On Nov 15, CIVIC’s Peacekeeping Director, Alison Giffen, was one of two civil society representatives invited to speak at the 2017 Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial, hosted by the Canadian Ministry of Defence.
The Security Council will vote today to renew the mandate and provide a needed boost of 900 additional troops to the beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic (CAR). The neglected five-year war in CAR has taken a deadly turn for the worse in 2017, resulting in the killing of civilians, humanitarians…
In this episode of Intercross the Podcast, we sit down with ICRC in Washington’s Deputy Head of Communications Trevor Keck and Lauren Spink, the Center for Civilians in Conflict Peacekeeping Advisor. Trevor recently returned from a brief mission to South Sudan and Lauren is headed out to the country this week. We took the opportunity to chat with…
Protecting civilians is too often a “nice-to-have” and not a “must-have” part of militaries’ missions. This is fundamentally wrong-minded
CIVIC Director of US Program Dan Mahanty discusses the dangers of the proposed changes in counterterrorism policy in an op-ed with USA Today: The US military is going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, and Americans should be worried. New changes to US counterterrorism policy, branded as getting decisions out of the White House and…
On Monday, President Trump will chair a high-level panel on United Nations reform, kicking off the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting. Peacekeeping reform is badly needed and should be part of that discussion. Smart cuts to the U.N.’s budget could spur needed changes, but so far, the Trump administration’s focus has been primarily…
If civilians are not included as meaningful participants in the Dialogue, the results of the process are likely yet another agreement between national politicians that divides the spoils of war between themselves rather than healing the deepening ethnic divisions that four years of civil conflict have sown.
Despite well-publicized and often unacceptable failures, proposed budget cuts by the United States would undo what good has been done to make UN peacekeepers better able to protect vulnerable civilians.
United Nations peacekeeping troops often take the blame for mission failures, but a recent op-ed by Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC)’s Peacekeeping Advisor Lauren Spink argues that the UN Security Council and Secretariat must share in accountability for peacekeeping operation failures and enact meaningful reform to support field operations.