Project on Restoring the Rule of Law

The Future of Peace Operations Program engages with the United Nations and with governments, international organizations and NGOs committed to improving peace operations. The Project on Restoring the Rule of Law focuses on those components of UN peace operations that work with host state police, courts and correctional institutions. In 2013, project work includes assessing the impact of those components and building a visual model of peacekeeping and peacebuilding that starts from a rule of law rather than military perspective. The project also continues to support the UN Police Division in developing international police peacekeeping doctrine.

Current Research Areas

Assessing the Impact of Police, Justice and Corrections Components in UN Peace Operations

Record numbers of personnel are being sent into peace operations of growing complexity in environments where critical government functions, including criminal justice, have decayed or collapsed. Over the last decade or so, the UN Security Council has given complex UN peace operations broad mandates in police development, followed by mandates to help restore justice systems and provide advisory support to national prison systems. UN efforts to restore those functions have met limited success, partly owing to resource constraints but mostly due to outsiders' limited ability to change the fundamentals of governance in conflict-affected states. In 2011, the project responded to a request from the Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI) in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations to study the impact that police, justice and corrections components in UN peace operations have on the people and practices of the corresponding institutions of the host state. The resulting report, Understanding Impact of Police, Justice and Corrections Components in UN Peace Operations, can be downloaded here. The study drew upon nine mission case studies developed for OROLSI, as well as more than 200 hundred field interviews, to substantiate the study's analysis and conclusions. FOPO director Bill Durch presented the study's findings to the 4th UN International Corrections Conference in Berlin; the presentation can be downloaded here. 

Towards Visual Models of Peace Support

UN peace support operations deploy alongside state and multilateral aid providers and NGOs to help implement peace accords among host state parties in power, parties out of power, and parties sharing power. In missions' areas of operation, stability may vary over time, between different parts of the country and across the larger regional neighborhood. Operations deploy into variable terrains, climates, infrastructural conditions and access to resources, and into societies with varying political histories, social norms and customary practices. It is difficult to grasp from text-based descriptions how these many elements interact to promote or inhibit an operation's work or to see whether, much less how, an operation is contributing to consolidation of peace. Together these elements constitute a set of complex systems that must in some fashion be modeled to be followed, let alone understood.

The project seeks to map the ‘ecology' of peacekeeping and peacebuilding to promote shared, integrated views of mission status within the mission and at Headquarters; provide an interactive tool for training and familiarizing new mission personnel; and tracking mission goal attainment as well as flagging unanticipated knock-on effects of mission actions. In 2013, the project will develop conceptual models of conflict, peacebuilding and the post-conflict environment, beginning with rule of law, focusing on two current mission areas.

Support for Development of UN Police Strategic Guidance

The project supported the development of new guidance for UN Formed Police Units in peace operations (2008-09); development of a UN-INTERPOL Action Plan for International Police Peacekeeping (2009-10); and development of a Strategic Guidance Framework for individual police officers in UN operations (2010-present).

Previous work includes studies on: