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Flooding and droughts significantly disrupt livelihood patterns and food-security and may result in temporary displacement or longer-term migration. Such shocks exacerbate vulnerabilities and weaken the resilience and adaptive capacity of agriculture-dependent communities; they can heighten competition over natural resources, sometimes leading to cattle raiding and communal conflict. Unpredictable annual variation and extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, affect pastoralist mobility patterns and routes, and farmers’ agricultural production. These changes may exacerbate tensions between herders and farmers, often in connection with land, grazing, water and communal conflicts. Female-headed households are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, as most depend on agriculture to sustain their families, and rely on natural resources like firewood and water. Climate-related livestock losses compound ongoing rivalries, increasing the risk of cattle raiding, which can trigger retaliations, communal conflicts, displacement and the growth of new or existing armed groups. This fact sheet has been produced by the Climaterelated Peace and Security Risks project, jointly undertaken by NUPI and SIPRI, with funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

At the UN Security Council and in other forums in Africa and Europe diplomats are considering how to increase international support to the G5 Sahel Force. The support is aimed at filling critical gaps that have hindered the mobility and operational tempo of the G5 Sahel Force. The overall goal is to enhance its operational capacity and effectiveness in an effort to restore stability in the Sahel. Despite the presence of the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Group of Five Sahel (G5 Sahel) Force, as well as French-led and European Union missions, the security situation in the Sahel has significantly deteriorated over the last few years. Drawing on lessons identified from the support provided by the UN to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and a wide number of experiences with voluntary funded trust funds in other mission support settings, we discuss a few political, financial, doctrinal, human rights and operational considerations. We find that a UN support office funded from assessed contributions, complimented with voluntary contributions, appear to be the only solution for reliable and predictable support to those core needs of the G5 Sahel Force that cannot be met by the G5 Sahel countries themselves, or via bilateral support to those countries.

How would the civilian population of a specific country respond to significant disruptions caused by hybrid threats? This paper explores different response scenarios and considers what can be done to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacities of a civilian population, and its social institutions, when such threats are likely. One of the main challenges in increasing civilian resilience is the uncertainty and unpredictability of both the threat and how people will respond to it. The paper recommends utilizing an adaptive approach that is designed to cope with the complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability. This paper was produced as a part of the Resilient Civilians in Hybrid Population-centric Warfare project, funded by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme under grant SPS G5442. For more information about the project, see https://site.uit.no/hybrid/.

Somalia is highly susceptible to the effects of climate change and extreme weather. Without anticipatory preventive approaches, these factors are likely to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and reduce the people’s livelihood options, which in turn may have negative impacts for stability and security in Somalia. This fact sheet has been produced by the Climaterelated Peace and Security Risks project, jointly undertaken by NUPI and SIPRI, with funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Report from the UN75 Africa-Nordic Sub-regional Meeting, 3 & 4 March 2020, Dakar, Senegal

Over the past few years, the performance of UN peacekeeping operations has come increasingly under the spotlight. It started with financial pressure, especially but not exclusively by the United States Government, to reduce the overall cost of UN peacekeeping operations. This pressure has generated a number of initiatives, including the UN Secretary-General’s Action for Peacekeeping campaign, a series of strategic reviews of ongoing missions, the adoption of a new Comprehensive Performance Assessment System (CPAS) for UN Peacekeeping operations, and even a Security Council resolution dedicated to performance. UN peacekeeping has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt continuously to new challenges over the past 70 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it will not continue to do so into the future. As researchers, we should stimulate this adaptive process by focussing attention on those aspects that have proven to be effective, and caution against those that have proven to be ineffective, by continuing to generate evidence of the factors that influence UN peace operation effectiveness via both comparative and longitudinal research studies.

The African Union is coordinating the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Africa, but the measures introduced are also significantly disrupting the reforms, programmes and operations of the AU.

