International Civil Service: Without Fear or Favor?

Throughout the world, national civil servants take official pledges, among other things, to provide advice ‘without fear or favor’. When it comes to international civil servants, the ‘without fear or favor’ expectations are far more equivocal – specifically, where ‘without fear’ is concerned, writes KATE GILMORE.
Article 100 of the United Nations Charter explicitly bars the seeking or receiving of instructions from States or other external authority – including, one presumes, incentives and disincentives. The Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service and the UN Staff Regulations and Rules apply this by covering conflicts of interest and banning receipt of gifts. Yet, their provisions deal only with the ‘without favor’ element, states GILMORE, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“The ‘without fear’ aspects are comparatively neglected,” she writes in ‘Without Fear or Favor?’, a paper published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation as part of its ‘100 years of international civil service’ series.
Elsewhere, of course, the UN has taken a clear stand on reprisals by Member States against those who avail themselves of its human rights mechanisms – thus some effort of protection is offered for those who speak to the UN, she states. The Secretary-General has issued a policy on ‘whistleblowing’ – so some protection is offered for those who speak within the UN about the UN. “But the assurance of protection for those who speak for the UN? That is a less certain story.”
It can be tough to take risks with your professional future, but we are all worse off if international civil servants are not able and willing to speak ‘without fear’, writes GILMORE. “Protection when they do so should be unequivocal.”
Elaboration of what that means: of what service ‘without fear’ requires and how it should be protected, might be challenging. However, a first step would be for the UN Staff Rules and Regulations to spell out clearly both the requirement to speak the truth without fear – and the institution’s commitment to protecting staff who do so, she states.
“[Dag] Hammarskjöld emphasized that a UN Secretary-General is not some kind Delphic oracle. Nor is the interna-tional civil servant. Yet, the provision of evidence-based, fact-loyal, standards-upholding advice without fear or favor, including in the public domain as required, is essential. It was a point that Hammarskjöld underscored in his last ever speech to the staff of the UN Secretariat, ‘To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear.’ Without fear that is, not merely without favor.”

Improve the Link Between the UNSC and Fifth Committee To Align Peacekeeping Mandates and Resources

Three Ways to Improve Multilateral Peacekeeping in Africa (and Beyond)

While United Nations peacekeepers mostly have been an effective multilateral instrument for fostering war-to-peace transitions, peace operations continue to suffer from many problems. This is especially so in Africa, where the majority of missions are deployed. These shortcomings severely restrict missions from fully realizing their peacebuilding potential.
“UN peacekeeping missions are better able to protect civilians when well-trained and well-equipped troops participate in blue-helmet missions,” write NADINE ANSORG and FELIX HAASS in a paper for the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). “But it is particularly those countries with highly qualified troops, such as European or North American countries, which are reluctant to participate.”
African peacekeepers are increasingly filling the rising demand for peacekeeping contributions, but they often lack the training and the capacity to help missions fully achieve their goals effectively, the authors state in their paper ‘Three Ways to Improve Multilateral Peacekeeping in Africa (and Beyond)’, published as part of the GIGA Focus series.
“Peacekeepers themselves often perpetrate crimes – for instance, sexual abuse. High-profile cases have been reported from UN missions in Liberia or the Central African Republic. These crimes undermine peacekeepers’ legitimacy and obstruct their peacebuilding potential,” ANSORG and HAASS stress.
The authors suggest three ways to address the challenges linked to troop quality and training, regional peacekeeping, and peacekeeping misconduct. First, European countries, including Germany, should continue to participate in UN peace operations.
Second, Germany and its allies should keep strengthening Africa’s peacekeeping infrastructure, including the African Union and other regional security initiatives.
Third, to credibly push for a rules-based international order, Germany should use its position on the United Nations Security Council to press for reforms to the council and to improve the legal accountability of peacekeepers.
“These measures to strengthen troop quality, regional peacekeeping, and accountability against peacekeeper misconduct are neither a panacea nor the only measures available to improve peacekeeping effectiveness,” the authors stress. For instance, member states must also strengthen the UN in general, first and foremost by paying their budget contributions – a constant issue plaguing the institution and greatly inhibiting its proper functioning, ANSORG and HAASS state.
“But by specifically improving troop quality, regional security architectures, and accountability measures, the international community can help peace operations achieve their full potential as an effective multilateral instrument with which to contain violence and promote peace.”

Shaping Multilateralism: Principles and Opportunities for Multilateral Cooperation in the United Nations

An unrelenting weakening of multilateralism in recent years has eroded the ability of international organizations to perform their longstanding task of seeking solutions to old and new global problems. Various initiatives to mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations in 2020 aim to restore this vital capacity.
“Multilateralism is characterized by rules-based cooperation. But which rules and principles can serve as the basis for cooperation in a multipolar world with increasingly divided societies?” GISELA HIRSCHMANN and CORNELIA ULBERT ask in a new paper published by Bonn-based Development and Peace Foundation (sef:).
They proceed to offer answers in ‘Shaping Multilateralism: Principles and opportunities for multilateral cooperation in the UN,’ published by sef: as part of its Global Governance Spotlight series.
“The first step is to identify ways for governments and civil society to reach consensus on established principles – and new ones,” the authors affirm. The next steps are to align existing institutions to these principles and to take active countermeasures against rising populism.
Flexible coalition-building, institutional reforms and winning people over are among the key preconditions to more actively engaging governments and civil society toward revitalizing the multilateralist project. “The aim of all measures should be to show that multilateralism serves the interests of every state and all citizens, because global public goods such as protection from climate change or epidemics cannot be provided or guaranteed at the national level alone,” HIRSCHMANN and ULBERT state.
“A key prerequisite for the success of winning people for multilateralism is credibility, however: only stakeholders whose own actions visibly demonstrate a firm commitment to multilateral principles will be successful in shaping the new multilateralism.”

Charting a Future For Peacekeeping in the DRC

Given that United Nations peacekeepers have been deployed continuously in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for two decades, there is understandable fatigue among Member States and donors. The UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) has come under increasing pressure to develop an exit strategy and plan for a phased withdrawal from the Central African country.
While renewing MONUSCO’s mandate in March 2019, the UN Security Council (UNSC) requested the Secretary-General to provide the body with “an independent strategic review assessing the continued challenges to peace and security in the DRC and articulating a phased, progressive, and comprehensive exit strategy.”
The strategic review, therefore, offers an opportunity for reflection and analysis that can strengthen MONUSCO’s planning. However, the timeline for MONUSCO’s activities and presence in the DRC should be driven by analysis of the conflict environment to ensure that its drawdown and eventual exit are not premature and do not excessively endanger civilians or jeopardize regional peace and security, a policy brief from the Center for Civilians in Conflict stresses.
“[T]here are still a number of hurdles that need to be overcome for the DRC to achieve durable peace, and MONUSCO’s protection efforts remain crucial in the meantime,” states the brief, titled ‘Charting a Future For Peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of Congo’.
With limited support from the Congolese government in the past, MONUSCO has struggled to ensure that its efforts are sustainable. However, the January 2019 change in government presents an opportunity that the UNSC and MONUSCO should capitalize on.
“This is a time to evaluate what a successful end to MONUSCO’s mandate will look like, what failures from past drawdowns can be avoided, where the Mission has been successful, and which Mission activities should be reinforced to achieve an exit that does not leave civilians trapped between violent armed groups and abusive state security forces.”
Reductions to MONUSCO’s budget over the past several years have spurred base closures and an increased reliance on mobility. While recent closures in the west of the country may prove an effective way for MONUSCO to prioritize and refocus on the most insecure provinces, past base closures in the east serve as an example of the risks that can arise from a quick drawdown in areas where armed groups are still entrenched, the report states.
In the coming years, MONUSCO will need to continue providing protection to civilians, developing tailored and comprehensive strategies to address armed group violence, monitoring human rights violations, building government and civil society capacity to monitor and respond to threats, and supporting national strategies to address violence and promote human rights.
Success will depend less on MONUSCO than on the willingness of the Congolese government to support reform efforts. Constructive and sustained diplomatic engagement with the Congolese government by Member States and regional actors will be vital in this regard.
Moreover, bilateral engagement by Member States and a renewed commitment from donors on security sector reform and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration will be required to pave the way for a responsible MONUSCO exit. In addition, as MONUSCO draws down, funding should shift to the protection efforts of UN agencies, international and national nongovernmental organizations, and some Congolese government agencies.
A rapid drawdown and withdrawal from the DRC would undermine the gains MONUSCO has made and have devastating consequences for civilians. Plans for MONUSCO’s exit should remain linked to thorough analysis of the conflict environment, and timelines for drawdown should take into account the need to bridge large gaps in security sector reform, the necessity of demobilizing armed groups, and the importance of transitioning protection-related tasks to other actors in the DRC.
The UNSC can avoid significant risks by linking MONUSCO’s exit to benchmarks that evaluate the security environment and signal when civilians truly no longer need the protection of peacekeepers, the brief concludes.

Dialogue in Peacebuilding and Social Cohesion: Understanding Different Perspectives

The constriction of the space for robust, uninhibited and constructive dialogue by entrenched positions, vitriolic accusations and a rejection of data or facts has emerged as an additional challenge amid the urgency to promote local, national and international efforts to address the world’s increasingly complex problems.
On peacebuilding and strengthening social cohesion, it has become ever important to place dialogue in the context of the evolving dynamics of conflict and shifts in international efforts to build and sustain peace.
‘Dialogue in Peacebuilding: Understanding Different Perspectives’ provides a glimpse of the multiplicity of ways in which dialogue is and can be applied to address conflict and to strengthen peacebuilding efforts, from contexts ravaged by ongoing armed violence like Afghanistan or Somalia to situations of seemingly intractable conflict like Israel and Palestine, as well as in countries and communities typically described as peaceful like Sweden.
Although they range widely, common themes do emerge in the volume, published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation as part of its Development Dialogue series. These themes included the reasons for and results of applying dialogue and some critical considerations for designing and facilitating dialogue processes.
Several contributors identify the use of dialogue as a key instrument for promoting inclusivity, engaging women, youth, marginalized groups and other actors who are typically not at the center of policymaking or negotiations. The potential to constructively engage youth and to counter perceptions of marginalization by young people through dialogue is underscored in many pieces.
Another common theme raised in the different papers is the potential of dialogue to transform strained vertical relationships between the state and society, or to cultivate civic trust in governance and official institutions.
The contributions raise many considerations that are critical in order for dialogue processes to be successful. Several authors emphasize the importance of careful and thorough preparation that involves building trust and for ensuring that basic conditions are present, such as that participants are prepared to genuinely listen and respect other perspectives and to share without fear of retribution.
They also underscore the need for follow up and sustained engagement. The role and identity of the facilitator is key to success and most recognize that this calls for acceptance by all participants and for multi-partiality.
Several contributions identify the media and, in particular, social media as a significant force and consideration, with the potential to support or advance dialogue gains as well as to undermine the process by deepening polarization and disseminating misinformation.
“Given the urgency of working together at all levels and across political, ideological and other divides to address current global challenges and to build more inclusive, peaceful and just societies,” the introduction to the publication notes, “this volume can perhaps provide inspiration on how to avoid ‘dialogues of the deaf ’ in favor of dialogue that genuinely promotes mutual understanding.”

Leading United Nations Peace Operations: Complementing a Leader-Centered Approach

The debate on United Nations peace operations continues to focus on various aspects of individual, organizational and political performance at the strategic and operational levels. In terms of leadership, the characteristics, styles, and practices of individuals are considered centrally relevant to effective leadership of peacekeeping operations.
PATRICK SWEET takes the discussions a step further and explores the collective fundamentals of leadership that amplify the understanding of what leading in fragile contexts entails. “Our hope is to complement a ‘leader-centered’ view of developing the capacity to lead on peace operations with a ‘substantively and collectively contextualized’ view to developing such capacity to lead,” the author states in ‘Leading UN Peace Operations: Complementing a Leader-Centered Approach,’ a paper published by the International Forum for the Challenges of Peace Operations.
Leading happens at all levels and a leader is (can be) anyone who influences people and impacts systems to mobilize toward specific outcomes, SWEET states. With these clarifications, he adds, they sharpen the focus on the specific nature of the three areas led in peace operations: turbulence; collectives of people (not only individuals); and polarities or tensions.
Leading turbulence: Leading in a perpetual state of turbulence is different than leading a process of change. Leading change implies leading “from somewhere (the current state) to somewhere else (a new state).” One can argue that peace operations are about leading change: from violence to non- violence. This is often achieved via combinations of diplomacy and peacekeeping force.
However, the underlying reasons for the violence in the first place (scarce resources, tribalism and migration, artificial scarcity of resources created by corruption, historical vendetta, etc.) if not addressed, result in peace operations calming a state of turbulence that actually simmers under the surface, SWEET writes. “The state of felt turbulence can simmer for a decade only to flare-up when peacekeeping operations are withdrawn.”
These challenges play out in what he recognizes to be where events unfold rapidly, with seemingly unpredictable actions and actors, where tensions and polarities among actors, actions and interests are ever present, and the link between actions, actors and outcomes is tangled in such a complex context that one action may not only not cause an intended outcome, but may actually spur other events and outcomes. Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical and Tangled (RUPT) describes the context or ‘state’ a mission lead must lead in.
In RUPT, the context is too complex to rely on one leader, the author states. RUPT is created collectively and can only be led through in a collective fashion where leading happens at all levels, even by those who are not leaders, by role.
Leading collectives: Leading peace operations in the contexts from which they spring requires both leading institutions to help create conditions for violence to stop (aka peace), and the eventual transfer of authority and accountability from individual leaders to the engaged collectives, because only the collectives can hope to address and sustain peace. This brings to bear both leader-centered and collective views of leading.
“A collective view of leading helps prepare for positive peacebuilding that accommodates local beliefs and practices needed to accomplish shared direction, alignment and commitment,” SWEET writes. A leader-centered view of leading disguises an oft-made trade-off between situational/contingent leading and norm- or policy-based leading, which ultimately keeps ‘leading authorities’ accountable (and thus empowered over others) rather than transferring accountability and empowerment to the collectives themselves. This view complements leader-centered views of the ‘how’ of leaders, by lifting focus to the ‘what’ of leading.
Leading polarities: An example of a polarity dynamic in the peacebuilding space, according to SWEET, is that of the need to recognize both local and national interests. Focus on national interests (to the negation of local interests), and the system becomes centralized and often authoritarian. Fractionalize entirely into local interests (to the negation of common interests), and an ever-present imbalance of critical resources (for example) will often lead to conflict. Both local and national/common interests must be addressed to different degrees and in varying ways. They represent an interdependent polarity and are mirrored at the regional and international levels. “Sustainably leading polar tensions requires collective monitoring for indications of when one pole is being neglected.”

The Art of Creating Public Value in the United Nations

When it comes to the United Nations, there are multiple judges of its performance: member states, civil society and the international civil servants who manage the organization. And then there are the people who created the institution. What does the general public expect from the United Nations?
“The push and pull between a body of sovereign states and ‘we the peoples’ is one of the defining characteristics of what the UN is,” writes BRUCE JENKS in a paper published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.
Looking at what leadership means in the highly complex environment in which the United Nations operates, he explores the underlying principles of international public service as articulated in articles 97-101 of the UN Charter, as well as the interpretation of these articles by Dag Hammarskjold in his May 1961 Oxford Speech. Together these provide insights into the political space which can influence the scope for initiative and leadership, JENKS contends in his paper, ‘On Leadership: The Art of Creating Public Value in the United Nations’, published as part of the Foundation’s series commemorating 100 years of the international civil service.
JENKS also explores how Mark Moore’s strategic triangle serves to identify the scope of the political space that lies at the heart of the art of leadership. He discusses a number of the instruments available to create, as well as to invest in, political space.
The author concludes by highlighting that our reflections on the 100th anniversary of the creation of the international civil service come at a unique moment. “The need for strategic capacity and political space has never been so evident as it is today.” This is because of the convergence of a number of critical elements.
“The arrival of Anthropocene man means that for the first time, human beings have a direct impact on their own destiny,” JENKS states. “The speed of technological and scientific innovation is daunting. Today, never has the gap been so big between the resources we have at our disposal, what we can do with them, and what we are actually doing.”
Development challenges are emerging that require a collective response if there is to be any chance of finding solutions, the author states, adding that effective decision-making requires a level of collective action to succeed. Multilateralism has a major role to play in this regard. And the scientific evidence points to the very limited time we have to undertake the transformative changes which are required.
“The challenge that is common to all of these dimensions relates to the choices we make,” JENKS writes. “How do we exercise the control we have, how do we translate our mission into reality and how do we choose to use and create value out of the resources that are so bountiful.”
Fortunately, he states, Agenda 2030 provides us with a powerful, universal mission statement. “Whether its rhetoric will be matched by its translation into reality remains to be seen.”

Promoting Compliance with Human Rights: Performance of the UN Universal Periodic Review and Treaty Bodies

While a multitude of instruments exists to monitor state adherence to international human rights obligations, the extent of their effectiveness in improving state compliance remains unclear. 

VALENTINA CARRARO proposes and applies a model to assess the extent to which two United Nations human rights mechanisms – the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and the state reporting procedure of the treaty bodies – are perceived as capable of stimulating compliance with human rights, and why.

In an article titled ‘Promoting Compliance with Human Rights: The Performance of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review and Treaty Bodies’ and published in the journal International Studies Quarterly, CARRARO does so by identifying a set of goals potentially achieved by these organizations – generating pressure, stimulating learning, providing an accurate overview of states’ performance, and delivering practically feasible recommendations – and testing the extent to which reaching these goals is seen to facilitate compliance with human rights.

She concludes that the treaty bodies’ perceived strength lies in providing states with learning opportunities and an accurate overview of their internal situations. In contrast, the UPR is deemed particularly strong in generating peer and public pressure on states.

CARRARO shows that, under certain conditions, the three main theoretical schools on compliance – enforcement, management, and constructivist – offer credible explanations for states’ performance in implementing human rights recommendations, with the enforcement school faring relatively better than the other two. Data were collected by means of forty semi-structured interviews and an online survey, targeting individuals directly involved in the two procedures.

The two mechanisms show differing scores when it comes to their ability to achieve these goals, the author notes. The UPR’s perceived strength lies in generating peer and public pressure. “The main explanation for the UPR’s ability in generating public pressure is to be found in the active role that NGOs play in the process, holding states accountable for the commitments they made in the review.”

Additionally, the bilateral nature of UPR recommendations creates a much higher pressure on states to live up to their commitments than in the case of recommendations by nongovernmental experts.

Conversely, treaty bodies fare better in providing accurate overviews of states’ internal situations and learning opportunities. This is largely due to the expert nature of their recommendations, which are seen as more objective and of a higher quality than in the UPR.

Finally, both reviews are successful in delivering feasible recommendations, although with a notable difference: while UPR recommendations are appreciated for being realistic (albeit often vague), Concluding Observations are praised for being very detailed, yet criticized for aiming at unattainable standards.

“From a policy perspective, these findings suggest that the UPR and treaty bodies could reinforce each other’s strengths by working more closely together,” CARRARO states. Reviewing states in the UPR could more systematically consult recommendations delivered by the treaty bodies before formulating their own recommendations.

Even though this already occurs in several instances, it would be beneficial to make it a structural part of the process. If UPR recommendations were more strongly based on Concluding Observations, they would preserve their political force while, at the same time, providing better guidelines for states, according to the author.

“Future research could highlight the extent to which the output of the UPR and treaty bodies is currently aligned, and the degree to which recommendations by one body inform those by the other.”

Valentina Carraro, Promoting Compliance with Human Rights: The Performance of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review and Treaty Bodies, International Studies Quarterly, sqz078, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz078

Digital Public Goods: A Precondition for Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals

With a decade until the 2030 deadline to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, experts continue to view progress as largely inadequate. Many experts highlight collaboration as being crucial for driving progress on the 17 goals and 169 targets, which were formally launched in 2015.
Progress towards every single one of the goals and targets also hinges on the effective deployment of digital technologies, write ANITA GURUMURTHY and NANDINI CHAMI in a new report published by Bonn-based Development and Peace Foundation (sef:).
As the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (HLPDC) has flagged in its 2019 report, the authors state, this cannot be restricted to the idea of promoting access to connectivity technologies. “In the age of digital interdependence, a transformative vision in relation to Agenda 2030 requires building digital ecosystems, including elements such as public data pools and public platforms,” they write in the report, titled ‘Digital Public Goods: A Precondition for Realizing the SDGs’.
Only by overcoming crucial weaknesses in the current data economy will such ecosystems be able to catalyze and sustain progressive socio-economic change. A binding international treaty on data – enabling states to develop national policy frameworks for the governance of their data resources – is necessary for the realization of the SDGs.
Successful public provisioning of digital and data infrastructure is predicated on overcoming the data economy challenges. Infrastructural investment in digital public goods and national data and AI strategies or digital economy road maps need to be guided by an effective policy framework.
The following actions need to be undertaken on priority by governments:
- Building public data pools
- Adopting a mixed data economy ownership regime
- Putting in place a strategic framework to govern cross-border transfers of data
- Introducing public interest exemptions in AI patent licensing
- Recovering the public utility character of essential platform infrastructure
Undoubtedly, nation states cannot effectively undertake these policy measures without a supporting international framework for the regulation of transnational digital corporations, fair use exemptions for intellectual property rights in AI technologies and the governance of cross-border data flows.
In the first two areas, there are already existing processes in the multilateral system that need to be leveraged: the negotiations on the binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights must be closed out at the earliest with a dedicated section on platform companies; and the prevailing intellectual property rights regime must be revisited so that foundational digital infrastructure is made available as a global public good.
With regard to data, it is imperative that the governance of data flows is removed from the space of trade policy negotiations. “The need of the hour is a new binding international treaty on data that recognizes the sovereign right of states to evolve national policy frameworks for the governance of their data resources, working within the larger rubric of a data constitutionalism that respects, protects, and promotes the civic-political and economic rights of individuals and communities in data resources,” the authors state.
As Jovan Kurbalijia, the Executive Director of the argues, a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue forum at the international level to build policy traction on data and AI governance issues may be a useful step in the direction of international cooperation in the digital domain, GURUMURTHY and CHAMI write. The UN HLPDC’s recommendation to reboot the Internet Governance Forum into a Digital Cooperation Forum with due corrections to its historical weakness of lack of concrete action outcomes and dedicated discussion lines for governments/other stakeholders is a concrete direction in this regard.
Finally, in the highly skewed and exceptionally unequal global digital economy, strengthening ODA contributions to digitalization for development strategies in the global South must be undertaken, according to the authors. As the UNCTAD has flagged, the share of aid for ICT in aid for trade is only a mere 1.2%, and only 1% of project funding of multilateral development banks in developing countries has gone to ICT projects. This needs to shift immediately, through a dedicated mechanism to co-ordinate development funding for digital public goods that are integral to the realization of Agenda 2030.

