Two days after the Security Council Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians (POC) organized by Poland on May 22, 2018, an IPI policy forum took up the issue of the perceived and actual tensions between the pursuit of political solutions and the protection of civilians in peacekeeping contexts.Ralph Mamiya, a consultant and former Protection […]
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Partnerships are essential for effective UN peacekeeping policy making, but consensus on how to go forward can elude stakeholders because they suffer from a divergence of interests, limited access to critical information, and confusion over the responsibilities of UN bodies. To discuss the problem, IPI and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) held a policy […]
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Partnerships are critical to effective UN peacekeeping, particularly in New York, where the Security Council, the Secretariat, and member states examine proposed reforms and seek consensus on the direction of peacekeeping. Yet throughout the nearly seventy-year history of UN peacekeeping, relations among key stakeholders have frequently fractured due to their often diverging interests. These differences […]
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IPI Senior Visiting Fellow Alexandra Novosseloff told an IPI policy forum that aviation assets, the United Nations’ second biggest expenditure after personnel, were chronically shortchanged in mission planning, making them the “Achilles heel” of UN peacekeeping. “Ultimately it’s not UN rules that are the problem, it’s the persistent lack of needed assets and capabilities combined […]
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In recent years, United Nations peace operations have increasingly begun addressing environmental challenges related to their own impact and the conditions in which they operate. Missions, particularly large deployments in arid, land-locked countries, have considerable resource requirements and can cause significant, if unintended, environmental damage to countries the UN is seeking to assist.To discuss this […]
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The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, triggered by the UN mission there, killed more than 9,000 people and affected nearly 807,000. This disastrous case drew attention to the negative effect UN peace operations can have on the surrounding communities and environment—something peacekeepers had started paying attention to with the deployment of new large-scale operations in […]
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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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Jake Sherman, director of IPI’s Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations, opened a standing room only event December 7th marking the launch of a new two-year project that will examine the challenges related to the Protection of Civilians (POC) by UN peace operations.Since the Security Council first established “protection of civilians” as an explicit mandated […]
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Over the past year, political and military actors and agendas in South Sudan have increasingly fragmented, and the political process has stalled. These developments have undermined the security of civilians, the stability of the country, the humanitarian situation, and the viability of efforts to pursue sustainable peace. The population’s mistrust toward international actors has further […]
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UN peace operations are confronting crises from all sides: they face ever more complex operating environments in the field, while in New York they face divisions among member states over the very nature of peace operations, a “peacekeeping fatigue” aggravated by scandals, and cuts to the peacekeeping budget. These are some of the reasons why, […]
Read moreIf any country, particularly the US, wants to prevent further Chinese gains in the SCS, it will need to substantially increase investment in military capabilities, diplomacy, and…
The lessons from New Caledonia have implications for independence movements in other places like Catalonia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and West…
In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325, perhaps one of the boldest steps the global community can make is to truly upend how it approaches peace: to move away from ideas of merely including women in broken processes, and to move towards creating necessary systemic…
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The International Peace Institute is an independent, international not-for-profit think tank with a staff representing more than 20 nationalities, located in New York across from United Nations headquarters. IPI is dedicated to promoting the prevention and resolution of conflicts between and within states by strengthening international peace and security institutions. To achieve its purpose, IPI employs a mix of policy research, convening, publishing and outreach.
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