Reports by region: Africa

Ten years ago the UN Secretary-General pledged to intensify efforts to move from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention. In 2005, heads of state and government at the UN World Summit solemnly renewed their commitment “to promote a culture of prevention of armed conflict.”

To what extent have the UN and the international community turned their aspiration for a culture of prevention into a reality? How well do multilateral instruments for conflict prevention perform today? What challenges exist in tapping into their full potential, and how can these challenges be addressed?

This meeting report presents a synthesis of discussions of these questions that took place during the sixteenth New York Seminar on May 4-6, 2011. It also summarizes key recommendations made by participants at the meeting.

The report finds:Multilateral conflict prevention has undergone significant change in recent years.

The report finds:

- Multilateral conflict prevention has undergone significant change in recent years.
- Capabilities, working methods, and the normative framework for multilateral conflict prevention have evolved considerably in response to greater receptiveness by many states facing conflict risks and increasing preparedness by third parties to engage in preventive diplomacy and structural prevention.  This trend has been accompanied by a proliferation of the number of third states, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations undertaking preventive action.
- Achieving coordination and coherence among these numerous third parties in their pursuit of preventive goals constitutes a critical challenge.

Consolidating the legitimate use of force in the hands of the state is a vital first step in post-conflict peacebuilding. Transitional governments must move quickly to neutralize rival armed groups and provide a basic level of security for citizens.
Two processes are vital to securing a monopoly of force: disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and security sector reform. Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) involve disbanding armed groups that challenge the government’s monopoly of force. Security sector reform (SSR) means reforming and rebuilding the national security forces so that they are professional and accountable.  U.S. experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo yielded three crosscutting lessons: go in heavy, tackle DDR and SSR in tandem, and consolidate U.S. capacity to implement both tasks in a coordinated, scalable way.
This report is based on the panel presentation and the views expressed at a September 12, 2011 meeting of the Security Sector Reform working group. The panel included retired Ambassador James Dobbins, RAND Corp., retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, Center for New American Security, retired Ambassador John Blaney, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Melanne Civic, the Center for Complex Operations. Robert Perito, the Director of USIP’s Security Sector Governance Center, moderated the panel.

Peace operations are increasingly on the front line in the international community’s fight against organized crime. This book explores how, in some cases, peace operations and organized crime are clear enemies, while in others, they may become tacit allies.

The threat posed by organized crime to international and human security has become a matter of considerable strategic concern for national and international decisionmakers, so it is somewhat surprising how little thought has been devoted to addressing the complex relationship between organized crime and peace operations. This volume addresses this gap, questioning the emerging orthodoxy that portrays organized crime as an external threat to the liberal peace championed by western and allied states and delivered through peace operations.

Based upon a series of case studies it concludes that organized crime is both a potential enemy and a potential ally of peace operations, and it argues for the need to distinguish between strategies to contain organized crime and strategies to transform the political economies in which it flourishes. The editors argue for the development of intelligent, transnational, and transitional law enforcement that can make the most of organized crime as a potential ally for transforming political economies, while at the same time containing the threat it presents as an enemy to building effective and responsible states.

Read about the book from the publisher.

Since 1999, an increasing proportion of UN peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) have been mandated to use force to protect civilians from physical violence. Although recent research and UN efforts have helped clarify that the protection of civilians (POC) is a critical and unavoidable requirement for UN PKOs, its implications for UN planning, and particular planning for the military component, prior to and during deployment remain largely unaddressed in formal guidance.  Recent initiatives by DPKO and individual missions to develop guidance, conceptual tools, and working methods to implement POC mandates have demonstrated remarkable ingenuity.

This document is intended to support those processes by drawing on recent scholarship and operational research on the challenges of ending complex civil conflicts. It seeks to apply that research to better employ the military capabilities of UN PKOs to alter conflict dynamics in order to end attacks on civilians. Drawing on lessons from recent UN PKOs and interviews with mission personnel from a wide variety of contexts, it proposes a shift from a primarily reactive approach based on crisis response, to a proactive one that seizes the initiative and applies pressure on armed actors responsible for violence against the civilian populace.