Volume 11, Issue 1 -
Now Available!
The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre (PPC) is pleased to present the eleventh volume of The Pearson Papers:
"Challenges of Effective Cooperation and Coordination in Peace Operations."
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- Foreword
- With the mix of different actors and organizations taking part in complex peace operations, the concept of integration has become increasingly relevant, as evidenced by the lively debate among theoreticians and practitioners within the peace operations community. Integration, in its narrow sense, is often seen as difficult and even undesirable. However, if understood as part of a larger trend toward strengthening peace operations, integration can be said to reflect the importance of cooperation and coordination among all actors involved in peace operations.
Increasingly, military, police and humanitarian actors find themselves, sometimes sharing but more often, co-habiting a common space in complex peace operations. Faced with diverse perspectives, lack of clarity regarding roles and responsibilities, and the need to identify lessons learned, they are finding new and innovative ways to collaborate and synchronize their actions. While revised operational principles, guidelines and doctrines are carefully crafted to incorporate the multiplicity of perspectives found in intervention efforts, more is required to enhance our understanding of current approaches to today's complex operations. In this spirit, the current issue of The Pearson Papers thoughtfully discusses and analyzes the theme of cooperation and coordination through a selection of four major articles and one dispatch from the field.
The first article examines the effects of a shift from multinational to regional peace operations on the United Nation's ability to maintain international peace and security. While some positive outcomes are identified from this shift, ultimately, the argument remains that enhanced and concerted coordination amongst all actors involved in peace operations is critical to achieve long-term peace and security. Coordination becomes even more critical where leadership is dispersed, efforts are fragmented and there is disagreement on priority access to scarce resources and facilities. This is reflected in the remaining articles and dispatch from the field, which discuss the theme of cooperation and coordination among diverse actors in the context of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is an interesting prototype of UN-mandated but coalition-led intervention, which not only disrupts our traditional "linear" understanding of peace processes, but pushes the boundaries in terms of how we view, understand, and work in integrated environments. Given this background, the articles examine the challenges and effectiveness of civil-military interaction in Afghanistan and the advancement of a "whole of government" approach from a coalition, Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), and humanitarian perspective. Lastly, the dispatch from the field provides a credible account of the nature of the challenges of cooperation and coordination on the ground. - The Implications of Regional Peace Operations on United Nations Capacity for Peacekeeping
- The deployment of peace operations by regional organizations is often promoted as a means of relieving the UN in the area of peace and security and of promoting cooperation among organizations with complementary goals. In practice, however, the growing preponderance of peace operations by other actors than the UN is not necessarily a value-neutral enterprise, and the legitimization of the use of force by regional agencies coincides with a growing reluctance among developed nations to place troops under UN command. This paper will evaluate the shift towards regional peace operations by assessing whether it is undermining the UN's ability to maintain international peace and security. It will examine two regional operations: Operation Artemis, deployed by the European Union into the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2003, and theAfrican Union Mission in Sudan. This paper will argue that while these operations provide some temporary relief during an ongoing humanitarian crisis, without improved cooperation with the UN, regional operations will have little impact on long-term peace and security. Authored by: Laurie Gorman
- NATO and Militaries as Trusted Partners in Civil-Military Interaction
- NATO's future in conflict, post-conflict, and post-disaster multidimensional missions is assured if NATO continues to enhance and expand its civil-military interaction capacity. Effective NATO civil-military interaction is dependant on being trusted by civilians as a partner, for which various NATO militaries are devising new or expanded civil-military interaction mechanisms. This will be the sine qua non of successful NATO transformation as set out in the seminal August 2004 Strategic Vision by NATO's Strategic Commanders. This paper looks at some of the key principles of effective civil-military interaction and some courses of action for NATO and militaries in general.
At the core of militaries being a trusted civil-military partner will be a conscious and hard-won reputation by NATO militaries that they are not taking over civilian roles, nor looking to coordinate the civilians. Various NATO militaries have been overstepping into civilian territory, proving to be highly counterproductive in the effort to gain the requisite civilian trust.
NATO's future in complex multidimensional missions is inexorably linked to effective civil-military interaction at the field level. Success will come from NATO restricting itself to a military role that above all provides a stable and secure environment for its civilian partners. This self-disciplined effort by NATO is vital to its being seen as a trusted partner. There is a danger of NATO giving into the temptation of trying to control, drive, shape, or even supplant the civilians, which would destroy rather than build the requisite trust for effective civil-military interaction, and would diminish the abilities of both the military and the civilians. Authored by: Paul LaRose-Edwards - Understanding the Performance of Civil-Military Cooperation: A Case Study of the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team
- This article investigates the performance of civil-military cooperation. A performance assessment of civil-military cooperation is appropriate as it addresses the actual contribution of the cooperation. In practice however, it is frequently difficult to assess whether, and to what extent, the cooperation has actually contributed to the objectives of the respective participants. A performance assessment framework consisting of a set of performance criteria is developed and by means of multiple case studies, is applied to eight civil-military alliances of the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team in Baghlan, a province in northern Afghanistan. The case study shows that despite the overall positive feelings of participants about their performance, most alliances did not contribute significantly to many of the descriptive performance criteria, such as sustainability, situational awareness and force protection. To improve the performance of civil-military cooperation, the research ends by formulating recommendations with respect to ensuring continuity of activities. These include structuring the collection and processing of information, and increasing the involvement of local populations and humanitarian organizations. Authored by: Bas Rietijens
- Rethinking Deeper Integration: The Case for Safeguarding Independent Humanitarian Action in Afghanistan and Beyond
- Current best practice suggests that conflict resolution missions are most likely to succeed under an integrated or "whole of government" approach (WGA). This approach is dependent on defense, diplomatic and development actors working together seamlessly to protect the population, meet their basic needs and support the rebuilding of failing states.
This model has now been appropriated for service in the 'War on Terror' which belatedly dressed its interventions in human rights language and humanitarian clothing. In Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is now implementing a WGA in a counter-insurgency war, where 'State Security' needs dominate at the expense of 'Human Security' needs and humanitarian concerns (both of which are now going largely unmet).
This paper will argue that the politicization and militarization of aid under the WGA in Afghanistan has created a number of un-resolved and counterproductive humanitarian challenges which can be partially remedied by decoupling humanitarian activities from the WGA and the politico-military project underway. Authored by: Stephen Cornish - Clash of Revelations: ISAF Nations Struggle to Sell the Integrated Approach on the Home Front
- Whether one cares to look at the ISAF operation from an Afghan or a troop-contributing national perspective, it is not the military situation that causes concern to most analysts. It is the lack of national security capacity, the fragile social fabric of a war-torn country, and the absence of local governance structures, that pose a threat to normalcy. The question is whether there is enough political commitment to put the necessary resources into diplomatic and economic efforts, in order to create real stability and tangible peace dividends for the population. Efforts must be combined into a more integrated strategy to assist Afghanistan in what is one of the most challenging state-building exercises of modern history. A genuine commitment to an inclusive political process is the key to stability in Afghanistan. Encouraging negotiations with the Taliban should be part of a comprehensive approach and an exit strategy of foreign troops. Authored by: Christa Meindersma
Volume 10, Issue 1:
"Measures of Effectiveness: Peace Operations and Beyond"
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- Our Seven Wars in Afghanistan: Progress under the SWORD Model
- Continued reports of corruption, increasing violence, struggles with development, and slow progress with poppy eradication seem to indicate that the situation in Afghanistan is on the decline. This paper will argue that the chances for success in the troubled nation are actually improving - although several adjustments must be made to how the problem is being solved.
The ongoing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan will be assessed with respect to the SWORD model's seven strategic dimensions or 'wars within the war.' These strategic dimensions are: (1) the legitimacy war; (2) the shooting war; (3) the war to isolate the insurgents from internal support; (4) the war to isolate the insurgents from external support; (5) the war to stay the course and maintain commitment; (6) the intelligence and information war; and (7) the war for unity of effort.
A trend-based approach is used whereby the progress or regress with respect to each 'war' is assessed using trends that relate to the key elements of that particular war. These trends will be derived from indicators of the situation in Afghanistan as well as the increasing or decreasing adherence of the involved elements of the international community to the dimensions of the SWORD model. Most of the trends are positive, indicating that the wars are being won and overall chances of success in Afghanistan are thus increasing. A few others are negative, indicating regression.
The paper will suggest how positive trends can be further improved and how negative trends can be reversed so that the seven wars can be won, focusing on those which can be most easily influenced by the Afghan government and the international community. Authored by: N. N. French - Measuring the Effectiveness of Reconstruction and Stabilization Activities
- The international community has become seized with measuring the effectiveness of emerging 'reconstruction and stabilization' activities in war-affected environments. This is partially motivated by a need to calculate the costs of these very expensive ventures, but also because activities have not been as effective as intended. While, on one hand, the international community is interested in measuring the effectiveness of its work in places like Afghanistan, on the other, it may be reticent to discover if reconstruction and stabilization activities are ineffectual, or worse, that they have negative effects on recipient populations recovering from armed conflicts.
The measures of effectiveness systems that are available, especially military combat metrics, are limited in relation to quantifying cultural and social indicators and require a recasting in order to capture the longer-term impacts upon cultural narratives within recipient populations recovering from such conflicts.
This paper argues that there is a need to include social and cultural narratives, as well as numbers and scores, in emerging measurement systems to better understand the effectiveness of reconstruction and stabilization activities in war-affected environments. Further, it is incumbent upon interventionists to revisit recipient populations and identify measures of effectiveness from their perspectives. Authored by: Sarah Meharg - What to Measure in Peace Operations
- This essay presents background to the field of evaluating peace support operations. It recommends a mix of macro and impact evaluation approaches, combined with Social Capital Theory and the results accountability model of Mark Friedman, which stresses contribution over attribution.
The main innovation of this essay is to posit that evaluating the complex interrelationship between a peace support operation, violence, human security, perceptions, group dynamics and politics is to accept that war is a culture in itself. If we accept this, then we need to develop indicators to measure the latent nature of society's transformation from a culture of war to a society that deals with its problems and fissures through non-violent means.
To this end, the essay's evaluation model attempts to outline a methodology that can incorporate multiple contributing factors. One approach that dodges the need for strict application of causality is to apply a change-agent model. Authored by: Joseph Schumacher - Israeli-Palestinian Bi-level Conflict Zone and Its Implications for International Intervention: What Went Wrong and What Can be Done?
- Over the course of the Second Intifada, the international community launched several unsuccessful initiatives to secure a ceasefire and return Israelis and Palestinians to September 2000 conditions. This article seeks to understand why those missions failed to meet their objectives.
A number of factors common to most of the recent interventions underscore the need for rethinking approaches to intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone, whose unique characteristics as a bi-level conflict zone defy the traditional distinctions between interstate and intrastate conflict. Analysis of the international experience in the Israeli-Palestinian arena as well as in Iraq demonstrates the need for new conceptual approaches that focus on stabilization and reconstruction instead of peace and reconciliation.
This articles further claims that the deployment of an international force with strong state-building capabilities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone is necessary for the establishment of a Palestinian state entity. Such international involvement might also reduce, to a substantial degree, the dimension of political asymmetry in the conflict zone and provide the necessary conditions for the commencement of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Authored by: Kobi Michael and David Kellen
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