Lessons from HIPPO, ten years on
Process and leadership are needed to avoid squandering an opportunity for reform
Lire en français ici (via Observatoire Boutros-Ghali)
Last week, the launch of a new IPI report marking ten years since the issuance of the 2015 report of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) prompted me to reflect on how much has changed and what has not. Certainly the geopolitical context for peace operations today is dramatically different. Against this backdrop, the UN has in recent years argued that the key challenges faced by UN peace operations today are fundamentally political in nature. In peacekeeping, for example, the UN asserts that
Insufficient political support from UN member states has made enabling conflict to come to a lasting end a distant prospect for many UN Peacekeeping missions.1
And in the case of special political missions, the UN argues that,
In the face of the current complex global peace and security environment and given the breadth and complexity of what special political missions are being asked to deliver, strong support from Member States…is critical for the missions to be able to implement their mandate successfully.2
But peace operations must deliver wherever they are needed; they do not have the luxury of deploying only during permissive geopolitical eras. And it is difficult to think of more than a handful of cases over the 80-year history of the UN in which Member States have provided unified political support to UN peacemaking efforts.
At the same time, UN peace operations today function under the structures, policies, and processes built up in response to the exigencies of previous eras. But the demands during the time of the HIPPO, the 2000 Brahimi report, or the 1992 Agenda for Peace are not the same demands as today. The peace operations machinery is not optimized for contemporary requirements; it is also cumbersome, fragmented, and focuses more on outputs rather than outcomes. The challenges facing the UN are not exclusively political in nature. The UN must take advantage of the opportunity of the peace operations review and the UN80 initiative to address the shortcomings of current approaches and structures.
If only.
Lessons deliberately not learned
A key difference between the HIPPO review and processes such as the UN80 initiative and the peace operations review is that the HIPPO was independent. Its members—who were respected individuals with a wealth of knowledge and experience working in and with UN peace operations—were not beholden to the UN bureaucracy. They were therefore free to speak their minds and they made a range of recommendations that would be difficult to imagine appearing in a report of the Secretary-General. The UN80 initiative and peace operations review, however, are the opposite. They are internal processes led by the relevant departments, and these departments are primarily guided by their own bureaucratic interests and priorities.
To be clear, I am not saying that there is any deficiency in the expertise within the Secretariat to be able to undertake such reviews. But, as noted in a recent article by Ben Christian published in International Studies Quarterly,
the internal criticism culture in the UN Secretariat’s Peace and Security Pillar is repressive and self-restrained.…UN employees do not dare to voice criticism in official formats, and “learning products” are glossed over as they move up the ranks. As a consequence, the [international organization] lacks a necessary stimulus for learning, which results in performance problems.
In fact, there is a wealth of good ideas on how to improve peace operations in the rank-and-file of the relevant departments, along with plenty of firsthand experience of the shortcomings in existing approaches to planning, analysis, coordination, and implementation. But a variety of factors—including career considerations, the hierarchical culture of the Secretariat, and the design of internal clearance and coordination mechanisms—limit the extent to which staff are able to advance recommendations that conflict with the interests and priorities of their department. On top of this is the fact that internal initiatives involving more than one entity, each with very different preferences, tend to result in least common denominator outcomes, which often manifest as maintenance of the status quo.
In fact, this is what happened with the restructuring of the peace and security pillar during Secretary-General Guterres’s first term. Not only did the internal review team consist of staff members nominated by their respective departments and who therefore represented the interests of those departments, but the heads of the departments also imposed parameters around the work of the team to limit the scope of the review. As a result, very little changed in practice within the peace and security pillar as a result of the restructuring.3
Potential ways out
Moments of crisis can be catalysts for reform at the UN. At the same time, the dynamics of the current moment, in which a siege mentality has overtaken the UN peace and security pillar, make it difficult for the leadership of the departments in question to confess deficiencies in their current approaches or structures, lest such admissions be used to justify further cuts in budgets and staffing. To ensure that this crisis does not go to waste requires that the Secretary-General demonstrate leadership and put in place a process designed to overcome the bureaucratic incentives arrayed against change.
