‘Sisters in Peace’: Analyzing the Cooperation between the UN and the EU in Peace Mediation

With the proliferation of external actors such as states, international and regional organizations, NGOs, and individuals, contemporary international mediation has become increasingly crowded and complex.
Among international organizations, the United Nations has been one of the most frequent providers of international mediation since 1945. While the UN played important mediation roles in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, its significance in mediation has been declining since the beginning of the 21st century.
At the same time, regional organizations have become increasingly engaged as peace mediators. Among them is the European Union. After initial failures to broker agreements in Yugoslavia’s conflicts in the 1990s, and a phase during which it consolidated its foreign and security policy, the EU has (re-)emerged as an important international provider of peace mediation, particularly in regions to the east and south of its area.
JULIAN BERGMANN examines UN-EU cooperation over peace mediation. He compares their conceptual approaches to peace mediation and the evolution of their institutional capacities, demonstrating that the EU has learned from the UN, while actively supporting the strengthening of UN mediation capacity. 
“The most important difference concerns the embeddedness of mediation in a broader foreign policy agenda in the case of the EU compared to the UN,” he writes in the journal International Negotiation. 
BERGMANN’s article, titled ‘“Sisters in Peace”: Analyzing the Cooperation between the United Nations and the European Union in Peace Mediation’, also examines models of EU-UN cooperation in mediation practice. 
Drawing on an overview of cases of UN–EU cooperation, the article develops a typology of the constellations through which the two organizations have engaged with and supported each other. A case study on the Geneva International Discussions on South Ossetia and Abkhazia investigates the effectiveness of this coordination. The findings point to a high degree of effectiveness, although this has not yet translated into tangible mediation outcomes.

Bergmann, J. (2021). “Sisters in Peace”: Analyzing the Cooperation between the United Nations and the European Union in Peace Mediation, International Negotiation (published online ahead of print 2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15718069-bja10041

Mission (Im)possible? UN Military Peacekeeping Operations in Civil Wars

Under what conditions can UN military peacekeeping operations (PKOs) succeed in contexts of civil war? 
DARYA PUSHKINA, MARKUS B. SIEWERT and STEFAN WOLFF raise this critical question amid the prevalence and cost of civil wars and the high, yet not always fulfilled, expectations of very costly military PKOs as responses to them by the international community. 
“[T]he academic and policy debates on this question are as long-standing as they are unresolved. Our article contributes to existing scholarship in several ways,” the authors state in their research article published in the European Journal of International Relations. 
First, adopting a nuanced and multi-dimensional definition of success that considers violence, displacement, and contagion as its three essential components, they have identified 19 cases of full or partial successes, and 13 full or partial failures, covering all 32 UN military PKOs deployed to civil war settings. 
Second, they develop an original dataset and analytical framework that identifies a wide range of plausible factors related to the dynamics of both the intervention and the underlying conflict it is meant to address. 
Third, applying qualitative comparative analysis to their dataset of these 32 military PKOs, their key finding is that what matters most and consistently across all of these missions is the presence or absence of domestic consent to, and cooperation with, deployed PKOs.
“We found that domestic consent to and cooperation with a military PKO turns out as the single most important factor in both its absence and presence,” the authors state in the article, titled ‘Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars’. 
The absence of external belligerent support is part of all pathways to PKO success. “Both findings are confirmed in our robustness tests, which underscores the high internal validity of their findings. 
“We are thus confident that we have generated important new hypotheses about PKOs in general that can be further tested in future research on PKOs, including outside the UN context. While this may suggest limited external validity, we note that our findings concern an important and large subset of UN PKOs (32 of all 71 PKOs to date and 6 out of 12 of current PKOs).”
Thus, from a policy perspective, PUSHKINA, SIEWERT and WOLFF state, military PKOs should not be implemented in the absence of (prior) domestic consent and cooperation or in the presence of external belligerent support. 
“As we know from other research, the drivers behind UN Security Council decisions on the deployment of military PKOs do not factor in these issues that we found to be crucial for their ultimate success. This raises the question whether and how such consent can be obtained and sustained, and whether and how belligerents can be cut off from external support.” 
Answering this question would be one important avenue for further research, which also connects with existing studies that emphasize the importance of organizational learning for PKO success.
“Combining insights from micro-level studies and our own and other research into macro-level factors could be used to guide more in-depth case studies to establish the causal mechanisms that link the factors that we have identified to the outcomes we observe,” the authors state. 
For example, process tracing in a smaller number of cases could be used to reconstruct how the core ingredients of success and failure that we have identified work, and whether a causal logic of sequencing exists, for example, deriving from the absence or presence of a major power lead that creates subsequent path dependencies.

Pushkina, D., Siewert, M. B., & Wolff, S. (2021). Mission (im)possible? UN military peacekeeping operations in civil wars. European Journal of International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211046602

Financing the UN Development System: Time to Meet the Moment

With the COVID-19 pandemic having reversed development gains across the world, Member States and United Nations entities have a mutual responsibility to demonstrate proactive and transformational leadership in ensuring an adequate multilateral response, while also looking ahead to strengthen global and regional risk reduction.
“Such leadership is about investing in more integrated approaches and in global public goods that go beyond what individual states or agencies can achieve,” states the seventh edition of the report Financing the United Nations Development System.
The Funding Compact, welcomed by both Member States and the UN in 2019, offers a potential framework for changing funding patterns. If utilized to its full potential and empowered by leadership, it can deliver the quality of funding – predictable, flexible and accountable – that enables UN country teams to scale up integrated programming and policy support across mandates, thereby accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, according to the report.
Pooled funds, in particular, can catalyze integrated programming by establishing transformative criteria for joint planning and effective funds allocation based on priority needs and comparative advantages. To improve the quality of funding channeled through the UN development system, Member States and UN entities are encouraged to deepen strategic funding dialogues at global and country levels.
“In preparing for such dialogues at this critical juncture for multilateralism, we hope that the seventh edition of the Financing the United Nations Development System report can help enlighten decision-making for a stronger UN,” the authors state. The report, subtitled ‘Time to Meet the Moment’, not only offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of the current state of UN funding, but provides a marketplace of ideas from thought leaders across Member States, UN entities and research institutions.
For all stakeholders, it is time to ‘meet the moment’ through smart investments and financing for sustainable development, prevention and emergency preparedness, while at the same time managing the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of this, the larger challenge calls for investments addressing climate resilience; the deep inequalities and injustices laid bare by the pandemic; and – through investing in prevention, peacebuilding and sustaining peace – the root causes of conflict.
The seventh edition of the report arrives at a moment when the UN system is facing unprecedented challenges. Climate change, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing inequality, and armed conflicts are placing inimitable demands on the multilateral system. For the international community, then, it is “Time to Meet the Moment” through quality financing of multilateral approaches to development. Only then can a shared aim of promoting prevention, mitigation, resilience building and emergency preparedness be met.
Mobilizing the quality, unearmarked multilateral finance needed to address these challenges calls for clarity and transparency. Towards this end, the financial data explored in Part One of this report aims to demystify the complex funding dynamics of the UN development system and how they feed into financing flows for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Building on this, in Parts Two and Three the report presents a comprehensive selection of contributions from experts – including UN professionals (present and former), and representatives of think tanks and Member States – reflecting on the emerging trends, risks and opportunities apparent in multilateral financing. In doing so, the report provides a point of departure for forward-looking conversations both on how the UN system ought to be funded and how it could leverage this finance towards meeting global needs and goods, all the while building forward better from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The annual report is the result of a longstanding partnership between the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office.

