 Hi, I'm Heather Herbert. I direct the New Models of Policy Change Initiative here at New America, and I'm so delighted to welcome you to the first event in our new policy series. We are so excited to be kicking off this partnership with Bridging the Gap and to match their dedication to getting helping scholars engage with policy relevant work and our interest in helping get policy relevant work to the broadest possible audiences and spark new conversations and new ways, not just about what U.S. foreign policy is, but who it is that's doing it and how they're doing it. Given that, we're particularly delighted that the first in this what is going to be an ongoing series features Dr. Anjali Dayal, a scholar whose work looks at why combatants go to the U.N. for peacekeeping, even when they don't think the U.N. will be successful, and Ashish Pradhan from International Crisis Group. We, of course, planned this event before the war in Ukraine began, but over the last week, you may have seen both Anjali and Ashish taking part in really fascinating conversations about the role of the U.N. Security Council, the role of U.N. institutions, the role of U.N. norms in the war Ukraine this week. So, this couldn't be a more timely conversation and all kudos to the organizers. You're now going to hear from one of the organizers, Jim Goldgeier, who is Senior Advisor to Bridging the Gap, Professor of International Relations at American University, former Dean of the School of International Service at American University, visiting scholar at Stanford and longtime collaborator, friend, and a fount of wisdom on international affairs. So, Jim, over to you. Thanks so much, Heather, and we're absolutely thrilled to have this partnership between New America and Bridging the Gap. Bridging the Gap's been dedicated for many years to try to help academics produce policy relevant research and share it with the policy community and also to help the policy community to become more aware of the kind of work that's being done in academia. And we run training programs for postdocs, PhDs, and faculty members. We also have a new voices in national security project that tries to help policy makers connect with early career scholars from outside the D.C. area that they may not be aware of. And we have a Bridging the Gap book series with Oxford University Press. And the latest book in the series is out today, Tom Long's A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics. Great that we're able to work with Heather and Alex Stark at New America. And I turn it back to Heather to get things moving. Thanks, Jim. Well, I'm really going to just hand it over to Alex Stark at this point to run our conversation. And my colleague Alex Stark is really actually kind of a model of what Bridging the Gap is all about. She's a senior researcher with us at New Models. She's also holder of a PhD in political science from Georgetown and has really brought this sort of academically informed policy sensibility to our work on gender and international security on political violence and, of course, to her own work on Yemen and Gulf security. So Alex, I'm delighted to turn it over to you to run this conversation. So we're, I think, really lucky to be joined today by two kind of superstar researchers. Like Heather said, when we were planning this event, we didn't really necessarily have the foresight to know that Russia would be invading Ukraine in the weeks leading up to it, that the UN Security Council and General Assembly would play such a central role in conversations around this crisis, or at least I didn't have the foresight. Maybe some others did. But I'm really pleased to be able to ask them questions about that and also to talk more about what Dr. Dayal's research findings can tell us about this crisis and about the world more broadly. So first, let me just introduce you to our two panelists quickly. Dr. Anjali Dayal is an assistant professor of international politics at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. Her book, Incredible Commitments, How UN Peacekeeping Failures Shaped Peace Processes, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, and you should buy a copy. Ashish Pradhan is international crisis group senior UN analyst. He is responsible for crisis groups engagement with the UN secretariat and security council members. And his work primarily focuses on African and Asian crises. Ashish regularly relays crisis groups field-based analysis to UN officials and member state diplomats and ensures that debates at the UN are adequately reflected in crisis groups policy prescriptions. Ashish previously worked for three years in crisis groups Asia program conducting research on the constitution writing process in Nepal. So without further ado, let's jump straight in. Anjali, can you start by telling us a bit about what this book is about, where the ideas came from, and maybe some of the takeaways that policymakers or others might find interesting or surprising? Yeah, absolutely. First, thank you so much for having me here today. The big question that I was trying to answer in the book is why do people turn to the UN for assistance ending their conflicts and sort of upholding their peace agreements even when they don't think the UN can bring them peace or security? And the answer that I lay out in the book is that it's because the UN can offer them unique tactical material and political benefits that may actually have very little to do with peace. Some combatants are going to turn to the UN because they want peace. But all we have to do is look inside any peace process or any negotiation to end a war to see that a lot of the actors involved, peace may not be their primary goal. And they may be turning to the international community because they want tactical benefits, right? They may want the time to regroup or rearm. They may use the opportunity to elevate certain factional leaders within the negotiating coalition, for instance, they may want material benefits. So they may be looking for things like the international community's assistance in post-conflict reconstruction or refugee resettlement. They may be looking for a straight economic influx into either elite or more general populations. Or they may be looking for political benefits because negotiating with the UN on the ground seeking out UN peacekeepers, that's a good way to certify that you're a legitimate political actor, that your intentions are conciliatory, that you want to be taken seriously as a party with real ideas about governance or about the way your state should be run, that you're not just a group of people who kill others or who take up arms against the state. And part of the reason I wanted to look at this question is because there's this important body of work, both sort of policy and scholarly, that tells us that peacekeeping actually works really well. But we don't actually have that popular conception of peacekeeping. If you stopped the average person, the average well-informed person and asked them of peacekeeping work, they'd probably tell you no, that it's not a very effective tool or that it doesn't work where it's needed most. And that's an understandable impression to get from news coverage of peacekeeping or from a generalized sense of UN peacekeeping failures, which have been big and notable. But both these sort of conceptions, we need to put them alongside this idea that both policy and scholarly understandings of peacekeeping usually focus on how peacekeepers can help solve security problems. And if you're a combatant or a party to civil war, you may not actually think that UN can help you with that. You may have the same conception as the average person. So then the question from you really became, what do these parties actually want from the UN? If they, like the average person, may not think that they're going to get peace from the UN or security from the UN. Why do they want this kind of international involvement as they try and end their conflicts? Now part of the reason I think this is a relevant question for policy audiences is because in practical terms the UN is the central point for global conflict resolution efforts. And so it seemed like a critical question to ask beyond people who care specifically about multilateral conflict resolution, also even for people who are concerned more broadly with just say international security. I think there's this tendency to think of UN peacekeepers as being sort of a small oddity on the world stage. But actually, only the US has more armed soldiers worldwide. And there are more UN peacekeepers in conflict zones worldwide than there are any other force. So this is really a central part of contemporary international security and a central motivating sort of force beyond contemporary conflict resolution. Now in the book, and I'm happy to talk about this more in Q&A, but I developed this argument by examining the Rwandan peace process from 1990 to 1994, immediately preceding the genocide in the Guatemalan peace process from 1989 to 1996. Broadly speaking, I look at those two cases because I wanted to know what would happen in the Rwandan case where the parties that conflicted very little reason to suspect the UN would be able to bring them peace. And in the Guatemalan case with the El Salvadorian example next door, they had a much stronger conception that the UN might be able to bring them peace. And in both cases, I actually find that these other benefits are much more primary drivers of their seeking out the UN. They are much more interested in the tactical material and political benefits that the UN can bring than they are in actual peace and security. In the Rwandan case, refugee resettlement is primary. And so too is the RPF's desire to appear to be legitimate political actors. In the Guatemalan case, they looked at El Salvador, and even though that was a big international success, they interpreted that case as being one in which their counterparts gave up too much to the UN. So they actively worked to try and curtail some of the strongest parts of the mission in El Salvador to develop a much weaker mission than they otherwise might have gotten. And for me, one of the big policy takeaways I have from this argument is that I think these cases really push us towards a model of multilateral peacekeeping, where UN peacekeepers are really lightly armed diplomats. And we invest in those diplomatic tasks and capabilities, not a model where peacekeepers are primarily understood as like weak military actors, and where they're actively involved in counterinsurgency in state stabilization missions or primarily involved in those kinds of missions. Because that model, I think, is one that could actually threaten the UN's ability to do the things that combatants seem to want most, not necessarily security, but conferring legitimacy or enabling sort of refugee repatriation or working on post-conflict reconstruction. And so I think that's sort of the big policy takeaway from the book. That's great. Shisha, I'd love to hear your kind of top-line reactions to Anjali's research and findings, and as someone who's also engaged on these issues, obviously on a day-to-day basis, are these the kinds of things that you see or recognize from your own work, where do you see groups coming to the UN, not just for security, but also for those benefits that Anjali outlined, tactical, material, political kinds of benefits? Absolutely. Thanks so much, Alex, and Anjali and everyone else for this conversation. I agree very timely with everything else going on. And to answer your question, Alex, and to respond to Anjali, I think absolutely know we're seeing, obviously, in spite of everything happening in Ukraine at the moment, quite a fascinating dynamic in the, let's say, one of the other big crisis