CIAO DATE: 05/02

Refashioning the Dialogue: Regional Perspectives on the Brahimi Report on UN Operations

Executive Summary

• There is no single "developing world" perspective on UN peace operations — nor, indeed, a single perspective from each of the regions that took part in the consultation. Nevertheless, some broad themes emerged in the course of discussion, conditioned by particular regional experiences with such operations. Each of the meetings emphasized the importance of the Brahimi Report and took note of the timing and resource constraints that limited the scope of the Report essentially to peacekeeping. All meetings in the developing world, where people feel marginalized from UN decision-making, rued the lateness of the consultative process, noting that building a constituency for UN peace operations requires more extensive, deeper, and earlier consultation with a broad range of regional and local actors. At the New York meeting one permanent representative observed that, returning to the organization after a fifteen-year absence, he saw that the UN, too, was now being affected by the global demand for transparency and accountability.

• The meetings in the developing countries confirmed both the depth of the crisis of confidence in the capability and willingness of the United Nations to conduct peace operations — especially evident in the African regional meeting — and the hopes that many people continue to place in the world's only truly global organization. European participants engaged directly with the Report's operational prescriptions, as they evidently felt more ownership of UN decisions affecting them. Though most participants saw the Brahimi Report as setting a useful baseline for a sober reassessment of what the UN can and cannot accomplish, they also agreed with its authors that the Report's recommendations constitute only the "minimum threshold of change" (para. 7) required by the UN. discussed in the Brahimi Report. Prevention should

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