GPPi presents research on learning and UN police at London workshop
GPPi Research Associate Philipp Rotmann presented a paper titled Organizational Learning and the UN Peacebuilding Apparatus: The Case of Constabulary Police, 1999 – 2006 at a conference on “Learning and its application to EU foreign and security policy” held at the Royal Overseas League in London on November 16, 2007. Academic researchers and practitioners from the Brussels-based international organizations discussed the role of learning in the practice of European foreign policy making and the EU’s growing number of field operations under the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP).
GPPi’s Philipp Rotmann presented early results from his joint work with colleagues Thorsten Benner and Stephan Mergenthaler on organizational learning in UN peace operations. The project, entitled “Learning to Build Peace? UN Peacebuilding and Organizational Learning”, takes an in-depth look at processes of institutional learning and doctrine development in four distinct areas of peacebuilding, one of which is post-conflict police assistance. For the period since 1999, the conference paper traces the gradual introduction of constabulary police forces (“formed police units” in UN jargon) as an instrument to fill the public security gap between military and civilian police capabilities and arrives at tentative hypotheses on the key factors that enabled or hindered processes of organizational learning.
The conference was jointly hosted by the Centre for the Study of International Governance, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond of Sweden and Loughborough University. It brought together researchers from the European Foreign and Security Policy Studies program supported by the Volkswagen Foundation (Germany), the Compania di Sao Paolo (Italy) and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) with a number of experienced practitioners who are involved in learning efforts and best practice collection at various international organizations such as NATO and the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union.
GPPi’s project Learning to Build Peace? is generously supported by the German Foundation for Peace Research.