Namie Di Razza joined IPI as a post-doctoral fellow in October 2016. She works on UN peace operations and protection of civilians with IPI’s Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations.
Prior to joining IPI, Namie worked for two UN peacekeeping missions. In 2016, she worked in Bangui as an Information Analyst for the Joint Mission Analysis Center of MINUSCA. From 2012 to 2013, she served with MONUSCO as a Civil Affairs Officer in Goma, where she worked on the implementation of protection of civilians activities. She was also a consultant on protection of civilians for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in 2016-2017, and for the French Ministry of Defense in 2015
Prior to her experience with the UN, Namie worked on protection issues with OXFAM and local human rights NGOs in France.
Namie holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris. Her doctoral thesis on “Protection of Civilians by UN Peacekeeping Operations” focused on the case of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She also has two Master’s degrees, in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris, and in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from the University of Paris II.
Selected Publications
The challenging environments where many contemporary UN peace operations are deployed can take a toll on the mental health of both uniformed and civilian personnel. This has led to increased attention to questions around mental health in peace operations, and in 2018, the UN made mental health and well-being a system-wide priority. Yet two years […]
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The effectiveness of UN peace operations depends on the “operational readiness” of their personnel, which refers to the knowledge, expertise, training, equipment, and mindset needed to carry out mandated tasks. While the need to improve the operational readiness of peacekeepers has been increasingly recognized over the past few years, the concept of “human rights readiness”—the […]
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In recent years, the UN and its member states have promoted comprehensive approaches and integrated structures and processes to improve coherence and consistency between political peacekeeping, humanitarian, human rights, and development efforts undertaken by the UN and its partners. For POC specifically, coordination between the military, police, and civilian components of peace operations; between peace […]
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The process of reconfiguring, closing, and handing over responsibilities to a UN country team or host-state institutions is a crucial—and challenging—part of the life cycle of a UN peacekeeping mission. Transitions have been a central feature of UN peacekeeping in Haiti, in particular, which has gone through numerous transitions since the 1990s. This paper focuses […]
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In the non-permissive environments where they are often deployed, UN peace operations need to be increasingly creative to implement their mandate to protect civilians. They face particularly acute challenges in contexts marked by violent extremism, such as Mali, where attacks by terrorist groups have greatly constrained the capacity of peacekeepers to protect local populations.This paper […]
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Since the late 1990s, POC has continuously gained prominence, both as a concept and in practice, and has become the mandated priority for most UN peacekeeping operations. However, while POC has become a centerpiece of peacekeeping for many stakeholders, it has also become diluted as a consensual label used to justify diverse actions and approaches.This […]
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As the UN has grown in terms of size, role, and mandate, restructuring its human resources (HR) system has become a pressing necessity. Staffing missions operating in conflict zones and managing and retaining people in hardship duty stations have proven difficult, leading to multiple attempts at organizational reform. However, past reforms have had limited, counterproductive, […]
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