A few weeks ago, peace operations across the world began swiftly adapting to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease. Missions have been forced to take unprecedented steps to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. These efforts may be just the beginning, and much more significant reductions and changes in the way these operations function may be needed over the coming months.

Between the African Union, European Union, OSCE, NATO and United Nations there are approximately 160,000 civilian, police and military personnel deployed in more than 50 missions. These missions have all been forced to take unprecedented steps to adapt and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. This may be just the beginning and much more significant reductions and changes in the way these operations function may be needed over the coming months.

Over the past decade the impact of climate change on people’s everyday lives have become tangible. Its effects have contributed to loss of human life, it has undermined livelihoods, destroyed infrastructure, harmed national economies and stressed state budgets. Across the globe, its impacts have contributed to widened gender inequalities in different contexts. Climate change is also transforming and redefining the global security and development landscape. The implications of climate change for security and development has become increasingly recognized within the United Nations (UN), African Union (AU) and Regional Economic Communities (REC). The framing of climate change in the security and development discourse is undergoing an important change. In some spaces it is moving away from seeing climate change as a security ‘threat,’ and instead frames it as climate-related security and development ‘risks’. This approach, which is also the approach we take in this paper, emphasizes that climate change must not be seen as predominantly external in its cause, but rather that it exposes and compounds risks that are inherent in social-ecological systems, – especially in fragile and conflict-affected environments.

China’s new, assertive role in UN peacekeeping, especially in Africa, represents a significant shift in Beijing’s peace and security posture that is not yet fully reflected in official discourse and rhetoric, but that reflects China’s new confidence with its global power status. Every significant adaptation in its peacekeeping policy has reflected an important shift in the country’s practical foreign and security policy. Tracing and tracking China’s peacekeeping policy and practice is thus a useful proxy for analysing the evolution of its peace and security considerations. In this policy brief we consider the medium- to long-term trajectory of China’s peace and security practices by analysing its recent activity in Africa, focusing on how China has used its contributions to the UN peacekeeping missions in Mali (MINUSMA) and South Sudan (UNMISS).

The AU cannot simply wait out the coronavirus pandemic: it must adapt and urgently develop new ways of working.

Africa represents the third wave of the spread of COVID-19, but its impact may significantly undermine the reform, programmes and operations of the African Union.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted UN peacekeeping operations. In the short-term, activities have been reduced to the most critical, rotations have been frozen, and most staff are working remotely. Most of the missions have adapted remarkably well, but even more extreme changes are likely in the medium term, as the global economic recession that will follow in the wake of the virus may force UN peace operations to drastically contract in size and scope.

We often refer to peace processes being complex. Beyond this common-sense use of complexity, however, there is a serious project under way to study and theorise complexity, and to operate adaptively in such environments. Studying complexity can, for instance, help peacebuilders understand where they can have the most impact when trying to influence social systems. Adaptive peacebuilding approaches can contribute in original and innovative ways to more inclusive peace processes and more self-sustainable political settlements. Incorporating complexity thinking will help mediators and other peace practitioners to become more confident in coping with uncertainties and more comfortable experimenting with adaptive approaches. Complexity thinking and adaptive peacebuilding

Zu seinem Amtsantritt hatte UN-Generalsekretär António Guterres deutlich gemacht: Die Prävention von Konflikten muss für die Vereinten Nationen ganz oben auf der Agenda stehen. Aus diesem Grund arbeiten die Vereinten Nationen aktuell an der Umsetzung und Ausgestaltung der 'sustaining peace'-Resolutionen, die von der Generalversammlung und dem Sicherheitsrat 2016 verabschiedet wurden. Welche Herausforderungen stellen sich bei der Umsetzung der Resolutionen? Wie wirkt sich die aktuelle geopolitische Lage aus? Und welche Chancen bietet der neue Ansatz, um die UN fit für das 21. Jahrhundert zu machen?

