Suchergebnisse

"This research paper analyzes the efforts of the past decade to turn the UN peace operations apparatus into a learning organization. It begins by examining a traditional organizational culture of peacekeeping, which is the subject of section 2 of this paper. The traditional culture emerged under the conditions of Cold War peacekeeping operations. It prized maximum political flexibility over professional management practices. After the shock of the UN's catastrophic failures in the face of genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica, this traditional culture came to be challenged by a new generation of peace operations officials. This group of 'reformers' promoted objectives such as critical reflection and organizational learning while the 'traditionalists' sought to protect the organization from excessive bureaucratic standardization. Section 3 details the structural and political constraints to learning that the reform agenda had to deal with in the beginning. The peace operations bureaucracy is a fragile, extremely decentralized and highly politicized organization – and none of these traits have served to promote its capacity to institutionalize learning. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that all but a few civilian staff can only ever receive short-term contracts and have had, in 2009, less than two years of experience in peace operations underscores the adverse career incentives and limited cause to identify strongly with the organization that individuals have. Together with the cultural rift that had begun to emerge in the late 1990s, these structural and political constraints provided the backdrop for the reform efforts that began in 2000 with the so-called Brahimi report, driven by the new generation of managers who gradually came into influential headquarters jobs from the field. Their initial efforts are outlined in section 4, which draws on examples from several in-depth case studies on specific attempts at learning particular lessons in various subject areas of peace operations. After several years of focusing on the nuts and bolts of managing growth, the learning agenda took shape in 2005 as part of 'Peace Operations 2010,' Under-Secretary-General Jean-Marie Guéhenno's central professionalization initiative. Section 5 depicts the 'Peace Operations 2010' agenda that put learning at the center of reform efforts, again with illustrations from our in-depth case studies on the impact of those efforts (published in full detail elsewhere). Two of the key elements of Peace Operations 2010 were a top-down guidance development effort and a bottom-up knowledge sharing toolbox, the products of which could be used as a source of feedback to inform the formulation and improvement of guidance for as long as it would take to establish an effective evaluation capacity as well. Training and evaluation, however, did not receive the same level of attention and political/financial support from member states. As a result, even the lessons that were taken up by the organization, debated, refined and formally adopted often languished for lack of effective institutionalization in practice." (author's abstract)

"During post-conflict periods, institutions and patterns of action are challenged and renegotiated – processes that have long gone largely unrecognized. There continues to be a lack
of empirical research on the constellations of authority following the cessation of conflict.
This lack corresponds to deficiencies on the level of policy-making: It appears that Western
donors, until today, base their approaches to post-conflict reconstruction on the wholly
unchallenged assumption that the state is the only legitimate actor in this area. This research
project focused on core questions in post-conflict security provision by and beyond
the state. The central question of the project was to determine which actors (such as traditional
authorities, the remnants of state security organs, private entrepreneurs, international
peacekeeping missions etc.) provide security in a situation of fragmented authority, i.e.
sanctioning violence and crime. Moreover, the project sought to analyze under which conditions
these actors are considered legitimate by different groups within society: some
actors might protect specific groups among the population while representing a threat to
others. These questions were addressed in empirical case studies of Liberia and Sierra
Leone. The project worked under the basic assumption that oligopolies of violence exist in
periods directly preceded by conflict, comprising a limited number of actors that produce
violence and provide security, who both compete and cooperate with each other. It was
also assumed that oligopolies exhibited significant variation, with one important sub-type
being an 'oligopoly with market leader'. (...)" (author's abstract)