GPPi contributes to peacekeeping policy workshop

On 4 June 2013, GPPi Associate Director Philipp Rotmann and GPPi Research Associate Steffen Eckhard participated at the workshop ​“Peacekeeping Policy in Focus: Ongoing Initiatives and Recent Findings,” jointly hosted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation (FES) in Berlin. The workshop brought together international researchers and practitioners, particularly a number of current projects to support the strategic development of peacekeeping conducted by SIPRI, FES, the International Peace Institute in New York and the Center for International Peace Operations in Berlin.

Eckhard contributed to a panel about International Peace Institute’s ongoing project ​“Providing for Peacekeeping” in which expert Adam Smith presented findings from a recently published study titled Rethinking Force Generation: Filling the Capability Gap in UN Peacekeeping. Based on their findings, Smith and his co-authors encourage the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to implement a capability-driven approach to force generation that would allow DPKO to select and remunerate troops based on their performance. In his comment, Eckhard questioned the underlying assumption that the supply of peacekeeping contributions will indeed outrun demand in the nearby future – the key precondition for DPKO being able to choose between competing suppliers. He also called for caution about employing in-mission evaluations as an instrument to assess contributors’ performance. On the one hand, employing evaluation to sanction performance in peace operations would threaten the tool’s integrity as a means for organizational learning. On the other hand, performance assessments might create a two-tier society in peacekeeping that discriminates countries with less developed military or police organizations.

Rotmann commented on another panel about ​“Scenarios, Trends and Issues for Future research, Dialogue and Policy Development.” During that panel, Stefan Köppe from the German Center for International Peace Operations and Jair van der Lijn from Clingendael presented the findings of two recent scenario analyses on the future of peace operations by about 2025. Rotmann focused on two key commonalities among their scenarios: a significant level of uncertainty about the likelihood of different futures, and the broadly shared trend towards a less Western-centric world. He called for greater attention to the operational implications of these trends. If scenario research reveals that we do not know which organizations (UN, AU, ASEAN, Arab League, etc.) and mission models are most likely to define peacekeeping in 10 years, we need to pay greater attention to making our contributions connectable with and transferable between different institutional contexts. Rotmann also argued that the peacekeeping community will need to step out of its own Western-centric paradigm and become more open toward other – African, Asian, Latin American – views on what works and what does not work in practice.