How Africa and China May Shape UN Peacekeeping Beyond the Liberal International Order

A flagship activity of the liberal international order (LIO) in the post-Cold War era, characterized by globalization, liberal norms and western leadership, UN peacekeeping today finds itself at a crossroads.

While Western states’ diminished support for LIO UN peacekeeping has left it increasingly open to challenge, significant changes are only likely if a strong group of states coalesces around an alternative model of UN peacekeeping, according to  KATHARINA P. COLEMAN and BRIAN L. JOB.

Writing in the journal International Affairs, they highlight African actors and China as well positioned to play pivotal roles in such a coalition. African states, who host the preponderance of UN missions and furnish almost half of the UN’s uniformed peacekeepers, support globalized UN peacekeeping, show relatively weak support for the most liberal peacebuilding principles and assert the need for African-led solutions to continental crises.

China’s influence reflects its P5 status, financial and personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping and engagement with regional actors, notably in Africa. Aspiring to global leadership and a ‘new world order’, China endorses globalized UN peacekeeping but proposes a non-liberal (and non-western led) notion of ‘developmental peace’ to guide it.

“Chinese and African strategic goals are not identical, but there are important complementarities in their respective positions,” the authors state in their article titled ‘How Africa and China may shape UN peacekeeping beyond the liberal international order’.

China challenges liberal democratic peacebuilding, which has few committed champions in Africa. African actors embrace robust protection, stabilization and counterterrorism activities, which China is willing to support within a ‘developmental peace’ framework, as long as state sovereignty is respected—priorities many African actors share.

China and African actors share common interests in curtailing western dominance over UN peacekeeping decisions. African actors seek greater influence in peacekeeping decisions regarding Africa; China supports greater regional ownership as part of its own vision of an international order characterized by greater Chinese leadership within and beyond the UN.

The compatibility of Chinese and African objectives presages a significant challenge to LIO UN peacekeeping, especially given that other UN actors have also supported elements of their proposed reforms, including greater regional consultation (endorsed by the UN Secretariat) and a shift to stabilization (whose supporters include some western states).

Whether a post-LIO version of UN peacekeeping emerges will nonetheless depend on the coherence and skill of both the actors advocating it and those seeking instead to reconsolidate LIO UN peacekeeping. Strikingly, however, the globalization of UN peacekeeping is not at stake: China and African actors endorse globalized UN peace operations as essential complements to regional peacekeeping.

“The challenge they pose is thus not one of deglobalization, but one that contests the nature and leadership of globalized institutions.”

Katharina P Coleman, Brian L Job, How Africa and China may shape UN peacekeeping beyond the liberal international order, International Affairs, Volume 97, Issue 5, September 2021, Pages 1451–1468, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab113

Power and Diplomacy in the UN Security Council: The Influence of Elected Members

There is well-known claim that due to the dominant position of the veto-wielding five permanent (P5) in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the ten members elected to two-year terms (E10) are left with little space to be influential in that body. 
However, VAHID NICK PAY AND PRZEMYSŁAW POSTOLSKI argue that, in fact, there could be powerful channels for the E10 to exercise significant influence.
Writing in The International Spectator, the authors present the cases of Poland’s 2018-2019 and South Africa’s 2019-2020 terms as elected members UNSC to challenge the claim that due to a prevailing democratic, legitimacy or efficiency deficit(s) in the structure and/or working methods of the Council, there is no significant space for the E10 members to be influential.
“By examining these two representative cases, the E10’s capacity to exert such influence can indeed be detected on multiple levels, which highlights the numerous channels and practices available to the elected members to act as veritable norm entrepreneurs at this most prominent institution of global governance,” they write in the research article ‘Power and Diplomacy in the United Nations Security Council: The Influence of Elected Members’.
Regarding the dynamics of legitimacy, these case studies demonstrate that the position of elected members can be strengthened by building various coalitions with other members to extend their ability to influence the Council’s decision-making. In the cases of Poland and South Africa, the coalitions built with P5 and other E10 members paved the way for important accomplishments, such as the adoption of resolutions 2475 and 2493.
As far as diplomatic capacities are concerned, the example of South Africa appears to provide an interesting alternative for arrangements of resources for medium and small powers through keeping a considerable number of decision-making functions back in the capital, PAY and POSTOLSKI state. 
“Despite obvious procedural challenges, this seems to have provided significant advantages such as reduced costs, resource-sharing with other government sectors and, most importantly, opportunities for involving a broader number of actors, in particular the civil society.” Such potential for change in the working methods may contribute to strengthening the overall position of the E10 in the Council.
The study has also confirmed that even though the agency of an elected member, primarily manifested through its effectively deployed resources and diplomatic capacities, is important in determining its influence in the Council, no less important are conditions extending beyond the Council member’s direct control, the authors note. 
“In this light, Poland’s and South African’s voices were at times significantly amplified by the presence of other supportive members in the Council and other favorable conditions.”
In the case of South Africa, its concomitant presidency of the Council and of the African Union and numerous proactive diplomatic initiatives combined with unexpected support from other E10 members acted as enabling factors to simultaneously promote geopolitical questions of national interest and build and strengthen consensus in the Council. 
Therefore, when serving in the Council, one must factor in such elements as timing, political context and the composition of the Council in a given term. All these conditions can be either favorable or detrimental to the overall performance of an elected member.
Furthermore, the authors stress, the E10’s influence can be exercised through formal and informal mechanisms in the Council’s decision-making. In this vein, both cases clearly demonstrate that UNSC presidencies, Arria-formula meetings and high-level political engagement were especially useful, as highlighted for the aforementioned resolutions 2493 and 2475.
To be sure, the resolutions tabled by Poland and South Africa were hardly controversial as these were themes that most countries could agree upon. It must be borne in mind, however, that due to the political polarization of the Council highlighted above, even the P5 are increasingly incapable of reaching a consensus on difficult questions, as evidenced by the official Council data on the number of consensus resolutions. “This, in turn, could open up significant perspectives for influence for the elected members.”
Taking everything into account, it becomes evident that, despite the prevailing position of the P5, the elected members can play an important and sometimes even crucial role in the Council’s decision-making. 
One interesting conclusion from the above cases could be an appreciation of the fact that the E10’s capacity for playing such a fundamental role in the Council has been underpinned by their less pronounced national and geopolitical interests at the Council compared to the P5. 
This undoubtedly puts the E10 in a more flexible negotiating position, capable of going beyond ‘red lines’ and even acting as power brokers in the Council. This important attribute, which could be regarded as a foundational element of multilateralism, might be even more sorely needed in an increasingly polarized Council faced with the realities of a systemic shift towards a multipolar world. 
Accordingly, it could be argued that the presence of the E10 in the Council not only underpins its dynamics of legitimacy but also safeguards its very foundations of multilateralism, reposing on elements of devolution of power, pooling of sovereignty and compromise. 
In addition, the emerging trends towards the reform of the Council’s working methods and the inclusion of wider global actors and the civil society in debates have the potential to turn the E10 into veritable norm entrepreneurs of the Council’s developing working methods that could lead to future structural reforms. 
“Such drives to informal reforms appear to be even more crucial as the debates over the nature, the viability or even the desirability of structural reforms of the Council proves to be far from over for the foreseeable future.” 

