How UN Peacekeeping Operations Can Adapt to a New Multipolar World Order

How will United Nations peacekeeping operations adapt to the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order? The paper considers emerging dynamics in three areas that may suggest how UN peacekeeping are likely to be affected by a changing world order, namely strategic political coherence, the employment of force, and the outer limits of peace operations. It points out that one of the enduring characteristics of UN peacekeeping has been the resilience of its identity. Another has been the continuous evolution of the specific manifestations of that identity into practice. UN peacekeeping have thus shown a remarkable capacity to continuously adapt to new challenges over the past 70 plus years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it will not continue to do so into the future.

Expectations of Change: Development Partnerships in Faith-Based Forest Conservation in Ethiopia

Fieldwork on/with/through non-governmental organizations: navigating NGO ethnography

The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change

Supranational organisations can only confront politico-economic issues that are recognised as important. Typically, issues gain recognition either when they provide an external shock to the system, shaking political actors into action, or when they are framed as important in policy networks concerned with developing the appropriate scientific approach. Ideally political and scientific actors align in creating pressures to recognise the issue as salient and to mobilise organisational responses. Issues differ in their capacity to be driven by both political and scientific pressures, creating crisis management, technocratic, and reform agenda outcomes. Here we explore a further variation, where pressures around an issue are insufficient, creating a policy vacuum. We examine one such policy vacuum in Europe: demographic change. This issue belongs to no particular Directorate-General in the European Commission, but is subject to policy frames from DG EMPL and DG ECFIN. Without sufficient political and scientific pressures, no particular policy position is occupied and advocated despite recognition of the issue’s importance. We discuss the role of policy vacuums and the need for their identification in political economy research.