humanitarian.info » Peace Operations

The unbearable complexity of peacekeeping

Paul Currion — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:06:24 +0000

This week I recovered the note I wrote for the NATO ARRC, having lost it in the great Power Cable Calamity of ’09. One of the topics I discussed in the note was why it proves almost impossible to integrate short-term military, medium-term political and long-term development projects, which I referred to in the paper as an MPD approach – the holy grail of integrated peace operations of any kind. I used the diagram below to illustrate what I thought was the fundamental problem.

Embedded Decision-Making in Peace Operations

The diagram illustrates a dynamic, where the lightening bolt is any given action that the mission undertakes. Each of the three MPD elements is nested, with the military is embedded in political decision-making, and the political embedded in the requirements of social and economic development. The problem is that each element operates on a different timescale, with decision-making happening at different speeds, creating feedback loops that are completely out of synch with each other.

In a peace operation, the military can’t wait for the political level to reach a final analysis before it reacts to any given situation (for example, a rebel attack); as a result the political level often reaches a premature conclusion while the political feedback loop is still completing. This goes double for the development loop, because social and economic development processes happen in terms of decades rather than days.

Within this triple feedback loop, for any given action the three cycles may come together at a single point (temporal or spatial), but the effects are felt over different timescales and in different ways, each feedback loop may be positive or negative; and of course there is no guarantee that the three loops will even come together again. If this model is anywhere close to useful, then it’s always going to be impossible to predict how the three will play off each other from any given starting point – let alone for the wider range of interlocking actions the international community usually undertakes.

As a result it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be able to reconcile the three to create a truly coherent MPD approach. MPD is complex rather than complicated, and this means that linear planning tools – which currently dominate thinking in all three of these elements – aren’t up to the task. While systems thinking is making its way into each domain and will no doubt provide new tools to deal with this problem, there’s still a long way to go before that will have any impact on the ground.

It’s worth noting as well that this applies not just to peace operations in the traditional UN blue helmet sense, but also occupations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and it should be a counsel of caution for anybody who still thinks that regime change is a linear process of Stop X, Start Y. Also possible to adapt this very basic model to change processes in e.g. Arab countries in 2011-2012, but that’s a story for another day. Also:

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It’s all just words

Paul Currion — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:53:18 +0000

I feel duty-bound to direct you towards two exciting articles which are also quite brief, so they won’t take up too much of your day. I realise that you’re busy.

First up, it’s Sahana getting a mention in the Wall Street Journal, in an article with the snappy title of (sigh) Managing Disaster. Actually it’s just a puff piece written by the Business Roundtable, but it’s nice to see IBM and Sahana getting mentioned for the Chengdu earthquake deployment.

Second, it’s another insightful article by me for ICT Update magazine, entitled Communicating Peace. In it, you’ll find words of wisdom like ” What is important is not the technology itself, but how people use it.” It will only take 5 minutes of your time to read it – but a lifetime of enlightenment will follow.

Wikis, Webs and Networks: Creating Connections for Conflict-Prone Settings

Paul Currion — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 13:29:41 +0000

Yet another thing that reached my desk about a month late: a publication from the Post-Conflict Reconstruction program of the CSIS. Rebecca Linder (who I met last year at the National Defense University (don’t ask) has pulled together a variety of material to try and marry the world of social networking with that of post-conflict, civil-military type knowledge management. I’m not entirely convinced – I think the social and organisational obstacles are a much larger problem than the paper makes out – but I need to read it again when I’m not in Hong Kong airport to comment properly.

However this report is important because it builds on a few important ideas (particularly those described by Anne Holohan in her excellent book Networks of Democracy) and comes from a well-regarded think tank in the US. You can download the pdf of Wikis, Webs and Networks directly, and visit the blog post announcing the publication.