Vahid Nick Pay and Przemysław Postolski (2021) Power and Diplomacy in the United Nations Security Council: The Influence of Elected Members, The International Spectator, DOI: 10.1080/03932729.2021.1966192

A Missing Link for Accountability at the High-Level Political Forum

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, United Nations Member States committed to conducting regular Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), which would be ‘robust, voluntary, effective, participatory, transparent and integrated’. 

VNR reports are presented at the annual High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), creating a space for peer learning and feedback from different stakeholders.
Although the follow-up and review processes on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda are state-led, they are supposed to be inclusive and consultative, and to welcome inputs from relevant stakeholders. MICAH GRZYWNOWICZ discusses two such inputs to the HLPF process from civil society: shadow reports and spotlight reports.
Published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, the paper ‘Spotlight Reports: A Missing Link for Accountability at the High-Level Political Forum’ argues that while spotlight reports do not play any official role in the review processes, they are nevertheless critical tools, especially for stakeholders with limited or no access to cooperation with their governments. 

In fact, they serve the same purpose as shadow reports and states’ own VNR reports, which is ultimately to improve the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and benefit the well-being of people.

The UN Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect

Two decades ago, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) recalled a warning from then-UN secretary-general Kofi Annan: “If the collective conscience of humanity . . . cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and for justice.” 
The Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. 
However, looking at the past five or six years of the Security Council’s performance—including its paralysis in the face of the grim siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo in December 2016, its virtual nonreaction to the attacks by Myanmar state security forces against the Rohingya in 2017, its limited response to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, and its inability for months to agree on a statement or resolution regarding the COVID-19 pandemic—it is tempting to conclude that we have already crossed over into that dangerous terrain Annan warned about, writes JENNIFER M. WELSH in the journal Ethics and International Affairs. 
Contrary to the predictions of ICISS, however, we have yet to see an institution or forum supplant the UN as the focal point for the pursuit of peace and justice, the author states in her article titled ‘The Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect’. “Instead, there is a gaping black hole, as multilateralism comes apart at the seams.”
Skeptics may rightly point out that all of the alternatives to the Security Council – particularly the General Assembly – continue to face structural and political barriers to exercising their full potential, as components of an integrated structure, for addressing threats to international security and responding to atrocity crime situations, WELSH states. Nonetheless, the current crisis of multilateralism, which was extensively debated at the virtual events in 2020 marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN, presents a unique moment to revitalize and reinvest in mechanisms of global cooperation, lest they slide further into deadlock and irrelevance. 
A variety of proposals to improve performance and accountability have been tabled, including the creation of a UN parliamentary assembly that would enable further consideration of the domestic impact of multilateral decisions and increase democratic oversight of key components of the existing UN system. 
If such a scheme were to be realized – and this remains a big if, WELSH stresses – it could serve as a catalyst for more extensive reforms of both the General Assembly and the Security Council, as well as erode the latter's monopoly on the right to propose policies to manage international peace and security. 
At the time of writing, WELSH states, we do not know whether the opportunity presented by crises will be seized or if stasis and retrenchment will ensue. After all, while crises have been relatively frequent in the history of our modern international system, meaningful transformation of institutions and political orders has been much less common. 
“Let us hope that vulnerable populations around the world do not continue to pay the price for our collective failure of imagination and resolve.”

Welsh, J. (2021). The Security Council's Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect. Ethics & International Affairs, 35(2), 227-243. doi:10.1017/S089267942100023X

State Rationales for Contributing Troops to UN Peacekeeping Operations

In many conflict zones around the globe - spreading from Sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe and from the Middle East to Haiti - contingent troops, experts, staff officers, police and personnel are working under the umbrella of the United Nations. Countries struggle to promote peace and stability, as well as maintain the rule of law and order.

According to conflict resolution theorists, peacekeeping operations are necessary for positive conflict transformation. Thus the UN peacekeeping operations play a fundamental role in maintaining world peace. 

The UN peacekeeping’s mandate is unique in terms of global partnership. It is set by the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council; consent of the host country is needed, as is that by troop and police contributors. 

UN peacekeeping troops help countries navigate the challenging path from conflict to stability. However, as the UN doesn’t have a regular army, it relies on member states troop to carry out peacekeeping operations in conflict areas. 

In this research research paper, titled ‘State Rationales for Contributing Troops to UN Peacekeeping Operations’, MAKAM KHAN DAIM and ISIDORE HENRY EDET demonstrate that well-equipped and trained UN peacekeeping operations promote peace and stability more efficiently. The paper, published by Brussels-based South Asia Democratic Forum,  centres on an important question: what motivates the willingness of member states to contribute with troops to UN peacekeeping operations. 

“We found that states experiencing inter-state rivalry and with struggling economies tend to contribute more troops than great powers and wealthy states,” the authors state. They use the Bellamy and Williams’ Model and Middle Power theory to better analyse the rationale of troops contribution in peacekeeping operations. China is also used as a case study in the paper.

Staff Recruitment and Geographical Representation in International Organizations

What explains geographical representation in the professional staff of intergovernmental organizations (IOs)? 
Writing in the International Review of Administrative Sciences, STEFFEN ECKHARD and YVES STEINEBACH address this question from an organizational perspective by considering IO recruitment processes. In the United Nations (UN) system, recruitment processes are designed to ensure bureaucratic merit, with experience and education being the relevant merit criteria, the authors contend in their research article titled ‘Staff recruitment and geographical representation in international organizations’. 
“We develop and test a supply-side theory, postulating that differences in countries’ supply of well-educated and highly experienced candidates can explain geographical representation. Drawing on staff data from 34 IOs and supply data from 174 member states, and controlling for endogeneity and alternative explanations, we find no such relationship for education.”
However, countries with a high supply of candidates with relevant working and regional experiences have significantly higher representation values. 
These findings offer a complementary narrative as to why some countries are more strongly represented in the international professional staff than others. 
Findings also unveil the nature of bureaucratic merit in the UN, which seems to emphasize local knowledge and working experience over formal (Western) education.
Such experience comprises both regional expertise (local knowledge) needed in UN country operations where the bulk of UN personnel work and previous working experience. “It is possible that typical (Western) education systems do not deliver this kind of knowledge, which may be the reason why we observe such a pronounced importance of regional and work experience in the UN,” the authors state.
More precisely, because UN country operations seem to be worried about the impartiality of their staff but still need employees who possess local cultural knowledge, candidates from proximate countries in the region appear to have higher chances of making it into the international professional staff (IPS). 
Furthermore, while there is a lot of competition for individual IPS positions, having prior experience in national professional officers or general services staff positions seems to constitute a viable career path option. 
“Our findings on the relationship between regional experience and working experience imply that the chances of getting an international staff position are highest when an individual works as national staffer in a region where the UN has a significant regional presence. In such cases, working experience seems to add to the possession of regional experience.”

Eckhard, Steffen, and Yves Steinebach. “Staff Recruitment and Geographical Representation in International Organizations.” International Review of Administrative Sciences, (July 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211031379.

Expanding the Security Council: A Potential Bulwark Against the United Nations’ Legitimacy Crisis

The United Nations has long served as the primary vehicle for the administration and enforcement of the international legal and political order, and situated at its very core is its underlying security apparatus: The United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
The UNSC was designed with a structural rigidity, seeking to enshrine the superiority of its five permanent members—but now, seventy-five years later, the Council’s failure to keep pace with the changing composition of the United Nations writ large has led the entire compact to the precipice of a grave crisis of legitimacy.
Now more than ever, action must be taken to acknowledge the growing disillusionment of the United Nations’ smaller member states, BILAL ASKARI writes in the latest issue of the Virginia Journal of International Law.
An institution faces a crisis of legitimacy when social recognition of the validity of its identity, interests, practices, norms, or procedures comes under threat, at which point, it must either “adapt … or face disempowerment,” the author notes in his article ‘Expanding the U.N. Security Council: A Potential Bulwark against the U.N.’s Legitimacy Crisis’.
Perhaps the most fundamental threat to the UN’s legitimacy, ASKARI states, is its failure to establish representative governance; despite a quadrupling in the number of UN member states since 1945, the UNSC has remained untouched, granting only de minimis authority to the nations which rotate through the Council’s ten nonpermanent seats.
One potentially meaningful approach would be to amend the UN Charter to allow for the addition of one or more new permanent or nonpermanent members to the Security Council.
In particular, the possibility of permanent Indian accession to the Council may present a practical and promising means by which to salvage the legitimacy of the UNSC in the eyes of its constituent nations.
Perhaps the primary reason India ought to be considered as a potential addition to the permanent membership of the UNSC is simply that their bid would be the likeliest to succeed. This is for several reasons.
First, India certainly has the credentials to seek a seat at the UN’s highest table. Over the past two decades, India has enjoyed explosive economic growth and a rapidly expanding foreign policy outlook, and is now well poised to emerge as another potential superpower.
Second, India enjoys broad-based support from other members of the United Nations. India is currently serving its eighth term as an elected nonpermanent member of the Council, winning its seat with a resounding 184 votes out of a possible 192.
Finally, the current members of the P-5 are increasingly open to the possibility of allowing India on board. The US, the UK, France, and Russia have each signaled interest in at least moderate expansions of the Council, and even China, which has historically resisted India’s bid for a permanent seat, backed India for nonpermanent membership on the UNSC for its current term.
India’s permanent accession to the Council would be beneficial, in the first instance, to the United Nations’ legitimacy and operational integrity.
India has not only remained the largest contributor of UN peacekeeping troops for decades—providing nearly twice as many peacekeepers as every member of the P-5 combined—but its consistent record of timely payment to UN coffers will prove invaluable as the UN seeks to stabilize its budget. Validating these contributions with an offer to join the ranks of the Council’s permanent membership may also be important to prevent India from gradually sliding away from the UN and towards more fragmented multilateral organizations, which place greater value on India’s contributions, but sap the UN of relative legitimacy.
Of course, the value of elevating India to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council would not begin and end with India. To begin with, such a move would immediately bolster efforts by African nations which have long maintained that the absence of African representation on the Council constitutes a grave injustice. Indeed, most issues discussed by the UNSC have a direct nexus to African affairs, yet none of the continent’s fifty-four nations wield significant decision-making authority over these operations.
One potential approach, advanced by Sierra Leone’s UN representative, may be to reserve two permanent seats on the Council for African nations. India’s ascension to the Council would create a strong precedent that may enhance the viability of such measures in the future.
In addition to paving the way for future expansions of the Council, accession itself provides an opportunity for India to advocate for the views of historically marginalized nations. India has always styled itself as a “moralistic force” of the developing world, with Indian UN officials often highlighting that their nation’s own recent emergence puts them in a strong position to advocate for other states still on the rise.
This posture must be rewarded and developed if the UNSC is to successfully recapture the spirit of global community which undergirded the UN’s genesis. Only by restoring faith in the Council’s representative capacity can the UNSC safeguard its legitimacy and influence for years to come.

Developing Peace: The Evolution of Development Goals and Activities in United Nations Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping and development assistance are two of the United Nations’ defining activities. While there have been extensive studies of UN engagement in each of these areas, respectively, less attention has been given to the relationship between peacekeeping and development. 

JOHN GLEDHILL, RICHARD CAPLAN and MALINE MEISKE examine that relationship in an article titled ‘Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping’, published in the journal Oxford Development Studies.  

The authors do so by first considering whether concepts and principles that underpin peacekeeping and development cohere. They then combine original quantitative data with qualitative analyses in order to document the degree to which development goals and activities have been incorporated into UN peacekeeping operations since their inception over 70 years ago. 

“While we observe a steady increase in the level of engagement of peacekeeping with development over time, we argue that short-term security goals have been prioritized over longer-term development objectives in a number of recent UN peacekeeping operations, as peacekeepers have been deployed to contexts of ongoing conflict.”

The authors propose that, just as the practice of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding has integrated diverse actors and goals, so too would the study of peacekeeping and peacebuilding benefit from integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives into a more ‘multidimensional’ approach. 

As it stands, those who study peacekeeping ordinarily have a background in political science and international relations, and they publish in related field journals. While there was arguably a logic to this disciplinary focus when UN peacekeeping activities were primarily aimed at maintaining negative peace between states, that logic has weakened as peacekeeping has expanded and diversified its activities. 

Indeed, given that peacekeeping now typically includes interventions that aim to foster human and economic development within conflict-affected states, it seems clear that academic fields that study development should also be integrated into efforts to analyse and assess peacekeeping – fields such as development studies, economics, anthropology, geography and beyond. 

Cross-disciplinary cooperation and collaboration will likely face some of the same institutional, organizational, and ontological barriers that the UN has encountered when trying to foster cooperation and coherence among the diverse agencies and organizations that are involved in multidimensional, integrated peacekeeping. 

However, if the UN has been able to make some headway on that front, then surely academics can also take further steps towards a more integrated approach to studying (development and) peacekeeping.

