African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

Header Banner

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics

Evidence-Based Peacekeeping

By Alex de Waal
November 24, 2009
1314
0
Share:

In most areas of public policy, gathering and analyzing evidence for the nature of the problem and the efficacy of response is a sine qua non for designing and implementing programs. The statistical analysis of disease patterns is the basis for public health policies and the discipline of epidemiology. Police services routinely gather and analyze crime data in order to decide where, when and how to deploy their officers and assets. The military officers commanding counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan similarly examine data-sets for the kinds of incidents they face, and their spatial and temporal trends. In business this kind of data collection and use can make the difference between profit and bankruptcy.

Evidence is rarely clear cut. There are often multiple interpretations for trends. And there can be a tyranny of statistical accounting, which fails to capture important elements that are not being measured. Nonetheless, a commitment to evidence-based policymaking requires a commitment to taking evidence seriously.

International peacekeeping operations are one of the last bastions that have yet to yield to evidence-based planning and assessment. The classic form of peacekeeping, as an extension of inter-state diplomacy, emphasized discretion and the cooperation and confidence of the parties to the conflict, who were also the parties to the peacekeeping agreement. Any public statements needed to be cleared through diplomatic channels. Combined with the intrinsic caution of any organization subject to multilateral decision-making, it is understandable that the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations was reluctant to make or publish any assessments in its own right.

The world has changed. The demand for evidence to support claims of need or policy success cannot be resisted for long. International peace support operations have much more complex tasks and operate in different environments, including ongoing complex conflicts such as Darfur and DR Congo. Most importantly, a mission with a mandate that includes the Responsibility to Protect is required to undertake tasks that usually fall upon national police services and armed forces. How should a force with an R2P mandate make its tactical deployment decisions? How should it assess its success or otherwise?

Clearly, today’s peace support missions, especially those with R2P tasks, require a rigorous evidence base for policy planning, operational deployment, and strategic evaluation of progress. Without such an evidence base, mission design and deployment, and both internal and public evaluations, will remain irredeemably subjective and prone to manipulation in support of political agendas.

In this context it is unfortunate that UNAMID’s efforts to introduce some rigor into assessments of the situation in Darfur have been so controversial. The estimates for violent incidents produced by UNAMID based upon the information compiled by the Joint Mission Analysis Centre are not perfect. There are gaps and inaccuracies, and the data for sexual violence are particularly incomplete. Nobody claims that the (more reliable) figures for violent fatalities represent the total sum of harms inflicted upon the Darfurian people.

Nonetheless, the JMAC data are the best that exist at present. Lethal violence is an important element of the crisis. If the data are incomplete then the challenge is to invest more in the reporting systems. The data show important geographical distribution, temporal trends, and patterns of violence. These are empirical claims that can be verified or falsified. If the data fail to provide a complete picture of the nature of the Darfur conflict, then those who prefer to characterize the conflict differently, must either produce better data in support of their claims, or construct different definitions for the conflict.

Without doubt, the calls for evidence-based peacekeeping will increase. Improved data collection and analysis will follow, along with metrics for the measurement of crisis and response.

Previous Article

CPA’s Unhappy End

Next Article

Darfur: Who is Killing? Who is Dying?

mm

Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is Research Professor and Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. He was the founding editor of the African Arguments book series. He is the author of The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power.

0 comments

  1. Marjon 2 December, 2009 at 21:00

    The days for seeing Peacekeeping as a science are not here yet, I believe. Hence the reason why efforts that work to maintain peace are not as seriously invested in. However, with scholars such as the author of this article and professors who advocate the investigation and research of truth in circumstance like Darfur are a major step towards a human society that will be able to hold the capacity of how fragile human security and peace is, and its value to everyone in the long run.

Leave a reply Cancel reply

  • Debating IdeasSudanTINAC

    “This Is Not a Coup”: International Failure in Sudan

  • A cattle market in Garissa. Credit: USAID/Mariantonietta Peru.
    EconomyKenya

    LAPSSET: Will a new highway open up the long-neglected Garissa?

  • General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan declared a nationwide state of emergency and dissolved the transitional government in Sudan on 25 October 2021. Credit: Sudan TV.
    PoliticsSudan

    We stand with Sudan’s people and demand more AU, IGAD, UN action

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81664
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Popular articles

  • A shot of the protests on 30 June 2022 taken by drone and shared by @JamesCopnall.

    Why Sudan’s protest movement has toppled one but not yet two dictators

  • Dr Kanda at the Lwano mobile screening camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Credit: Xavier Vahed-DNDi.

    Africa-led progress on neglected tropical diseases needs boost in Kigali

  • Evangelista Kanohili sits outside her home in Sheema, Uganda, March 15, 2022. Kanohili has been experiencing on-and-off infestations of jiggers, a small parasitic flea that burrows into the skin and can make it too painful to take care of daily tasks. Credit: Apophia Agiresaasi/Global Press Journal.

    Uganda: The tiny flea making it painful for people to walk and work

  • “Too much propaganda”: Zimbabwe’s pirates of the airwaves look to SA

  • Charity Nyoni, one of the growing number of women in Zimbabwe’s construction industry, tests paint on a board in a Victoria Falls showroom. Credit: Fortune Moyo/Global Press Journal.

    Building houses while knocking down gender barriers in Zimbabwe

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
Cleantalk Pixel
By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu