UN and Global Governance: From Keeping to Building Peace

Catalog description

This course examines United Nations “complex” peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations since the end of the Cold War. It starts with an introduction to fundamentals: theories on the nature of conflict and types of peace operations. The course then explores a survey of the major UN missions, focusing on the international legal basis for intervention by external actors, states interest, capacity, mandate, strategies, and obstacles faced. It covers a number of cross-cutting issues including the politics of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the relationship between peacebuilding and statebuilding, normative debates on justice and ethics, the debates and controversies on the promotion of democracy and market economics as a basis for peace, the challenges of evaluating outcomes, targeting the needs of recipient communities, as well as subcontracting peace, indigenous peacebuilding, and cooperation and coordination with multiple actors (notably non-governmental organizations, regional organizations, donor governments, and multinational coalitions). Overall, the course is designed to help students think analytically and systematically about peacekeeping and peacebuilding, along with providing them with a strong foundation of the enduring theoretical and policy debates and recent developments in field-based knowledge.