John Gledhill, Richard Caplan & Maline Meiske (2021) Developing peace: the evolution of development goals and activities in United Nations peacekeeping, Oxford Development Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2021.1924126

Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding

Academics and policy-makers have accepted that the linearity of the liberal peace neither reflects, nor should it drive, the tumult of peacebuilding. Nevertheless, practitioners have made merely cosmetic changes to their approaches. 
Introducing ‘perpetual peacebuilding’, THANIA PAFFENHOLZ states that within the paradigm, peacebuilding is envisioned as an ever-developing process manifested in a series of (re-)negotiations of the social and political contract. Notions of success and failure and concepts such as ‘tracks’ and ‘peace agreements’ are abandoned, and peace is both utopian and subjective. Lastly, the peacebuilding community is called upon to display greater courage and creativity.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, has called for an immediate ceasefire in all corners of the globe,” PAFFENHOLZ states in ‘Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding’, published in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. Nevertheless, peacebuilding perseveres amidst persistent violence. We must therefore ask: how can we begin upon the pathway to perpetual peacebuilding? Critical rethinking must be the starting point. 
“I propose that peacebuilding, in response to violence, must be viewed as entailing continuous negotiations, and re-negotiations, of the social and political contract of a society and polity, with pathways to peace marked by opportunities, setbacks, catalysts, friction and resistance. Embracing this re-conceptualisation is an essential precondition for truly abandoning the linearity of the liberal peacebuilding model.” 
In addition to surveying relevant academic and policy literature, the author explores the peacebuilding which has taken place in Kenya post-2007 and Syria post-2011, processes which have been conducted amidst cycles of violence; this scholarly and empirical evidence informs the paradigm developed.
It remains crucial for those engaged in peacebuilding to participate in critical reflections of their own assumptions, biases, traditions and practices, the author states. The tenets outlined represent a lens through which peacebuilders and their supporters may be able to meaningfully rethink the ways in which they can contribute to sustaining peace, deploying creative, innovative, malleable and long-lasting approaches grounded in local, national, regional and international realities. 
The tenets will help to bridge the void between research and policy on the one hand and practice on the other, and to move towards generating a multitude of perpetual pathways to inclusive, peaceful and just societies. Crucially, these tenets shift the focus away from the international peacebuilding ‘industry’, foregrounding instead the communities facing conflict and the local and national actors that build their peace. Retreating into the background while reconceptualising the very notion of peacebuilding may represent the only means through which international peacebuilders can retain their relevance.
However, further effort will also be required to embark upon this new paradigm. That which is required are formal and informal processes which challenge and disrupt the prevailing system(s). Change-oriented governments, accompanied by think tanks, practitioners and activists, must ‘push’ until the policy frameworks surveyed within this article become an operational reality. This will demand courage and willingness to transform the dominant discourses at the global level, and will require in-country testing of this new paradigm to gather experiences and evidence to support this new practice of peacebuilding and mediation. Future research must contribute to this endeavour by investigating in-depth case studies, further confirming the non-linearity of peacebuilding, and documenting and assessing alternative approaches in order to continue to develop this new paradigm.

Thania Paffenholz (2021) Perpetual Peacebuilding: A New Paradigm to Move Beyond the Linearity of Liberal Peacebuilding, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2021.1925423

A Quantitative Approach to Studying Hierarchies of Primary Institutions in International Society: UN General Assembly Disarmament Resolutions 1989-1998

LAUST SCHOUENBORG and SIMON F. TAEUBER aim to contribute to two contemporary debates within the English School: The debate about how to observe primary institutions and the debate concerning hierarchy between primary institutions. 

Writing in the journal Cooperation and Conflict, they specifically analyze references to primary institutions in United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions in the decade 1989–1998 and their distribution using descriptive statistics. 

In this way, the article, ‘A quantitative approach to studying hierarchies of primary institutions in international society: The case of United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions, 1989–1998’, offers a novel approach to identifying primary institutions empirically, and provides some insight into the hierarchy-question in the sense of documenting the relative numerical presence of references to different primary institutions in a specific issue area and temporal context. 

With respect to the latter, the key finding is that great power management, diplomacy and international law are by far the most prominent primary institutions in the analysed material. 

This is an intriguing finding, not least given the importance attached to them by Hedley Bull in his classic work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. 

The main contribution of the article is thus to spell out a new approach to how the aforementioned debates might proceed empirically.

Schouenborg L, Taeuber SF. A quantitative approach to studying hierarchies of primary institutions in international society: The case of United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions, 1989–1998. Cooperation and Conflict. 2021; 56(2): 224-241. doi:10.1177/0010836720965998

A Peacekeeping Mission in Afghanistan: Pipedream or Path to Stability?

RYAN C. VAN WIE analyzes how an international peacekeeping operation (PKO) can support an intra-Afghan peace settlement by mitigating information and commitment problems and fostering compliance during the settlement’s implementation phase. 

To frame the information and commitment problems currently hindering an intra-Afghan settlement, he briefly reviews noncooperative bargaining theory, its application to civil conflicts, and how PKOs can lessen mutual uncertainty and foster stability. 

Anchoring this research on Afghanistan, he analyze the first peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, the 1988–1990 United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP). UNGOMAP’s eventual failure to foster peace highlights Afghanistan’s complexities and the dangers of an insufficiently resourced PKO operating in a state without a viable, incentive-compatible settlement, VAN WIE writes in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs.

The author applies these lessons to policy analysis, where he explores possible PKO options and their potential for incentivizing compliance with a future intra-Afghan deal. 

“Though a viable PKO currently seems improbable given Afghanistan’s ongoing violence and the Taliban’s insistence on the complete withdrawal of foreign forces,” VAN WIE writes in the article titled ‘A Peacekeeping Mission in Afghanistan: Pipedream or Path to Stability?’ “future conditions may change.”

He highlights necessary prerequisites where a PKO may become possible. If designed properly, an Afghanistan PKO can fill a critical monitoring and verification capacity and bolster Afghanistan’s prospects for long-term stability.

Meaningful Political Participation: Lessons Learned From UN Mediation in Afghanistan and Syria

In this Bonn International Center for Conversion policy brief, ESTHER MEININGHAUS and KATJA MIELKE present lessons learned and subsequent policy implications from an in-depth analysis of the United Nations peace processes on Afghanistan and Syria. 

The authors argue that in both processes, the ability of peace process participants who come from Afghanistan and Syria to politically participate in their respective process was and is severely limited, thus hindering the prospects of successful conflict transformation. 

By political participation, the authors mean that peace process participants not only attend negotiations (“are being included”) but are in a position to (co-) determine who is negotiating the agreement (incl. which representation mechanism is adequate), what is the format of peacemaking (incl. methods of consultation), and what are the issues negotiated in which order (agenda-setting). The authors call this ‘meaningful political participation’.

Emphasising “inclusivity” in peace processes over meaningful political participation is highly problematic for potential progress towards longer-term/sustainable peace. Potential organisers of peace negotiations and related pre- and post-peace agreement measures (whether outside actors or ‘indigenous’) should strengthen political participation and process legitimacy for representatives from the populations concerned. This would contribute to opening a new pathway towards more sustainable peace processes, also beyond the Syrian and Afghan cases.

Natural Resource Exports and African Countries’ Voting Behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the Economic Rise of China

How do African countries’ resource exports to China affect the countries’ voting alignment with Beijing in the United Nations?

YI CHE,  XIAOYU HE  and YAN ZHANG exploit time variation in the swift surge in China's demand for natural resources and cross‐sectional variation in countries’ propensity to export resources. 

Writing in the Canadian Journal of Economics, the authors find that an increase in resource exports to China increases the probability of voting in line with China in the United Nations. “Interestingly, we observe a stronger effect for resolutions on which China and the United States cast opposite votes. We provide suggestive evidence that public goods and state capacity are possible explanations for our main results.”

To establish causation, the authors, in an article titled ‘Natural resource exports and African countries’ voting behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the economic rise of China’, exploited the fact that China's surging demand for natural resources has been driven largely by its rapid economic growth, which was triggered by its own institutional reforms and African countries’ propensity to export resources, which is determined mostly by natural resource endowment. 

Using this arguably exogenous interaction term as an instrument for country–resource exports to China, the authors found a positive effect of resource exports to China on the share of the countries’ votes that are in line with China for important human rights resolutions in the UN. 

“We further documented that this baseline result is not influenced by the assumption of an exclusion restriction, alternative dependent variable, alternative methods for constructing the instrument, alternative resolutions or subsample analysis. Interestingly, we found that the effect of interest is particularly strong if we restrict the resolutions to those on which the United States and China take different positions, and more resource exports to China actually reduce the share of African votes that are in line with the United States.

To understand the reasons why countries with more resource exports to China tend to vote more in line with China, the authors explored several possible explanations. They found that government revenue, industry value added and capital investment in the society are all increased due to the profits from resource exports to China. In turn, these countries invest more in public goods, including electricity, roads and telecommunications infrastructure. “Because the increased government revenue and public goods provision elevate the opportunity cost of rebellion, in our sample, we found that countries with more resource exports to China have a lower probability of having an intra‐state conflict, providing a safer environment for citizens in the country. 

“In this sense, our paper contributes to the resource‐curse literature by showing that resources, when used appropriately, can be beneficial for the country's development.”

Che, Y., He, X. and Zhang, Y. (2021), Natural resource exports and African countries’ voting behaviour in the United Nations: Evidence from the economic rise of China. Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique. https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12514

Aid, Arms or Autocrats: Explaining the Voting Preferences of Developing Countries at the United Nations

Despite their continued effort to bargain collectively on behalf of developing countries, the Group of 77 (G77) at the United Nations consistently fail to coordinate their voting positions. 

With 134 of the UN’s 193 member states in the G77, it has the potential to dominate the UN General Assembly, but it has become so disparate that many now question the logic of the group’s existence moving forward. 

Writing in the New York University Abu Dhabi Journal of Social Sciences, CHRIS WHEELER uses ideal point estimates to analyze the predictors of G77 countries’ individual voting preferences in the UN General Assembly to understand the cause of growing division and disunity within the group. 

He finds that voting preferences for individual countries within the G77 are determined mainly by variation in democracy and human rights. The article, titled ‘Aid, Arms or Autocrats: Explaining the Voting Preferences of Developing Countries at the United Nations’ provides new insights into both the dynamics of the UN General Assembly and the cooperation among developing countries.

“From our results, we can broadly split the tested variables into three levels of importance in terms of their impact on a country’s ideal point estimate,” WHEELER states.

“Firstly, analyzing levels of economic development and receipt of US Foreign Aid shows that neither of these measures has a strong influence on UN voting preferences among members of the G77 group. Secondly, analyzing the choice of military supplier, OPEC, and OIC membership and region, we found that both of these measures impact voting preference.” However, he states, these measures are also strongly correlated with measures of democracy and human rights. 

Finally, the strongest indicator of UN voting preferences among the G77 group is a country’s level of democracy and human rights, which consistently showed a high impact on ideal point estimates across various measures, even when controlling for all other independent variables.

Sequencing United Nations Peacemaking: Political Initiatives and Peacekeeping Operations

The United Nations has developed a diverse range of peacemaking tools, including different forms of political initiatives (diplomatic, technocratic, and political-development missions) and peacekeeping operations. Yet we know surprisingly little about when and why we observe the onset of different types of UN missions, write HAN DORUSSEN, TOBIAS BÖHMELT and GOVINDA CLAYTON in the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science.
Examining an ‘escalatory trajectory’, the authors analyze the United Nations Peace Initiatives data, a new dataset providing information on all different types of UN engagements. “Our main contributions are that we provide insights into how the different types of missions relate to one another and conceptual clarity about what the different types of missions are.”
Increasingly detailed data and sophisticated analyses have provided a better understanding of the determinants of peacekeeping. However, much less attention has been paid to political missions, the authors write in ‘Sequencing United Nations peacemaking: Political initiatives and peacekeeping operations’. The risk is that peacekeeping is compared with a broad and relatively poorly understood reference category of “no peacekeeping.” 
“Here, our main contribution is to add to unpacking of the baseline by considering political missions as distinct instruments of UN peacemaking. Analyzing the UNPI dataset on political missions, we find strong support for treating them as separate from peacekeeping missions as well as “non-interventions.”
Peacekeeping missions are not always a feasible, or even the most appropriate, response to situations that may threaten international peace and security. Over time, the UN has developed and extended different options enabling it to engage with a variety of conflictive situations.
Arguably, different types of political missions impose distinct costs on the UN system as well as on countries contributing to supplying or hosting missions. Whether it is appropriate to accept these costs depends on the potential benefits of a mission relative to contextual needs. Not intervening at all may well turn out to be the costliest option. That said, after considering the costs of authorization, funding and supply, and belligerent consent, peacekeeping stands out in being more expensive than political initiatives. 
“Given budgetary and political constraints, we expect the UN and hosting states to minimize intervention costs. Put simply, peacekeepers will only be deployed when such costly intervention are required.” 
The authors empirically assessed the impact of different conflict characteristics on the onset of different mission types and found that political missions are more likely to occur than peacekeeping missions when a conflict has not (yet) escalated and more time has passed since the last fighting. Their results further suggest the UN is more likely to opt for a peacekeeping mission in conflicts that are ‘new’. It is plausible that such conflicts indeed present a larger risk to international peace and security and need to be addressed urgently.
Political missions are not only generally less costly than peacekeeping missions, but there is also variation in the likely costs of diplomatic, technocratic, and political-development missions. Considering the relative costs of different political missions, political-development missions are more costly than technocratic and diplomatic missions, respectively. Political-development missions are usually field missions, while diplomatic and technocratic missions face lower barriers for authorization. “Our analyses do not necessarily support such conjectures. The impact of key conflict characteristics does not vary much on various political missions.” 
Control variables, such as population size and wealth, affect the choice for political mission differently, but not in a way that seems related to their relative costs. At the same time, the authors find evidence for the escalatory logic underlying political missions. Less costly missions tend to set the framework and requirements for costlier efforts in the future.
Future work might then seek to explore the wider range of factors that lead to the adoption of one form of political mission over another, the authors suggest.

