Article
The WPF Program on Intrastate Conflict recently published two timely and hard-hitting reports. To Rid the Scourge of War: UN Peacekeeping Operations and Today''s Crises, by Rachel Gisselquist, discusses how the United Nations should reform its overall approach to peacekeeping, peace enforcement and maintenance, and state building.
The report arose out of two meetings with senior UN officials, scholars, practitioners, and journalists. The first meeting, held in May, 2001 at the Kennedy School, evaluated the reforms recommended by the Panel on UN Peace Operations in what came to be known as the "Brahimi Report." At a second meeting at the UN in November, 2001, with Afghanistan very much in mind, participants debated how well the UN was prepared to assume serious peace creation and post-conflict reconstruction responsibilities.
Given the financial weaknesses of the UN, and the UN''s limited peace operations capabilities, UN officials stressed how improvised and restricted the response of the UN could be to civil wars as devastating as Afghanistan''s. The peace of the world clearly demands a UN with a greater capacity to make and sustain peace with and across countries. To Rid the Scourge of War discusses how best to provide that capacity practically and effectively.
In Diamonds in Peace and War: Severing the Conflict-Diamond Connection, Ingrid Tamm examines the role that diamonds play in supporting wars in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone, and what is being done to break this deadly link. Although 95 percent of the world''s $7 billion a year trade in rough diamonds stems from peaceful countries, the other 5 percent is inextricably intertwined with war.
In early 2000, De Beers Ltd. began meetings with the main exporting countries and NGO leaders to craft a protocol that came to be known as the Kimberley Process. The Process eventually produced an agreed-upon method of making the trade in so-called "conflict diamonds" more costly and cumbersome than the trade in peaceful diamonds. Although enforcement of this new regime is not yet fully assured and critical U.S. legislation is still pending, substantial progress has been made in limiting the impact of conflict diamonds.
http://www.worldpeacefoundation.org