Paul D. Williams is Professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, where he also Directs the MA program in Security Policy Studies. Dr Williams was previously a faculty member at the University of Birmingham and the University of Warwick in the UK. He was a non-resident Senior Fellow with the International Peace Institute between 2011-2019. His research focuses on the politics and effectiveness of contemporary peace operations, the dynamics of warfare in Africa, and emerging security threats. His books include Understanding Peacekeeping (Polity Press, 3rd edition, 2021), Fighting for Peace in Somalia: A History and Analysis of the African Union Mission (AMISOM), 2007-2017 (Oxford University Press, 2018), and War and Conflict in Africa (Polity Press, 2nd edition, 2016).
The UN support office model, developed over the past fifteen years in Somalia, has been a vital tool in enabling African Union (AU) missions to operate effectively. The UN support office in Somalia has performed essential functions, including logistical support, casualty evacuation, airlift, and long-distance resupply for AU forces. It is now being examined with […]
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Deployed to Mogadishu in March 2007, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) operates through a complicated and extensive system of partnerships. This has been referred to as the “AMISOM model” of “partnership peacekeeping.” While this specific configuration of forces and mechanisms is unlikely to be repeated, AMISOM remains the longest-standing case of a peace […]
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The last decade has seen more UN peacekeepers than ever before coming from countries neighboring the host state. This report uses the IPI Peacekeeping Database to explore this increase in neighborhood contributions between 1990 and 2017. While less than 3 percent of all UN peacekeepers came from next-door neighbors in the early 1990s, this number […]
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Logistics support is both critical to the safety and health of peacekeepers and vital to success at every stage of a peace operation—especially in the high-threat environments where both UN and regional peace operations are increasingly deployed. Contemporary peace operations are based on logistics partnerships, with support provided by a range of actors including states, […]
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Authorized in January 2009, the UN Support Office for the African Union Mission in Somalia (UNSOA) was an unprecedented operation. Through UNSOA, the Department of Field Support used the UN’s assessed contributions to directly support a non-UN regional peace operation (AMISOM). Although this significantly enhanced AMISOM’s capabilities and increased its overall effectiveness, UNSOA faced numerous […]
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In January 2016, Kenya suffered its largest ever military defeat at the battle of El Adde in the Gedo region of Somalia. Yet many of the questions surrounding this attack remain unanswered. On the six-month anniversary of the battle at El Adde, this report provides a preliminary analysis of the battle and some of the […]
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In recent years, a growing number of UN peacekeepers have been mandated to carry out “stabilization” tasks. Yet the UN still has no explicit definition of or framework for this concept, and most recent stabilization operations, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, occurred under quite different circumstances from UN peacekeeping operations. The AU Mission […]
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Only fifteen United Nations’ member states provide more than 60 percent of the 104,000 UN uniformed personnel deployed worldwide. How can a more equitable sharing of the global peacekeeping burden be produced that generates new capabilities for UN operations?Operational partnerships are one potentially useful mechanism to further this agenda. They are partnerships that occur when […]
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The United Nations and African Union now deploy a record number of peacekeepers in Africa. In the past two years, the relationship between the two institutions has deepened, as new AU missions in Mali and the Central African Republic have transitioned into UN peacekeeping operations and ongoing missions in Somali and South Sudan have expanded […]
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This paper analyzes the recent history of relations between the UN Security Council and the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (AU) with respect to peace operations.
Read moreAs negotiators and climate leaders around the world process the outcomes of COP30, there is widespread disappointment that the parties did not agree on a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF). This omission reflected the complexity of the…
In February 2025, African heads of state gathered in Addis Ababa to announce a bold challenge to the global financial order: the continent will launch its own credit rating agency. The move follows years of mounting frustration over the…
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