Dorussen H, Böhmelt T, Clayton G. Sequencing United Nations peacemaking: Political initiatives and peacekeeping operations. Conflict Management and Peace Science. April 2021. doi:10.1177/07388942211000678

Peacebuilding and Authoritarianism: The Unintended Consequences of UN Engagement in Post-Conflict Settings

Many UN peacebuilding interventions take place in settings governed by authoritarian regimes and are often overtly designed to overcome deeply entrenched patterns of autocratic rule. Whether large multidimensional peacekeeping operations like those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mali, and Central African Republic, smaller peacebuilding missions in places like Guinea-Bissau and Haiti, or peacebuilding projects in non-mission settings like Kyrgyzstan and Cameroon, the legacies of autocratic rule present some of the most direct and immediate challenges for international intervenors, a new report by United Nations University Center for Policy Research asserts. 

“In fact, peacebuilding has seldom resulted in a complete transformation from an authoritarian system to an open democratic one,” write ADAM DAY, SARAH VON BILLERBECK OISIN TANSEY and MAYHAM AL MALEH. 

“Instead, most systems retain some form of authoritarianism via a continuation of a particular ruler, ruling party, or consolidation of power in a small elite.”

More worryingly, many post-conflict settings experience a further concentration of power and even greater repression as regimes take advantage of new forms of economic development and international support, according to the report titled ‘Peacebuilding and Authoritarianism: The Unintended Consequences of UN Engagement in Post-Conflict Settings’. 

In some cases, there is evidence that peacebuilding support may have contributed to increasing levels of authoritarianism, even while advancing other important goals.

The report explores the ways in which peacebuilding may unintentionally enable authoritarian tendencies, despite its stated goal of more inclusive forms of governance. The authors build on scholarship that has analyzed the impacts of democratization efforts in post-conflict settings, and the substantial literature describing how authoritarian systems may prove resilient to external efforts to transform them, including by instrumentalizing democratic institutions, controlling resources, and emplacing political structures that tend to centralize authority in a small elite. While helpful in understanding the politics of authoritarian rule, this literature seldom offers an analysis of the causal relationships between peacebuilding and authoritarianism, leaving policymakers and practitioners without a clear framework to understand the impact of their interventions. 

The fact that peacebuilding is one amongst many factors influencing authoritarianism means that its possible contribution to tendencies of centralization and political repression often go unnoticed.

The principal argument of the report is that peacebuilding support may enable authoritarian forms of governance in two ways: (1) by providing material and other resources to the central State, thereby allowing it to consolidate control over key institutions and levers of power, and (2) by signaling in ways that lower the perceived costs of autocratic, non-democratic forms of rule and may help to shield leaders from accountability for their actions. 

“Together, these operate as a causal mechanism through which international peacebuilders may bolster authoritarian tendencies within political systems even while ostensibly promoting democratic forms of rule.”

In contrast, where peacebuilding support diversifies its resources to a broader range of stakeholders and sends signals that the political costs of non-democratic forms of governance may be high, it should contribute to reductions in authoritarian tendencies. 

While these impacts may be difficult to isolate – especially given that the UN is often a small player in the broader peacebuilding landscape – an examination of international peacebuilding support more generally across a range of settings will facilitate a better understanding of these dynamics at play.

This approach would also help us understand the dilemmas facing peacebuilders who must often choose between supporting State institutions as key actors in conflict prevention, while also recognizing that authoritarian governments may instrumentalize the same institutions to consolidate power. Moreover, it offers an evidence base for policymakers and major donors hoping to understand how to translate elite bargains into more sustainable forms of peace.

The report not only explores the relationship between peacebuilding and authoritarianism, but also aims to provide a usable framework and set of recommendations for policymakers and practitioners to avoid some of the common pitfalls and ensure that peacebuilding support is not distorted or co-opted. 

To that end, this paper is organized as follows: Part One reviews the literature on post-conflict peacebuilding and authoritarian governance, noting that the bulk of scholarship on peacebuilding provides few causal explanations for the prevalence and resilience of highly centralized forms of governance. It then lays out the research design and the use of the two-part causal mechanism described above. 

Part Two illustrates how these dynamics play out in a range of country settings where the UN has invested significantly in peacebuilding support. The analysis compares across in-depth country case studies on DRC, Haiti, and Cambodia, and draws on an assessment of peacebuilding funding flows in eight other countries. 

Part Three builds on the country comparison and provides a framework for policymakers and practitioners involved in peacebuilding, offering key considerations and suggested approaches to planning future interventions.

It should be noted at the outset that this paper is primarily focused on UN-led peacebuilding efforts, the authors state, though it analyses a broad range of international peacebuilding support and provides recommendations that can be applied to bilateral donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) as well as the UN.

Taken together, this framework proposes a reexamination of the elite bargain at the heart of much of the UN’s conflict prevention and peacebuilding paradigm. It suggests that the tendency of the UN to identify solutions based on a core group of powerful elites may appear necessary to mitigate the immediate risks of escalation, but that it also carries significant risks of longer-term drift into the kind of deeply unequal, highly centralized rule that the Sustaining Peace resolutions and the UN/World Bank Pathways report have identified as the major drivers of instability globally. 

“Implementation of this framework will not necessarily mean jettisoning the elite bargain, but it will require that peacebuilders strike a balance between the exigencies of day-to-day conflict prevention and the ways in which international interventions might unintentionally bolster authoritarianism in the longer term.”

COVID-19 and Humanitarian Access: How the Pandemic Should Provoke Systemic Change in the Global Humanitarian System

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the world. With over 103 million cases reported as of February 2021 and over 2.2 million deaths worldwide, it is the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu. 

It has disrupted societies in a number of ways: over 400 million jobs lost in the first few months, widespread food insecurity, national and local lockdowns, hospitals overwhelmed, education reduced or postponed, and travel grinding nearly to a halt, according to a new United Nations University report. The pandemic has had an especially acute impact on vulnerable populations receiving humanitarian assistance. Widespread loss of income, massive drops in remittances, and limited access to social safety nets have combined to drive larger numbers of people into vulnerability while worsening the conditions for many already receiving assistance, the report titled ‘COVID-19 and Humanitarian Access: How the Pandemic Should Provoke Systemic Change in the Global Humanitarian System’.

At the same time, international organizations have had to scale back the number of international staff in field locations as they managed travel and quarantine restrictions, often placing even greater burdens on local partners as well as resident staff to undertake delivery, state the report’s authors, REBECCA BRUBAKER, ADAM DAY, and SOPHIE HUVÉ. 

In some settings, governments and armed groups have placed additional restrictions on the ability of humanitarian organizations to access populations in need. And, more broadly, the global economic downturn has contributed to widespread funding shortfalls for humanitarian aid, in a context of increasing need and growing inequality.

The report explores the impact of COVID-19 on humanitarian access in the initial months of the crisis, including both the delivery of assistance and performance of protection activities. It examines the varying crisis responses, including the shift to a more localized approach in certain cases. The analysis draws on case research from Colombia, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, as well as on wide-ranging interviews with humanitarian practitioners and experts from around the world. The research was conducted between August – November 2020. It does not make claims about the legitimacy of government decisions to restrict access – indeed, in many instances, there appeared to be a clear objective of limiting the spread of COVID-19 – but instead focuses on how access limitations have affected the delivery of aid.

While covering principally issues of access and humanitarian space, the study also describes how the pandemic has altered the relationships between international and local humanitarian organizations, deepening inequalities in terms of access to services, and requiring a global attempt to prioritize programming amidst financial shortfalls. More broadly, the pandemic response has accelerated a debate regarding the extent to which the commitments made at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit – especially the demand to shift to a more equitable model of cooperation among donors, the UN, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and local civil society organizations (CSOs) – are being adequately met.

The paper contains six sections: (1) an overview of major access challenges preceding the pandemic; (2) an analysis of how COVID-19 responses adopted by governments, local authorities, and humanitarian organizations themselves have affected issues of humanitarian access and delivery; (3) a review of the primary and secondary impacts of these measures on the humanitarian sector; (4) a description of innovations and responses by the UN and its partners; (5) the main challenges to adapting in the current context; and (6) recommendations for governments, INGOs, local CSOs, and donors. 

The paper concludes with the following ten recommendations for governments, donors, the United Nations (UN), and local non-governmental organizations on improving access and prioritizing in a crisis moment:

1. Revisit the standard humanitarian response.

2. Recommit to the 2016 Grand Bargain with tangible, system-wide steps for addressing inequalities across international and local service providers. This could include:

a. Giving even greater priority to the most vulnerable.

b. Pre-arranging finance.

c. Pooling resources.

d. Demanding transparency.

e. Equalizing contracts and increasing multi-year funding.

f. Investing in consortia and twinning approaches.

g. Adding chairs to the table.

3. Improve the provision of equitable duty of care or “occupational safety and health” for all personnel, regardless of nationality or contract status.

4. Invest in monitoring capacities of local staff and local partners.

5. Develop a coherent and consistent approach to humanitarian exemptions.

6. Define “life-saving” activities in coordination with humanitarian actors.

7. Prioritize protection activities related to sexual and gender-based violence.

8. Invest in information campaigns.

9. Look for opportunities in crisis.

10. Build a coherent, multi-scalar approach to risk.

Governing Uncertainty: The Future of Global Governance Over the Next 30 Years

Continuing growing inequality will undermine the legitimacy of global institutions as the diffusion of centers of power will create uncertainty and drive new conflict risks, the authors of a new report published by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research state. 

Strategic litigation will empower non-State actors and challenge State authority, while technology will continue to drive rapid, highly unequal advances in development, ADAM DAY and DAVID PASSARELLI add in the report titled ‘Governing Uncertainty’.

Commissioned by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, the report surveys major trends that will shape the future of global governance over the next 30 years. 

The report maps trends in society, politics, technology, security and the environment, and considers how the interplay across these sectors impact traditional and new development actors in their efforts to deliver a transformative development agenda centered on social inclusion, shared prosperity, safety and environmental sustainability.

The trends and changes outlined in the report are tied to a specific set of political and economic decisions and influences that marked the decades since the end of the Cold War. The globalization of economies and the impact of liberal trade and regulation policy on economic development and the distribution of wealth – within and across States – over three decades enabled rapid technological innovation, specialization through global value chains, poverty reduction and wealth generation in many parts of the world. However, this prosperity has not been equally distributed, leading to unequal development outcomes felt most acutely in the developing world and by global youth who will be forced to grapple with the intergenerational consequences of a worsening development emergency.

The report finds that many core societal risks – inequality, debt, mistrust, environmental and technological change, and the important role of non-State actors – persist today and have grown in importance following the outbreak of COVID-19.

Using the methods of foresight research, the report extrapolates possible future scenarios based on three cross-cutting trends (technological change, environmental change, demographic change and human mobility) and three megatrends (loss of trust in institutions, judicialization of governance, stakeholder activism). An integrated and systematic analysis of these trends results in four projections that will impact global governance, as well as security and development outcomes over the next 30 years:

-Inequality will continue to grow, undermining the legitimacy of global institutions.

-The diffusion of centres of power will create uncertainty and drive new conflict risks.

-Strategic litigation will empower non-State actors and challenge State authority.

-Technology will continue to drive rapid, highly unequal advances in development.

While it is impossible to say with certainty what this means for the future of global governance in 30 years, the authors formulate ten assumptions about the future, upon which three long-term pathways are explored.

Pandemic Pauses: Understanding Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19

One year after the UN Secretary General called for a global ceasefire in the face of the novel cornavirus, has conflict paused for the pandemic?
A new report from United Kingdom-based Political Settlements Research Programme (PRSP) launched earlier this month tracks ceasefires declared during Covid-19 and analyses what this means for the wider peace process landscape.
On 23 March 2020, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate global ceasefire, to help tackle the threat of Covid-19 rather than compound the risk to those in fragile and conflict-affected areas. 
In response to this call, multiple states, international, regional, and local organizations declared their support for a global ceasefire. PRSP, which is run by a consortium of organizations, has been tracking ceasefires declared during Covid-19 with the ‘Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19’ digital tracking tool. It data shows that since March 2020, conflict parties have declared 25 ceasefires across 17 countries.
To coincide with the one-year anniversary of the global ceasefire call, PSRP has launched a new report: ‘Pandemic Pauses: Understanding Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19’. The report draws on data from the ‘Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19’ tracker to analyse how ceasefires have unfolded throughout the pandemic, and to consider how the pandemic has affected moves towards ceasefires and peace processes.
In Part I, PRSP provides data on what types of ceasefires conflict parties have declared since March 2020, and the extent to which these ceasefires have held. In Part II, it puts forward key analytical and practical concerns for understanding these ceasefires and considering what, if anything, ceasefires during the pandemic mean for wider peace processes. 
In Part III, PRSP concludes that, although the Covid-19 pandemic has not been a ‘game-changer’ for ceasefire and peace process trajectories, it is now a crucial part of the context in which peace processes must take place. It makes recommendations for how ceasefires, and peacemaking more generally, can be better supported during global health emergencies.
The report was written by a team of researchers comprising: Laura Wise, Sanja Badanjak, Christine Bell, and Fiona Knäussel, and draws on data from the ‘Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19’ tracker.

Realizing Inclusivity: The Role of the UN in Promoting Inclusion at the Country Level

How do UN Country Teams understand and act on policy recognition of the importance of social, economic and political inclusion?

While the obstacles to realizing inclusivity in peacebuilding have been identified in a number of reports in recent years, a deeper and contextualized understanding of how meaningful inclusion is pursued in practice at the country level is still needed.

Inclusivity is particularly vital as the United Nations supports countries in mitigating and recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and follows through on interlinked reforms affecting its development and management systems, and its work on peace and security, a new report by the the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation stresses.

This raises an important but complex question: how does the UN, working at the country level, understand and act on international policy recognition of the importance of social, economic and political inclusion for sustainable peace and development?

The report, titled ‘Realizing Inclusivity: The role of the United Nations in promoting inclusion at the country level’, explores how, and to what extent, the UN promotes and supports inclusivity in its policy, programming and stakeholder engagement processes in four country contexts: Colombia, the Gambia, Jordan and Sri Lanka.