From the League of Nations to the United Nations: Milestones for the International Civil Service

The centrality of a diverse, independent and loyal international civil service to the effectiveness and efficiency of a multilateral organization is a given today. Such professionals not only manage day-to-day operations of countless such organizations around the world but also plan, promote and implement international policies and agendas.
“Indeed, ideas of internationality, independence, and loyalty were recognized as crucial cornerstones when the first professional international civil service was established 100 years ago with the creation of the League of Nations,” writes KAREN GRAM-SKJOLDAGER in ‘From the League of Nations to the United Nations: Milestones for the International Civil Service’, a report published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation as part of a series commemorating 100 years of the international civil service.
The League of Nations was founded as part of the Versailles Peace Treaty in June 1919, which also saw the creation of the International Labour Office and the Permanent Court of International Justice. “However, the statesmen and diplomats who created these new international organizations had given little thought to the form and function of the largest administration of this new multilateral system: the League Secretariat,” the author states. Article 6 of the League’s founding document, the Covenant, merely stated that a secretariat should be created comprising ‘a Secretary-General and such secretaries and staff as may be required’.
While the creation of the League Secretariat itself marked a critically important initial milestone in the development of a modern international civil service, the first Secretary-General of the organization, former British senior diplomat Sir Eric Drummond, more or less had a free hand to organize the Secretariat the way he saw fit. Working out of small office in Cumberland House in London with a staff of just three, Drummond started designing his new administration. The humble beginning of the Secretariat stood in stark contrast to Drummond’s ambitious vision, which would have an impact on the role of international civil servants over the decades to come.
The core principles of the modern international civil service – multinational staffing, institutional independence and undivided institutional loyalty – came into being in an incomplete and improvised form and developed gradually through the inter-war years. “With the creation of the United Nations, the experiments and experiences of the League were transformed into fully-fledged, formalized concepts and principles and lifted to the highest legal level enshrined in the UN Charter and other multilateral treaties,” GRAM-SKJOLDAGER states.
The new and enhanced legal status of the international civil servant was substantiated by the creation of a new UN Standard of Conduct for international civil servants. In 1949, the International Civil Service Advisory Board was set up to develop a standard of conduct for international civil servants. Here too, the continuities from the League, are clear.
The 1954 ‘Report on Standards of Conduct in the International Civil Service’ became a handbook for international civil servants. The report confirmed and developed the principles of multinationality, independence and loyalty from the League but with a somewhat stronger emphasis on the rules and procedures that enhanced the institutional autonomy of the international civil service. Thus, it confirmed the principle that the Secretary-General (and the Executive Heads of the specialized agencies) had the sole authority in appointing staff, now highlighting how this needed to be ‘maintained in practice as well as in theory’.
When addressing the issue of multinationality, the board also made it clear that while a broad geographical representation was desirable, the Secretariat leadership should be accorded a high degree of flexibility and room for maneuver. The board thus expressed the ‘firm conviction that the fixing of any rigid quota for geographical distribution would be extremely harmful to an international secretariat’, recommending ‘a regional approach to geographical distribution’ and that ‘corrections’ to imbalances should be made gradually and without rigid scrutiny. The ‘Standards of Conduct’ remained relatively unchanged until 2001, getting its last major update in 2013. It is still an important document for international civil servants today.
The new and robust legal framework for the international civil service was reflexive of a more general strengthening of the Secretariats political role. Unlike the League Secretaries-General, the new Secretaries-General of the UN were authorized to bring issues before the Security Council that they considered to be a threat to international peace and security (Article 99). They could now also be assigned any function that the Security Council or General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council or the Trusteeship Council decided on (Article 98), thus transcending the purely administrative function as the head of the Secretariat.
While much has changed, a lot remains the same, as GRAM-SKJOLDAGER reminds us. The UN Secretariat today continues to confront a major challenge the League grappled with: How the international civil service achieves broad geographical representation and close interactions with its surroundings, while also maintaining the undivided loyalty of its officials and securing its institutional independence.

Theorizing the Judicialization of International Relations

The advent of judicialization beyond national borders marks a fundamental shift in international relations, leading some to argue that this shift is permanent. Some governments, however, have responded by mobilizing political resources and strategies to defend their interests.

“In addition, populist revolts against European integration and globalization more generally may have been exacerbated by the strength of the courts associated with the European Union (EU) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international arbitral tribunals that hear investor-state disputes by foreign corporations,” write KAREN J. ALTER,  EMILIE M. HAFNER-BURTON and  LAURENCE R. HELFER in the journal International Studies Quarterly. “These politics may take a long time to fully play out, so that the ultimate impact of international adjudication may not be immediately apparent.”

For example, China’s entry into the WTO and its acceptance of the obligation to adjudicate trade disputes has had many downstream political effects, the authors write in their article titled ‘Theorizing the Judicialization of International Relations’. The United States no longer uses the threat of withdrawing most favored nation market access because China disrespects the human rights of its citizens. The binding and legally enforceable nature of WTO trade rules has constrained responses to increased Chinese imports, contributing to the US and European strategy of negotiating new trade agreements outside of the WTO framework, to the invocation of national security as a justification for limiting imports, to the current US policy of blocking appointments to the WTO Appellate Body, and to a populist backlash against trade liberalization. 

Most recently, the United States announced its withdrawal from a 144-year-old postal union treaty, because this treaty provides discounted small package shipping rates for Chinese goods sent to the United States. The WTO also creates a potential platform for China to take up the mantle of multilateralism that the Trump administration is shedding. “These events are not wholly determined by the judicialization processes we discuss. Yet, it is nonetheless the case that the legal rights and obligations associated with China's WTO membership – and the fact that these rights can be judicially enforced—have been a global political game changer.”

