The Brahimi report and the future of UN Peace operations

"There are many tasks which United Nations peacekeeping forces should not be asked to undertake and many places they should not go. But when the United Nations does send its forces to uphold the peace, they must be prepared to confront the lingering forces of war and violence, with the ability and determination to defeat them". Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, August 2000. In trying to meet many of the peacekeeping challenges thrust upon it in the mid-1990s, he United Nations experienced some dramatic failures. Determined not to repeat that experience as demand for peace operations surged again at the en of the decade UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked a high-level group of experts to assess the UN system's shortcomings and to make frank and realistic recommendations for change. Issued in August 2000, the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (known as the "Brahimi Report" after the Panel chair, UN Under-Secretary Lakhdar Brahimi) offered an in-depth critique of the conduct of UN operations and made specific recommendations for change. Only by making such changes, the Panel argued, would the United Nations be able to meet the critical 21st century peacekeeping and peacebuilding challenges presented by its member states. Three years after this landmark study, the United Nations finds itself at a pivotal point. Rancorous debate about the UN's global role has occupied New York, triggered first by the post-9/11 environment and spurred further by events in Iraq and Washington's assertive use of force there. Nevertheless, the UN continues to run fact-finding missions, 13 peacekeeping operations and 12 peacebuilding and political missions in post-conflict societies, with new operations on the horizon. For UN peacekeeping operations alone, more than 90 countries were contributing over 40,000 police and military personnel in the fall of 2003. Because key recommendations of the Brahimi Report are now in practice, the United Nations is better positioned today to meet these demands for peace operations than at any time in its history. In general, the United Nations has demonstrated clear progress, in implementing a majority of reforms recommended by the Panel on UN Peace Operations. The Report's more concrete and operational recommendations, impenetrable by the UN bureaucracy, fared better than those pitched at the level of doctrine or strategy of those addressed to the member states themselves. We summarize our study of the implementation of the Brahimi Report