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| The 2000 report on United Nations Peace
Operations began with a somber statement: "Over the last decade, the United Nations
has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge" of protecting people from war. The
report, compiled by a panel of experts from all six continents and chaired by Lakhdar
Brahimi, a former Algerian Foreign Minister, proposes extensive reforms of UN Peacekeeping
operations. Since the report, the UN has struggled to build peace in Sierra Leone and the
Congo. The UN may or may not prove capable of peace enforcement and peace building. These are central questions for the World Peace Foundation, which hosted a meeting of UN officials, peace practitioners, and academics at the Kennedy School of Government on May 4-5. The meeting explored all aspects of the peacemaking process, particularly the inability of the UN effectively to prevent conflict and build peace in the developing world. A second meeting November 29, 2001, in New York explored these issues further, and discussed how the UN could most effectively aid Afghanistan. This multi-year project has produced four reports (Jeffrey Herbst, Securing Peace in Africa: An Analysis of Peacekeeping and Peace Enforcement Potential, WPF Report 17, 1998; Dana Francis, Peacekeeping or Peace Enforcement: Conflict Intervention in Africa, WPF Report 21, 1998; and Robert I. Rotberg and Ericka Albaugh, Peace Enforcement and Peacekeeping: Conflict Prevention in Africa, WPF Report 24, 1999). WPF Report 31, To Rid the Scourge of War: UN Peace Operations and Today's Crises, by Rachel Gisselquist, was published in 2002. The project originally began by investigating whether conflict prevention in Africa could be assisted by the creation of sub-regional crisis response forces. Those forces would intervene to forestall or dampen intrastate conflicts at an early stage, thus reducing the mayhem and bloodshed that has been so much a part of African life in the decade of the 1990s. In structured discussions on two continents with African ministers of defense and African chiefs of staff, the creation of such forces has seemed possible. Yet critical questions of political will remain as obstacles to the early summoning of the forces that are contemplated. The ministers, chiefs of staff, and US and European diplomats and soldiers created a template, but bringing it into existence will prove difficult. The WPF and Brookings Institution Press published Peacekeeping and Peace Enforcement in Africa: Methods of Conflict Prevention in 2000, with chapters by Happyton Bonyongwe, Christopher Clapham, Jeffrey Herbst, Steven Metz, and Robert I. Rotberg. |
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