Complexity thinking and adaptive peacebuilding

Cedric de Coning explores how complexity thinking can contribute to our understanding of how to create more inclusive peace processes, and how adaptive approaches enable local and external peacebuilders to apply new models of practice, experimentation and learning. These differ fundamentally from approaches...

UN Peace Operations and Changes in the Global Order: Evolution, Adaptation, and Resilience

Changes in the global order are contributing to a more pragmatic era of UN peace operations. Peace operations are likely to become less intrusive and more supportive of locally-led solutions. Three overarching themes are identified. First, the degree to which a peace operation contributes to strategic...

Africa and UN Peace Operations: Implications for the Future Role of Regional Organisations

Over the last decade and a half, Africa’s peace operations capacity has significantly increased. African states have deployed operations of their own and they now contribute half of all UN peacekeepers. The African Union (AU) and the UN have developed a strategic partnership that plays out at the political,...

United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order

This edited volume generates a discussion about UN approaches to peace by studying challenges and opportunities that the organisation is facing in the 21st century. We use some of the findings from the HIPPO report as an inspiration and put both its recommendations and broader UN actions in a wider context....

Adaptive Mediation

Towards a Comprehensive Results-based Reporting and Performance Assessment Framework for UN Peacekeeping Operations

This report considers the tools and processes that DPKO and DFS currently use to assess the performance of senior personnel, individual units and peacekeeping operations, and proposes a methodology for reorganizing these tools into a single overarching comprehensive planning, reporting and performance...

Sustaining Peace: Can a new approach change the UN?

When António Guterres started as UN Secretary General, he emphasised that conflict prevention had to be a top priority of the United Nations. This is why the United Nations are currently working on specifying the new ‘sustaining peace’ approach, passed by concurrent resolutions of the UN General Assembly...

Adaptive peacebuilding

International peacebuilding is experiencing a pragmatic turn. The era of liberal idealism is waning, and in its place new approaches to peacebuilding are emerging. This article identifies one such emerging approach, gives it a name—adaptive peacebuilding—and explores what it may be able to offer peacebuilding...

Implications of stabilisation mandates for the use of force in UN peace operations

When United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he will commission a review of UN peace operations during the June 2014 UN Security Council debate on ‘New trends in UN peacekeeping operations’, the main reasons he gave for why such a review was needed, was that UN peacekeeping is...

The Challenge of Sustaining Peace: Enhancing and Moving Beyond the United Nations' Peacebuilding Architecture

Une volonté partagée de façonner un nouvel ordre mondial

(Kun tilgjengelig på fransk): In the West, the rise of nationalist populism reached a tipping point in 2016 when it generated both the UK vote for Brexit and the election of President Trump in the US. In contrast, over the same period, the BRICS have invested in strengthening inter-BRICS cooperation...

The Role of the Civilian Component in African Union Peace Operations

The role of civilians in African Union (AU) peace support operations (PSOs) is still not fully understood. As a result, civilian capacity development has not been well resourced in comparison with the military and police dimensions of the African Standby Force (ASF) and has only modestly developed since...