The overarching insights of the judicialization framework – that states do not fully determine the content, scope, or impact of delegation or adjudication and that legal process can diminish the role of executives and legislatures – has important implications for the study of international relations, ALTER, HAFNER-BURTON and HELFER state.

A key implication is that some of what the law actually does takes place in the shadows. “The mere threat of adjudication can prompt mobilization, bargains, and negotiations in ways that shape political decisions without any formal legal actions—a fact that has gone largely unnoticed by traditional international relations theory, which tends to focus on actual disputes and their settlements.” 

Moreover, the adjudication process itself, once it has kicked in, brings a range of new actors that have not traditionally been the focus of international relations theorists. Alongside states and their well-studied branches of government are many other actors, such as judges and arbitrators, that interject themselves into what traditionally have been considered state matters. 

Thus, for debates over compliance, looking simply to immediate state-driven outcomes may miss an essential element of law's influence. “Legal scholars have long understood that law is a process; interjecting this insight into the study of international politics can – and should – change the way we study what legal institutions actually do and how they help or hinder different actors and actions.”

Adjudication – and its very possibility – shapes legal discourse and state and international decision-making, the authors state. More broadly, the ‘practice of legality’ imparts a stability and a universality to international law that, at least in some circumstances, limits the extent to which the whims of executives are accepted within a single society or diffused around the world. 

The constraints of this stability may be limited, as, for example, when President Trump follows prescribed legal steps to execute decisions to withdraw from international agreements or to levy tariffs, thereby avoiding litigation over alleged abuses of presidential authority. Yet, the ‘stickiness’ of legal processes may also mean that, in the long run, Trump will fail to change the international institutions or laws he dislikes, avoiding a major disruption of the existing multilateral order.

“We do not dispute that power undergirds laws and legal practices, such as those concerning the use of force and the pursuit of vital national interests,” the authors state. “But the interests of great powers cannot explain all externally oriented national and international behaviors.” It cannot explain why international laws do not maximally advantage hegemonic interests, why human rights advocacy has developed specific understandings of legal rights-claiming, why firms and bankers worry about and respond to legal regulations, or why national judges decide cases by applying settled principles of legal interpretation that ignore guidance from political actors.

This does not mean that state interests no longer matter; indeed, the more powerful a state is, the better it may be able to deflect legal processes or harness law as another tool in its arsenal. “But it does mean that state interests may be shaped, limited, and channeled by adjudicatory bodies and nonstate actors in ways not yet fully understood.”

Karen J Alter, Emilie M Hafner-Burton, Laurence R Helfer, Theorizing the Judicialization of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 449–463, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz019

Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations

Most multilateral negotiations today take place via the computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones of diplomats, whom distance may separate, but who negotiate 24/7. The logical question is: How does technology influence international negotiations?
REBECCA ADLER-NISSEN and ALENA DRIESCHOVA explore “track-change diplomacy,” that is, how diplomats use information and communication technology (ICT) to collaboratively edit and negotiate documents.
“But technological advances and the ubiquitous nature of ICT do more than just facilitate negotiations. They also push negotiations in a particular direction, sometimes with unexpected consequences.”
To analyze the widespread but understudied phenomenon of track-change diplomacy, the authors adopt a practice-oriented approach to technology, developing the concept of affordance: the way a tool or technology simultaneously enables and constrains the tasks users can possibly perform with it.
Their article, titled ‘Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations’ and published in International Studies Quarterly shows how digital ICT affords shareability, visualization, and immediacy of information, thus shaping the temporality and power dynamics of international negotiations.
These three affordances have significant consequences for how states construct and promote national interests; how diplomats reach compromises among a large number of states (as text edits in collective drafting exercises); and how power plays out in international negotiations, the authors contend.
Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of negotiations between the European Union's member states, as well as in-depth interviews, the analysis casts new light on these negotiations, where documents become the site of both semantic and political struggle. “Rather than delivering on the technology's promise of keeping track and reinforcing national oversight in negotiations, we argue that track-change diplomacy can in fact lead to a loss of control, challenging existing understandings of diplomacy.”

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Alena Drieschova, Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 531–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz030

Levels of Dependence Between the European Union and Other International Organizations in Peacebuilding

With the European Union (EU)’s growing engagement with other international organizations (IOs) on peacebuilding, academic literature has been paying much attention to the reasons for the EU and its partners’ successes and otherwise in their interactions. Such discussions are furthermore often conceptualized around cooperation, competition and conflict.
What much of the literature fails to address are the reasons why the EU consistently interacts with other IOs in peacebuilding, write PETAR PETROV, HYLKE DIJKSTRA, KATARINA ĐOKIĆ, PETER HORNE ZARTSDAHL and EWA MAHR. Indeed, resource dependency theory, the most convincing account in organization theory explaining why organizations interact seems difficult to apply to IOs, they write in the Journal of European Integration.
Whereas this theory stresses the resource dependence of organizations on their environment, IOs tend to rely mostly on their membership. In their article, titled ‘All hands on deck: levels of dependence between the EU and other international organizations in peacebuilding, the authors attempt to expand the scope of the resource dependency perspectives and make them applicable to interactions between the EU and other IOs and thus provide a more nuanced explanation as to the reasons behind the EU’s cooperative preference.
The article argues that one needs to account for macro-level and micro-level dependencies in addition to the more conventional meso-level dependencies. While the EU in Kosovo, for instance, might not be formally dependent on other IOs – apart from NATO’s security provisions and the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)’s information about northern Kosovo – for the implementation of its Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, or EULEX, the EU can only succeed in bringing stability and progress in Kosovo, if the other IOs are also effective in fulfilling their own mandates. Despite the EU’s extensive commitment, the full challenge of Kosovo is too large for the EU to address, which has resulted in a division of labor across IOs.
Similar to such macro-level dependencies, the authors state, “we should neither underestimate the importance of micro-level dependence”. While ad hoc, one-off, contributions by partners might not be essential for IOs to fulfil their core mandate, such contributions are often very welcome. It has been long stressed that particularly on the ground, there tends to be a large degree of practicality to interactions between IOs based on informal and personal relations. Even if not institutionalized through formal and permanent agreements, ad hoc contributions are often the bit of oil that keep the machinery running.
“While this article has given illustrations through insights from Kosovo, Mali and Armenia, the article also triggers new questions,” the authors state. First, while it is useful to distinguish between these levels, a key question is how the levels relate to each other. UNMIK, as originally established, sought to create a formalized division of labor amongst IOs through its pillar structure. This is where the macro and meso levels intersect. Similarly, there are different degrees of formality that may distinguish between the meso and micro levels.
“Second, we have not tried to explain variation across cases within the levels.” For instance, macro-level interaction is more problematic in Kosovo than Mali. At the same time, the pre-accession process in Kosovo provides a macro-level focal point for the international community. The situation is less clear in Armenia where the EU is a secondary actor.
“The new framework we have put forward should facilitate further research into the dependencies of IOs across the different levels,” the authors state.

Petar Petrov, Hylke Dijkstra, Katarina Đokić, Peter Horne Zartsdahl & Ewa Mahr (2019) All hands on deck: levels of dependence between the EU and other international organizations in peacebuilding, Journal of European Integration, DOI: 10.1080/07036337.2019.1622542

Operationalizing Conflict Prevention: Role of UN Police

Since they were first deployed in the 1960s, UN Police have been an established instrument in the peace and security toolbox of the United Nations. Although their role has increasingly been framed as preventive, police contingents have become a regular feature of special political missions as well as peacekeeping operations.
The concept of ‘sustaining peace’ has consolidated the notion of UN Police as a central actor in conflict prevention in a wide range of settings and stages of conflict. In the context of the recent peace and security architecture reform, the UN Secretary-General formally assigned UN Police the role of a system-wide service provider.
While this opens up a range of deployment settings where UN Police can contribute to conflict prevention, writes ANNIKA S. HANSEN, it also entails organizational, financial and political challenges.
Some challenges are specific to police, others are inherent to preventive engagement more broadly but have police-specific connotations, the author writes in ‘Operationalizing Conflict Prevention – The Role of United Nations Police’, a policy briefing published by Berlin-based ZIF-Center for International Peace Operations. She suggests the following key considerations:
Finding a persuasive narrative: The most fundamental challenge is gaining host-country consent for early preventive engagement without appearing to undermine its authority and sovereignty and potentially ‘exposing’ areas of fragility and contested legitimacy. The joint World Bank-United Nations report “Pathways for Peace” (2017) suggests that a narrative which explains how preventive support will in fact bolster a state’s sovereignty and capacity might be persuasive.
Balancing technical and political engagement: Concepts of police reform have long argued that building state capacity without concurrently establishing democratic oversight and good governance, bears the danger of strengthening corrupt or authoritarian institutions. Hence, promises of technical support to enhance sovereignty must be complemented by political engagement, in order not to aggravate tensions and feed conflict drivers.
Addressing regional dimensions of conflict dynamics: Although conflicts tend to be part of a regional system, most deployments remain country-based: UN Police conduct activities with national police services and other stakeholders as part of a peace operation within a particular country. There are few examples of support to conflict prevention through regional offices to address transnational dimensions of conflict. The Peacebuilding Plan for Liberia is one; it foresees future support being channeled through the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel. These examples are likely to increase in the future.
Avoid flying blind: Conflict analysis in the UN has been notoriously disjointed. Efforts are underway to strengthen these capacities throughout the system, but challenges remain in merging component parts of the analysis produced by different stakeholders into a cohesive UN strategy for conflict prevention. This also entails structuring UN Police cooperation with DPPA and other system-wide instruments for coordinating conflict prevention.
Convincing member states of expanding portfolios: Russia and China are the most vocal member states that consider broadening the context of UN Police assistance to non-mission settings beyond the remit of the UN Security Council. Perhaps recognizing that the GFP is the primary entry point for such assistance, Russia rejected that a call for greater member state support for the GFP be included in the December 2018 SC Resolution 2447 on Police, Justice and Corrections.
Securing resources: Mobilizing funds for preventive activities has been challenging. While UN Police efforts in a peace operation are funded through the support account (peacekeeping budget), there are no such ready funds in non-mission settings – nor are there currently modalities for deploying individual officers outside of the SPC setup. Where the Peacebuilding Commission is engaged, such as in Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, the Peacebuilding Fund can provide vital funding to address post-transition needs. All other extra-budgetary financing has to be generated for a specific program, such as the senior management training for police in Tunisia, which individual member states have funded through UNDP and OHCHR projects. Germany is also providing funding to enable preventive UN Police deployments.
Pursuing prevention in new thematic areas: New areas, such as organized crime and preventing violent extremism, are pushing their way onto the prevention agenda. Organized crime represents a prime case for prevention: unless addressed early, it festers and infiltrates state institutions. Given the nexus between organized crime and national political dynamics, however, addressing organized crime, for which UN Police has deployed specialized teams as in Mali, endangers fragile consent and confounds political engagement.
The same can be argued when it comes to taking on the prevention of violent extremism. Given the mismatch between the deep roots of destabilizing forces and the duration of UN Police deployments, preventive contributions cannot bear fruit in isolation from longer term political and developmental efforts that can affect underlying causes of conflict. And yet, these contributions bring valuable change where it matters most, close to the people, and thereby maintain space for a political process to unfold.

Peacekeeping Conditions for an Artificial Intelligence Society

As human society searches for ways to achieve global peace, a new possibility may be emerging through appropriate interventions of an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system.
To achieve this goal, writes HIROSHI YAMAKAWA in the journal Big Data and Cognitive Computing, an AI system must operate continuously and stably (condition 1) and have an intervention method for maintaining peace among human societies based on a common value (condition 2). However, as a premise, it is necessary to have a minimum common value upon which all of human society can agree (condition 3).
In his paper, titled ‘Peacekeeping Conditions for an Artificial Intelligence Society’, the author investigated an AI system that satisfies condition 1. A part of the system may potentially be destroyed, so a robust intelligent agents (IA) society should be a team of autonomous and distributed IAs. A common value of humanity is shared among all IAs. Individual IAs would decompose common goals and derive means so that they can contribute to the advancement of common values. Each IA would diversify its activities to effectively divide tasks among them all. In order to adapt to their local environment, IAs would usually hold, as their local values, sub-goals derived from common goals.
There are a wide variety of local values and competition for available resources will create a competitive situation for IA comrades, the author states. It is an advantage that competition leads to an increase in capacity to achieve a common goal. “However, if the effort towards merely winning the competition increases, cooperation is lost, and devastating struggles occur, creating obstacles to achieving common goals.”
The ideal situation is one in which every agent believes that “all other agents intend socially acceptable goals”, YAMAKAWA writes. Here, “socially acceptable goals” means that the goals contribute to common goals and do not conflict with any other IA’s local values in practice. Under such circumstances, the IA society can achieve goals peacefully, efficiently, and consistently.
Communication channel problems, comprehension ability problems, and computational complexity problems exist, however, that may impede the realization of ideal situations. In an IA society based on a computer, it seems possible to design a distributed global management system that maintains the local values of distributed IAs.
Conversely, humans are biologically constrained. Irreversible death strengthens our survival instincts, and human beings need to maintain our species through reproduction. Humans must also distinguish their mates by appearance. For these reasons, similar people gather and become more likely to form a party. If people divide into groups with similar values and compete for resources, this can be a major cause of conflict.
YAMAKAWA assumes that building a universal AI system to arbitrate conflicts in human society based on a common value would reduce the existential risk. For stable and continuous operation, the AI system in his paper was constructed as an autonomously distributed system, which has concurrency, scalability, and fault-tolerance. Many issues remain to be solved, but this technology is feasible.
“It is desirable for the final form of our proposed AI system to be almost autonomous and worldwide, but part of that system can begin as a conventional AI system with the help of human operators.” However, a new issue will then arise regarding executing arbitrations that are consistent with a common value, while avoiding arbitrary influences of human operators.
Various possibilities for applying superintelligence to reduce existential risks caused by various non-AI factors, such as climate change, have been discussed before. With regard to AI itself, discussions have mainly focused on the increase in risks they might pose.
An approach using advanced AIs to reduce the existing risks that increase with the progress of AIs has not been sufficiently investigated. “However, effectively using the power of superintelligence or more elementary AI to construct future governance will create previously unknown possibilities for the future of humanity.”

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Supporting Inclusive Peace Processes

Amid today’s dynamic and fast-changing world of conflict resolution, it is no longer viable to resolve major conflicts through a simple deal between the opposing armed groups or elites within a country. Dealing with the deep-seated challenges within a society, today’s peace processes – from negotiations, through to the signing of a peace agreement and its implementation – need to be inclusive. Of course, the armed groups and their rank and file are also to be included in the peace process and must also share the peace dividends that come from it.
“Thus, any serious conflict resolution efforts to achieve sustainable peace need to ensure that all groups in society have the opportunity to be heard and have their concerns addressed,” writes ELDRIDGE ADOLFO in ‘Supporting Inclusive Peace Processes’, a brief published by the Folke Bernadotte Academy – Swedish Agency for Peace, Security and Development.
“The inclusion and voices of the various constituencies from women, to youth, minorities, business communities and more, are now an essential ingredient in achieving sustainable peace. Diplomats, governments, rebel groups and mediators all need to adjust to this new reality of complex peacemaking,” the author states.
Challenges undoubtedly come with new reality, he adds, but research and communities of practice are working to fill the gaps in knowledge on how to best work with inclusive peace processes.
The professionalization of the dialogue and mediation field over the last two decades has meant that there now exists a core body of expertise and a community of practitioners that have gained significant and chartered knowledge on how to work with these issues.
“Another significant step to move forward is to increasingly inform and gain acceptance for inclusive peace processes more widely among conflict parties and stakeholders – including victims, the regional and international community,” ADOLFO states. An understanding of the value of inclusion and its long-term effects on sustaining peace needs to be pronounced more often to create societal acceptance.
Peace processes are costly and inclusive peace processes even more so as they consist of the participation of a much larger community that includes various segments of society. It also requires much larger efforts to run inclusive peace processes, which also cost more in terms of resources.
“Those paying the bill for a peace process must make a cost-benefit analysis of a failed peace process that reverts to armed conflict and the significantly higher costs that creates, against the increased but significantly lower costs of an inclusive peace process.”

Defining the Concept of ‘Violent Extremism’

Despite being recognized across the international community as one of the critical development challenges of our time, a uniform definition of violent extremism (VE) – one that can ensure a shared understanding of the phenomenon it represents – does not exist.
 “All-too-often, it appears that VE as a concept is framed as self-evident,” write MATHIAS BAK, KRISTOFFER NILAUS TARP and CHRISTINA SCHORI LIANG in ‘Defining the Concept of ‘Violent Extremism’, published by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. This raises questions about whether subjective perceptions wind up influencing the responses and interventions currently designed to address the phenomenon.
 “The fact that interventions aimed at addressing VE are generally designed before the problem is actually delineated and defined is a strange anomaly,” the authors write.
The report, published as part of the Centre’s Geneva Papers Series, attempts to produce a definition that captures the most central characteristics of the types of violent extremism carried out by today’s most prominent violent extremist organizations (VEOs). “As such, it will not be an attempt to deconstruct the concept of violent extremism or deny its usefulness,” the authors state. Instead, the objective is to develop a definition which touches on key aspects of the violent extremism phenomenon, while also delineating the trend vis-à-vis other concepts such as radicalization and terrorism.
VEOs frequently undertake a mode of state-building that is based partly on a quest for legitimacy and partly on fear, coercion and extreme brutality. The report emphasizes VE partly as a political project in which state failure, the collapse of central government authority and the hardening of identity boundaries constitute opportunities for VEOs to build up their public authority and influence.
“[Violent extremism, on one hand, is exceptionally brutal and is undertaken in a deliberate attempt to spread chaos. On the other hand, it is also used as a means to foster state-building that is conducive to a specific ideology as well as to build and strengthen social boundaries,” BAK, TARP and LIANG state.
To capture the behavior of prominent VEOs, the authors assert, the following definition best exemplifies the essence of violent extremism:

Violent extremism is a violent type of mobilization that aims to elevate the status of one group, while excluding or dominating its ‘others’ based on markers, such as gender, religion, culture and ethnicity. In doing so, violent extremist organizations destroy existing political and cultural institutions, and supplant them with alternative governance structures that work according to the principles of a totalitarian and intolerant ideology.

“This definition highlights the political nature of the VE phenomenon, as well as its use of violent force to gain power. Thus, interventions against it must consider the unique regional and political forces at play, while also emphasizing the importance of strengthening social dynamics.”
VEOs use a deadly combination of local grievances and rehearsed narratives to lure its followers deeper into a complex, insular and disturbing world. It is therefore important to continue studying both the concept itself and develop a better awareness of engaging and empowering all stakeholders in the community -- be they women, youth, religious leaders, medical professionals, government and the private sector -- to push back against violent extremism.
The authors further state that violent extremism will only be challenged by designing and carrying out inclusive and effective multi-disciplinary and multi-agency approaches. Attempts to combat the totalitarian and intolerant nature of VEOs has been addressed through programming that enhance the capacity of individuals and community service organizations (CSOs) to engage in preventive dialogue. While such practices may be helpful in establishing a form of cohesion that prevents VE ideology from entering the mainstream and reducing inter-group information asymmetries that lead to group-based security dilemmas, few believe such engagements will reach the most adamant violent extremists.
“To truly put an end to the scale of VE that exists in the world today, the political project of violent extremism and the opportunity structures it exploits must be addressed.”

Transitional Justice, International Law and the UN

What relationship does international law have to transitional justice and what role has the United Nations played in shaping that relationship?
The international legal history of this concept reveals that the UN has shifted from relying on international law to support nationally determined transitional justice efforts to expecting States to conform to a growing body of international legal standards it has set in this field, writes LEENA GROVER in the Nordic Journal of International Law.
“This turn to international legal hegemony and UN managerialism can marginalize some of the most pressing concerns of people attempting to overcome past large-scale abuses.”
In recent years, the UN has expanded its work in transitioning societies and scholars have recommended ways for better addressing the needs of their members, GROVER writes in her research article titled ‘Transitional Justice, International Law and the United Nations’.
However, these measures seem partial at best, as they disrupt neither international law’s hegemony nor the UN’s managerial role in this field, which operate as major constraints on societies weighing their transitional justice options.
“Today, it is difficult to conceive of transitional justice without reference to the thick normative framework established by the UN and embedded in international law,” GROVER states.
To be sure, this regime has made many positive contributions to transitioning societies, supporting justice initiatives that would perhaps not be possible otherwise owing inter alia to legal barriers, limited resources or a lack of political will.
However, this regime contains a hierarchy of interests and does not overtly admit normative contestation. As a result, citizens are constrained in selecting transitional justice responses or else select responses that fall outside of this regime and are therefore not captured by it.
This regime also reflects a particular understanding of transitional justice that diminishes the role of national legal and political orders and assumes the need for international involvement in a normative sense, implicitly regarding transitioning societies and its members as unable or unwilling to conceive of transitional justice themselves.
Normative expansion, when it occurs, is regime-specific and depends on experts within it to do this work, the author states. “But where does the greatest normative expansion originate from if not the needs and imaginations of individuals in transitioning societies?”
If this is the case, is the answer to strengthen this international regime and give it the tools to catch up with developments on the ground in a conceptually authentic manner? Or is there another way forward?

Balancing Incentives Among Actors: A Carrots and Sticks Approach to Reputation in UN Peacekeeping Missions

With peacekeeping operations increasingly including a multitude of actors with varying interests and competing priorities, international organizations are forced to balance the needs of the actors involved in such missions.
And because international organizations often depend on member states as implementing agents, this could cause such organizations to suppress their own interests in favor of member states. That, in turn, could ultimately negatively affect the communities in which the peacekeepers operate.
This dynamic is present in United Nations peacekeeping operations, and some have sought to align the incentives of the UN and the states that contribute peacekeepers so as to harness reputation as a force to encourage the good behavior of all involved.
SABRINA M. KARIM argues that this alignment rarely happens because of international organizations’ reliance on member states. Through the dynamics of UN peacekeeping operations, she shows that the UN reliance on states to provide police officers and troops suppresses the UN’s own interests in favor of the contributing states’ interests.
In ‘Balancing Incentives Among Actors: A Carrots and Sticks Approach to Reputation in UN Peacekeeping Missions’, published in AJIL Unbound, which supplements the American Journal of International Law, KARIM also identifies a carrots and sticks approach to balancing incentives.
Drawing on a rational choice, actor-based theory to identify the mixed motives of the various actors who staff and operate peacekeeping missions, the framework proposed here provides a way to better understand the sources of the tension that exist when evaluating reputation as a disciplinary tool for international organizations.
“Indeed, a careful balancing of carrots and sticks could help balance the interests of both the UN and contributing states,” KARIM states.
What would this entail? On one hand, this means applying the stick – the public naming and shaming of states whose personnel have engaged in misconduct, regardless of the consequences, the author states. “This stick turns into multiple sticks as the UN enables third parties to penalize poorly performing states by publicizing their conduct.”
However, the stick must be coupled with a carrot – an increase in resources to those states that perform well, she adds. “In this way, the carrot incentivizes poorly performing states to reform their behavior instead of withdrawing their peacekeeping mission contributions.”
The logic is not unique to peacekeeping missions but applies to any activity undertaken by international organizations that involves the delegation of duties to other actors, according to KARIM. “Leveraging reputation as a part of a carrots and sticks balancing act is a novel way for any international organization to manage problems associated with misaligned incentives.”

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Digital Momentum for the United Nations Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century

While digitalization fundamentally changes the range of options available for future civilizational development, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals requires a fundamental transformation of the economy and society.
“These two challenges can only be met by dedicated global thinking and action,” a policy paper by the German Advisory Council on Change (WBGU) stresses. “So what could be more appropriate than to use the momentum of digitalization to advance the Transformation towards Sustainability and launch decisive stimuli for achieving national and global sustainability targets?”
Digital solutions can make it easier to supply the world’s population with food and renewable energies in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way, according to the paper, titled ‘Digital Momentum for the UN Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century’.
The intelligent design, longevity, reparability and recyclability of products in a digitally supported circular economy can reduce the demand for resources. Individuals can further their education using digital commons and develop an awareness of responsibility for overarching sustainability and humanity issues. Polycentric networks based on a culture of global cooperation and as a foundation for global governance can increasingly use sustainability-oriented social platforms. International sustainability politics could follow principles of open government and improve democratic participation.
However, the paper stresses, leveraging this potential will not happen automatically. Taking into account the opportunities and risks of digitalization in selected fields, WBGU offers four stimuli for using the digital momentum to (1) develop a global (environmental) awareness, (2) establish a globally networked, digitally supported circular economy, (3) modernize sustainability governance, and (4) continue sustainability policy in the digital age beyond 2030.
The implementation of these proposals can provide essential impetus for global sustainability politics: it is a question of the further development of our civilization on a finite planet in the digital Anthropocene. “In this way, the WBGU wishes to generate impetus for inter and transnational initiatives that urgently need to be taken. At the latest, the UN Summit proposed by the WBGU for 2022 should agree on key steps for a sustainable Digital Age – 30 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.”

WBGU – German Advisory Council on Global Change (2019): Digital Momentum for the UN Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century. Policy Paper 10. Berlin: WBGU.

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United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence

United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) are increasingly engaging with local communities to support peace processes, including as part of the world organization’s new focus on the management of transitions during the drawdown and subsequent closure of peace operations.
Existing academic research, however, tends to focus on the coercive and state-building functions of UN PKOs at the expense of the concrete local activities being conducted with community leaders and populations.
In a new study, published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, HANNAH M. SMIDT investigates how peacekeepers’ community-based intergroup dialogue activities influence communal violence. She argues that facilitating dialogue between different communal identity-based groups locally can revive intergroup coordination and diminish negative biases against other groups, thereby reducing the risk of communal conflict escalation.
She tests her argument using a novel data set of intergroup dialogue activities organized by the UN PKO in Cote d’Ivoire across 107 departments from October 2011 to May 2016. “The analyses provide robust evidence that the UN PKO mitigated communal violence by organizing intergroup dialogues,” she writes in the article titled ‘United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence’.
In 2013, more than half of the residents in the violence-prone region Western Comoe reported improved intercommunal relations, the author notes, adding that civilian peacekeepers may have contributed to this result. “This study provides robust evidence that UNOCI’s efforts to strengthen local conflict resolution capacity through intergroup dialogue activities decreased the average risk of communal violence. Its findings should encourage international and national organizations that local intergroup dialogue can meaningfully complement national-level peacebuilding initiatives.
Existing studies argue that peacekeeping works to reduce violence by monitoring belligerents’ behavior, imposing costs for coercive acts, replacing dysfunctional state structures, and de-escalating local conflicts through facilitating communication between political and armed group leaders, SMIDT states.
“Adding to this latter mechanism, this study examines peacekeepers’ intergroup dialogue activities and, thus, shifts the focus from political and armed groups to community leaders and local populations as well as from reactive responses to peacekeepers’ more preventive engagement in order to strengthen the locally rooted mechanisms and norms for peaceful dispute settlement.”
Furthermore, while conflict research tends to prioritize civil war–related violence by governments and nonstate armed actors, local-level ‘everyday’ or ‘peacetime’ violence after war can also undermine peacebuilding processes. Examining possible solutions is therefore important and the focus of her article, she writes.
“While recent research has significantly advanced our knowledge about coercive peacekeeping mechanisms at the local level,” SMIDT states, “this study is the first to systematically evaluate how civilian peacekeeping activities on the ground influence collective violence.”
Although her findings are limited to Cote d’Ivoire, the author states, case evidence from Somalia, Ethiopia and Liberia suggests that UN peacekeepers’ efforts to strengthen local conflict resolution mechanisms may also work in other war-torn countries.
It is difficult to test the persistence of the effects of intergroup dialogue activities because intergroup dialogues occur frequently over time and there is no sustained period without intervention following an intergroup dialogue event, SMIDT notes. “Yet, additional analyses suggest that intergroup dialogues held up to nine months previously still reduce communal violence if we hold constant the more or less frequent interventions in the meantime.”
Despite some anecdotal evidence, the article has to remain agnostic about the microlevel mechanisms through which intergroup dialogue interventions work, she states. Interviews with peacekeepers and community leaders, surveys of participants in UN activities, and similar individual-level data would help to empirically untangle the causal story.
Despite these limits, the study constitutes a crucial step forward in understanding peacekeeping mechanisms, providing some of the missing evidence on peacekeepers’ actions and policies, the author stresses. “[It] shows that it is also through strengthening conflict resolution locally that peacekeeping contributes to a reduction in violence.”