Summer School

Summer School 2023

Title: Planning for Peace: Understanding Multidimensionality and Integration in UN Peace Operations

Date and Place:

07.–09. and 17.–18.07.2023 at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Summary:

The IOCM Summer School 2023, entitled "Planning for Peace: Understanding Multidimensionality and Integration in UN Peace Operations," was organized by Steve Biedermann and took place from July 7 to 9 and 17 to 18. The 20 participants, including guests from Leiden University and the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg, focused on the meaning, implication, and challenges of multidimensionality and integration as two essential features of United Nations Peace Operations (UNPOs).

These operations constitute a central – and probably the most visible – tool in the UN's pursuit of international peace and security. They are deployed to manage international conflicts, ranging from preventive measures to post-conflict reconstruction, operate in different settings, and appear in various forms, including civilian, military, and police personnel. Their mandates include the monitoring of peace agreements, disarmament of combatants, observation of elections, the countering of terrorist activities, and the creation of stable institutions to ensure security, human rights, and the rule of law. This range of activities and participating actors illustrate UNPO's multidimensional character, creating the need for integrated planning and implementation.

Through workshop sessions and discussions, participants first gained an overview of UNPO's historical development, purposes, functioning, challenges, and the fundamentals of the mission planning process. These sessions also included guest lectures by experts from the Stabilisation Platform Berlin, the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College in Hamburg, and the headquarters of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in Kinshasa. Building on this, participants simulated an Integrated Mission Task Force for two days and planned the fictional UN Yemen Advanced Mission (UNYAM). During the simulation, they assumed different roles in given mission components – including political, humanitarian, and military affairs – and developed plans and strategies to coherently implement the mission's mandate. Intensive work and discussions were required to coordinate the different rationales of the actors involved and match the component-specific as well as overarching requirements. Despite tensions between the political, humanitarian, and military planning elements regarding strategies and resources, the participants eventually drafted a coherent mission concept and thus prepared UNYAM's deployment.

We thank all participants and contributors. A special thanks goes to Julie Marie Brischar and Jonas Georg Läster, who, as assistants, fundamentally contributed to implementing the IOCM Summer School 2023.

Group photo of the IOCM Summer School 2023

Image: Steve Biedermann

Summer School 2022

Title: UN Peace Operations: Actors, Structures & Challenges

Date and Place:

21.–29.07.2022 at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Summary:

Peace operations are a central tool in the United Nations (UN) pursuit of international peace and security. After its origin in the 1950s with a focus on interstate conflicts and a period of limited activity during the Cold War period peace operations nowadays operate in many different settings and take on various forms. They are engaged in the prevention and management of international conflicts as well as post-conflict reconstruction. Since the 1990s they are more involved in intrastate conflicts in which state and non-state actors are involved. Throughout its history, the UN’s peace operations have been regarded as successes (e.g., Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and Namibia) and failures (e.g., Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia) alike which is why an almost constant reform process was started. Despite various conceptual as well as practical improvements the missions still face many challenges like the increasing complexity of conflict scenarios, the limited political will of UN members states to engage in conflict management as well as cumbersome planning processes, and misconduct by peacekeeping personnel.

Against this background, the IOCM Summer School 2022 (July 21–29) aims at taking stock of UN peace operations by reviewing its historical development, pathbreaking documents like the UN Charter, Capstone Doctrine, and relevant reports. Furthermore, it will discuss the role of major political decision-making bodies and actors like the UN Security Council and Secretary-General, as well as relevant member states (e.g., P5, TCCs). It finally addresses current challenges to peace operations like the erosion of fundamental principles, artificial intelligence, and climate change.

All this is the preparation for a 2-day simulation of the UN Security Council, in which the deployment of a UN peace operation is to be negotiated by the participants.

The full programme for the 2022 Summer School can be found herepdf, 212 kb · de.

Participants of the IOCM Summer School 2022

Image: Steve Biedermann

Summer School 2021

Title: Dealing with Troubled Heritages. Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts and Reconciliation

Date and Place:

23.07.2021–31.07.2021 at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Summary:

The idea of nationalism and its related vision of a sovereign people in a clearly confined territory has been the driving force of modern times and the foundation of today´s international order. Whilst the original idea – sparked by the American and French Revolutions – was an inclusive, revolutionary and political one, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, it increasingly became a retrograde, exclusivist force featuring conceptions of ethnic purity and culture, while also laying the foundation for racist suppression, and serving as rationale for colonialist expansions. For its double-faced nature famous theorist Tom Nairn has called nationalism the ”modern janus”, Benedict Anderson in his historico-cultural analysis "imagined communities" has vividly outlined the constructed, socio-psychological character of nations. Eventuallly, popular historian Eric Hobsbawm has drawn attention to the strongest pillar of these communities: their common heritage. Since every grand nation needs a grand heritage, as he explains not without irony in his ground-beaking work ”invented traditions”, a nation´s past has often been a constructed one.

Many conflicts and post-conflict settings evolving around contested borders and territories, over minority rights, or power sharing balances have to be seen in their ethno-nationalist dimension. The continuous tensions between Turkey and Greece, the Cypriot division, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the newly sparked conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh have been called nationalist conflicts based on exclusive ethno-religious identities and competing prerogatives of interpretation over contested national heritages.

All of them can be called intractable conflicts to a larger or smaller degree. For they are rooted in decades of simmering tensions with entire generations raised in their spirit. Dominant discourses of educational systems, museums, media and politics are mostly based on mutually exclusive narratives of the conflict history. Some have been frozen for decades, like Cyprus, some characterized by daily dynamics of confrontation and outbreaks of violence, like Israel-Palestine. Yet others have undergone a profound political transition and classified as ”resolved”, or ”post-conflict” like former Yugoslavia and South Africa´s Apartheid. The latter, in fact, has been considered by many as text-book example of reconciliation with regard to comprehensive reappraisal, acknowledgement and compensation for committed injustices. Others, however, have strongly criticized the still existant socio-economic cleavages along ethnic lines. The same holds true for the former Yugoslavia: Peace accords and criminal prosecution that accompanied a profound political transition do not seem to have reconciled the former enimies. Rather, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one could speak at best of a peaceful coexistence of the communities and a collective memory that is based on competing, mutually-exclusive national narratives.   

In view of the above-mentioned, how can contested, sensitive heritages, how can human rights violations and traumata in intractable conflicts and post-conflict settings be sustainably addressed and reconciled?

Drawing on theories of nationalism, intractability and reconciliation, the summer school will discuss these and related questions in a series of case studies. It will shed light on the relevance of collective memory, national identities, and vested interests – particularly regarding disputed territories – for unfavorable intergroup dynamics and confrontational politics and seek methods for rapprochement and reconciliation.

Based on secondary literature, key-notes by accomplished experts and practitioners from the respective fields and primary sources taken from education, media and politics the summer school puts a special emphasis on peace activism, peace-educational material and peace-oriented trans-border, respectively trans-ethnic activism in an attempt to define best practices of reconciliation. Each day will be composed of theoretical expert input and interactive workshops guided by related research questions and concluded by a comparative discussion of the results.

The full preliminary programme for the 2021 Summer School can be found herepdf, 445 kb · de.

Participants of the IOCM Summer School 2021

Image: IOCM