Paul D. Williams is a Non-resident Senior Fellow working on the “Providing for Peacekeeping” project. Paul is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Security Policy Studies program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. He also serves as a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University and has been a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and the University of Queensland. Prior to working in the United States, Paul taught at the universities of Warwick and Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Selected Books
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.
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This report represents the first of a series of publications stemming from the Providing for Peacekeeping project, a partnership with IPI, Griffith University, and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.The report analyzes the practical steps needed to broaden the base of UN troop- and police-contributing countries. It identifies current trends, summarizes […]
Read moreAsif R. Khan, Director of UNDPPA's Policy and Mediation Division and a lead penholder of the New Agenda for Peace, reflects on the policy brief and next steps ahead of the Summit of the Future.
The New Agenda for Peace provides an opening for continental actors to advance priorities at the global level. However, this requires the AU to deliver on…
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