-partisan worldviews, a climate conducive to the insistence on unbiased perfection in our mediators that we are unable to guarantee in ourselves.  If we want less coercive, more inclusive solutions to conflict, and we certainly should, it will take more than discussions about our policy tools and options; it will also take discussions focused on our capacities to engender trust within a security and political environment that is now giving too many people sufficient reasons to withhold the risk of trust altogether.

Slowly, inexorably, our views and affiliations have calcified as dramatically as our arteries.  It is this hardening of hearts, and not a lack of UN Charter guidance on mediation and other non-coercive tools, that constitutes the greatest impediment to the development and implementation of flexible, context-specific, attentive, trustworthy responses to conflict threats. This “other” conversation, the one about our human capacities and barriers to progress we erect ourselves, is one that we would do well not to overlook.

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