As Alex notes, awareness of the crunch in peacekeeping is spreading. There’s news today of an MIT report arguing that the proposed EU force in Chad would be “engulfed”, which leaves those (like me) who have argued for a rapid deployment a tad uneasy. And, out in the real world, it’s full-scale artillery barrage time in the eastern DRC…
So, any reasons to be cheerful? Well yes, just possibly. The more attention the situation gets now, the higher the chance that the international community may pause to wonder what on earth it’s managed to get itself into. It’s worth remembering that the one really important document on UN peacekeeping – 2000’s Brahimi Report – mattered because it faced up to the catastrophes of the 1990s. Nothing like a great big failure to inspire new thinking.
Maybe if we can work out that peacekeeping is teetering on the brink right now, we can skip the horrible failure bit and start propping it up as we go along? Maybe.
