The Future of UN State-Building: Strategic and Operational Challenges and the Legacy of Iraq

Whether by accident or design, the United Nations increasingly finds itself in operations that seek to build or re-build the institutions of a state. This report discusses the challenges facing the UN in such statebuilding activities in the post-Iraq environment. Three sorts of challenges are reviewed: those arising from a lack of conceptual clarity on the aim of statebuilding, those resulting from the transformed strategic environment, and those operational and strategic challenges inherent to the complex task of statebuilding.