Last week, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, announced that the U.S. is … “very concerned that UNMIS take on board and fully implement the portion of its mandate – the critical portion of its mandate – that relates to the protection of civilians.” Ambassador Rice did not, however, elaborate on what the United Nations Mission in Sudan, otherwise known as UNMIS, could do to make protection a reality.

In two weeks the existing mandate for the UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) will expire, and UN Security Council will make an important decision about the future of the mission, and the trajectory of UN involvement in this volatile country.

I am writing from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country with incredible natural beauty, a bounty of mineral resources and site of a brutal and protracted conflict that has caused the death and displacement of millions of people since the mid 1990’s. MONUC, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the DRC, was deployed here nearly ten years ago, and its current mandate – which includes over 40 separate and complicated tasks – places priority on the protection of civilians, mainly in the DRC’s unpredictable eastern region.  

September has been a big month for international peacekeeping, for better and for worse…

President Barack Obama’s engagement and encouraging statements at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this week spoke of the promise of a renewed international push to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of UN peacekeeping as a whole. 

I am writing from Bahai, a village in eastern Chad right on the border with Darfur. Camilla Olson and I have trekked all the way out here, to what may be the most remote place I have ever visited, to understand the dynamics that make humanitarian assistance so hard to deliver. 

The following is currently a web feature on PBS NOW: 

Last October I traveled to Congo with a colleague from Refugees International to assess the effectiveness of the U.N. peacekeeping operation in the troubled town of Goma, the eastern provincial capital.

Shortly after we arrived, serious fighting broke out between government soldiers and the CNDP, an armed opposition group, just 30 minutes north of us.

Humanitarianism is built upon the principles of neutrality and impartiality and the fundamental assertion that aid should be delivered strictly according to need.  However, aid itself can and has often been manipulated for political and strategic ends.  Large deliveries of food and supplies have a monetary value, particularly in areas suffering from conflict where people are exposed to large-scale deprivation.  Aid can also have a legitimizing effect, giving political credibility and power to those people and institutions that are seen to be the intermediaries between aid agencies and the general population.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the end of Sudan’s civil war between the north and the south. For two decades armed actors manifested a capacity for calculated brutality and imposition of human suffering on a level that defies description or reasonable comprehension.

Four years after the parties agreed to lay down their weapons there are two important lessons to keep in mind.

The first is that ‘peace’ is not just an absence of war, and that peace-building takes more than just the handshakes and photo-ops that exemplify the signing of accords.  The second is that peace is always possible, even when it is impossible to conceive of how to get there.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was the result of a massive diplomatic push by Sudanese leaders and by the international community, led in large part by the United States. The agreement itself is strong, but far reaching and ambitious.  

This year, however, Sudan stands on the brink of a potentially volatile period in the implementation of that agreement.  We have just entered into the year designated for the first countrywide democratic election, and elections always have the potential to cause controversy and instability.

Lunch in the cafeteria of the United Nations headquarters building in New York is always a slightly strange experience

Violence re-erupted in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the evening of October 26th and the redisplacement of tens, and then hundreds of thousands of people began.