Georges Clemenceau once quipped that war is too important a subject to be left to the generals. The same is true for efforts to reshape and stabilise countries in crisis.
The stakes are very high and our choices about how to engage are not esoteric, nor hugely technical in nature. They would benefit from informed debate in the media, on charitable boards, and in parliamentary institutions.
A senior UN official caused minor waves in March with a New York Times op-ed entitled “I love the UN, but it is failing”. Among other zingers, he labelled the world organisation a “Remington typewriter in a smartphone world”, and captioned the piece with an image of a sucking black hole.
Many observers saw last June’s High-Level Panel on UN Peace Operations as an audit of the ambitious change agenda laid out some fifteen years earlier, in the Brahimi Report.
The latter had set out an aggressive vision for “multi-dimensional” peacekeeping. The 2015 panel found progress towards that vision had been mixed, at best, while adding a slate of issues of their own.
The “local” is increasingly fetishized in peacekeeping and conflict resolution circles. The UN’s recent high-level reviews of peacekeeping and peacebuilding pushed hard for “people-centred” approaches, as against traditional models of leadership by the national government.
There is a yawning gap between between what we’ve repeatedly said we would do in fragile states and the actual results. This long-form article for World Politics Review tries to step past the euphemisms, and define what achievable outcomes could look like.