Independent reviews are one option, and it is not too late for the Secretary-General to relaunch the peace operations review as an independent process. The decision of how to conduct the peace operations review, whether internally or using an independent panel, rests with the Secretary-General, and the timeline for completing the report in early 2026 was unilaterally determined by the Secretariat. Member States would not object if a delay were to yield a higher-quality product that actually offers a way forward.
That said, independent reviews are not a panacea; they are a tool whose impact is greatest when not over-used,4 and some such reviews have been more independent than others.5 And to avoid squandering the potential of an independent review, the departments with a vested interest in the outcome not be permitted to interfere with its work or censor its findings and recommendations.
A lighter-touch alternative is for the Secretary-General to engage an independent red team to stress test the findings of an internal peace operations review. A red team is a group of independent analysts “that can challenge the organization’s own assumptions, its groupthink, blind spots, political and institutional complacencies, and aversion to challenging the ideas of senior leaders.”6 A red team could be employed to provide the Secretary-General with an independent assessment of the analysis and conclusions of the internal review to allow for strengthening of the report of the Secretary-General on the peace operations review in advance of its issuance to the General Assembly and Security Council. A red team could also be engaged to examine the conclusions of the peace and security cluster of the UN80 initiative.
An internal option that nevertheless maintains some degree of independence from the departments is to have the review conducted by the Secretariat but led from outside the departments. By way of example, the report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the HIPPO recommendations7 was drafted by a team in EOSG whose members were drawn from across the Secretariat, as opposed to being drafted by the concerned departments themselves. This helped the Secretary-General maintain ownership over the follow-up process while also balancing the competing interests of the departments.
Final thoughts
The credibility of the UN is at stake, as is its promise to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. But unless the Secretary-General exercises leadership that has been sorely lacking and engages in some course-correction in both the peace operations review and the work of the peace and security cluster of UN80, we are likely to get a lame rehash of the same tired talking points: that (1) UN peace operations have a track record of implementing a wide range of mandated tasks; (2) they remain a flexible tool that can be deployed in response to many different political, peace, and security requirements; (3) their effectiveness is primarily hindered by an adverse geopolitical environment and the absence of unified political support; and (4) the existing structures and approaches underpinning UN peace operations remain largely up to the task, though under-resourced. Such an outcome would represent a squandered opportunity and a colossal failure to meet the expectations of the moment.
© 2025 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Lacroix, J. (2024, September 2). Peacekeepers Need Peacemakers. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/united-nations-peacekeeping-missions.
United Nations (2024). Overall policy matters pertaining to special political missions: Report of the Secretary-General (A/79/303). https://undocs.org/en/A/79/303.
There is, of course, the lift-and-shift of the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) into the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) to create the new Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), but this was more of a change in reporting lines rather than a true integration of the two entities. And for all its fanfare, the single “political-operational structure” shared by DPPA and the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) represents far less of a change in practice than appears on paper. The desks of the former DPA and the integrated operational teams of the former Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) were not merged or reconfigured, and they continue to report only to either DPPA or DPO, respectively. In fact, the bulk of the changes to the functioning of the peace and security pillar come from external factors such as the management reform, which brought with it not only a delegation of authority framework that empowered missions and changed the roles of departments at Headquarters (even if many of those departments remain in denial about these changes), but also changes as a result of the “divorce” between the former DPKO and the former Department of Field Support.
von Einsiedel, S. and Pichler Fong, A. (2017). The Rise of High-Level Panels: Implications for the New UN Secretary-General. United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:6048/OC09RiseofHighLevelPanels26Jan17.pdf
Forti, D. (2021). Independent Reviews of UN Peace Operations: A Study of Politics and Practice. International Peace Institute. https://www.ipinst.org/2021/10/independent-reviews-of-un-peace-operations-a-study-of-politics-and-practice
Trenkov-Wermuth, C. (2017, July 3). The UN Needs a "Red Team". Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/un-needs-red-team.
United Nations (2015). The future of United Nations peace operations: implementation of the recommendations of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations: Report of the Secretary-General (A/70/357–S/2015/682). https://undocs.org/en/A/70/357.