Traditional state-based and determined-design models are ill-equipped to help mediators manage increasingly dynamic, complex and unpredictable violent conflict systems. In this paper we explore an alternative approach, namely an iterative adaptive mediation process that enables the parties to generate solutions themselves, and that responds more nimbly to the challenges posed by complex conflict dynamics. With Adaptive Mediation, the aim of the mediator is to provide the benefits of external intervention without undermining self-organisation. When this approach is applied to conflict analyses, planning, monitoring and evaluation, the ability of mediation processes to navigate uncertainty and adapt to changing dynamics will be enhanced. In order for more resilient and more self-sustainable agreements to emerge, adaptive mediation requires mediators to apply a lighter touch. This encourages greater interdependence among the parties, and discourage dependence upon the mediator. As a result, utilising an adaptive mediation approach should result in generating peace agreements that are more locally-grounded, that are more self-sustainable and that are better able to withstand set-backs and shocks.

This report considers the tools and processes that DPKO and DFS currently use to assess the performance of senior personnel, individual units and peacekeeping operations, and proposes a methodology for reorganizing these tools into a single overarching comprehensive planning, reporting and performance assessment framework.

The African Union (AU), European Union (EU), and United Nations (UN) are under increasing pressure to justify the effectiveness of the peace operations they deploy. Justifying this effectiveness requires precise assessments based on systematized and evidence-based data. Per now, however, this data is lacking, a gap the global research community could help address. On 31 May and 1 June 2017, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) hosted a seminar that brought together thirty participants from the AU, UN, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as research institutes and think tanks from across the globe. The aim of the seminar was to share insights on how best to research the effectiveness of peace operations and to explore the establishment of a network that could seek to address this gap. The seminar discussed how to research and measure the effectiveness of peace operations. It looked at current definitions and conceptualizations of effectiveness, and it discussed the varying perceptions stakeholders have of the effectiveness of peace operations. The group also explored the options for establishing a network dedicated to research on the effectiveness of peace operations. The seminar agreed on the value of establishing such a network, with an aim to produce knowledge that is both academically valuable and relevant for policymakers. Hence, it considered different organizational modalities for a potential research network, with regards to governing principles, funding, and how researchers could undertake joint research projects. This report summarizes the key conclusions and recommendations from the seminar, and lists what the next steps may be for the establishment of a research network on the effectiveness of peace operations.

The scale of contemporary United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) peace operations in Africa represent a significant shift in the political will of the international community to invest in UN and African peace operations. A macro-pattern has developed where most European and American peace and stability operations are deployed in NATO or European Union (EU) operations in Europe and the Middle-East, whilst most UN peace operations troops are contributed by the developing world and deployed in Africa. However, there is a new willingness in Europe to consider deploying some of its peacekeepers to Africa in EU or UN peace operations. From a UN and African perspective, the USA and Europe have a major political and financial influence on, and stake in, the future of peace operations in Africa. The AU and regional entities like ECOWAS, IGAD and SADC have significantly increased their capacity to undertake and manage peace operations over the last decade. The AU has deployed its first three peace operations, AMIB in Burundi, AMIS in Darfur and AMISOM in Somalia. However, the single most important factor when considering the future of peace operations in Africa is how they are financed, as that determines the size, scope and duration of the missions, and therefore has a direct bearing on their impact. The lack of clear and predictable financial arrangements is now the most important factor hindering the further expansion of African peacekeeping.

This report presents the research of the Peace Capacities Network into the policies and roles of a select group of so-called ‘rising powers’ in international peace operations and UN peacekeeping reform. The case studies are from Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Norway, Russia, South Africa and Turkey.

An African model of peace operationsIncreasingly complex security environments are placing high demandson African peace operations, and complicating efforts at long-termpeace- and statebuilding. From the experiences of the African Union(AU) and the sub-regions over the last decade, an African model ofpeace operations has emerged that is at odds with the missionscenarios and multi-dimensional assumptions that underpinned theoriginal framework of the African Standby Force (ASF).