hotspots that was dominating the headlines just a few months ago, which is Afghanistan, where the Taliban, obviously, having taken over last fall, are now trying to consolidate their presence and get as much legitimacy as they can from the international system. And a big part of that is their interaction with the UN. We're in the midst of the Security Council negotiating a mandate for the UN's mission in Afghanistan, which used to look very different before the takeover and will look very different, I think, after this month. It's going to be potentially a sort of process that will end with hopefully the likelihood of the mission continuing to do a bunch of the same work it was doing along monitoring human rights, really keeping track on the situation of women and girls. And these issues, you would think, are quite, in some senses, maybe even non-starters for the Taliban, that they would never accept to having this sort of oversight from an international institution. But the reality seems to be actually more complicated and more mixed, and certainly from crisis groups, engagements and discussions with actors in Afghanistan, including with the Taliban. What we are hearing is that there is actually an openness, certainly not, they're not happy about it, but at least they're willing to stomach the fact that the UN will stay on, will carry out some level of monitoring the human rights and the rights of women and girls, because it means that it could fit with their overarching aim of getting international legitimacy. And I think this is a controversial issue and folks over at the UN, especially at the UN secretariat, are very careful to note that whatever they do going forward will not be conferring, even by default, any amount of legitimacy that they will be working to compartmentalize as much as possible what they do on the ground. But this really speaks to, I think, in a concrete way, the sort of incentives, sometimes they can seem quite perverse with the incentives that conflict actors can have to see value in how they engage with the UN. Again, a lot of this gets lost in the muck and even when conversations and negotiations are happening at the council, what I mentioned can get lost, especially when you have strong positions being taken by the likes of China and Russia who come in and say that we absolutely don't think that the UN can continue to monitor human rights in the country because it's a completely new reality. But in a lot of ways, this conversation, the fact that it's more controversial in New York than it is in Kabul, I think, speaks to these sort of varied realities. And just one other point that I really wanted to hit on before we open up for Q&A is Anjali's point about the fact that the UN still remains, for better or worse, a focal point for global conflict resolution. And there's been a lot of talk in the past week, week and a half or so, rightfully so, about the place of the UN, the international system, but also specifically the place of Russia within the UN and within the Security Council and whether that's something that could be changed. Lots of column lengths have gone into whether Russia came and kicked out of the UN or the Council, for example, setting aside the fact that I think practically that that's a really challenging prospect. It's more feasible to maybe look at their membership of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, for instance, but setting that aside, I think it could be a little bit maybe not premature, but certainly you might be missing opportunity in the future of using the beauty of the UN, which is that you have all of the member states theoretically on the same table. We've seen, even if it's very minute, at times, benefits of the fact that states like Pariah, states even like North Korea and Iran and others have continued to be members of the UN, despite all of their, let's say, policy controversies to be very diplomatic. But that's led to some benefits and the sort of contact informally that happens between diplomats from Western countries and those governments in New York in itself, I think, has value. So I think, you know, it's worth thinking about that as well as the fact that the actual benefits of trying to kick out actors from the UN versus the benefit of keeping them in for any potential future openings is worth considering as well. Maybe I'll leave it there to start. I'm very happy to go into other specifics in the Q&A. Yeah, on the question of Ukraine and Russia, Anjaliya, your book is about UN peacekeeping, but it's also really about why combatants and wars decide to engage with the UN as you laid out. I know many of us were struck by the Kenyan UN Ambassador Martin Kamani's speech to the UN Security Council. Was it a few weeks ago now? It could be a few days, a few weeks, who knows? Where he kind of opposed Russia's claims to Ukraine and he said multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. Can you talk about why Security Council meetings like this one matter, even if they don't necessarily yield the kinds of tangible or material results that some might hope for? Yeah, absolutely. First, believe it or not, that was last week, but it feels like it was like years ago at this point. Yeah, there's I think an understandable urge to look at the structure of the Security Council, to look at the way it works in the world, and to think this is a useless institution at moments of absolute crisis. The Security Council is built by design to overweigh the political projects of the permanent bio-members of the Security Council. The US, the UK, Russia, China and France are given by the Charter an outsize role in maintaining international peace and security and the ability to shape it to their own will. And that obviously is a huge problem when one of the permanent members of the Security Council decides to engage in aggressive action or to violate the terms of the Charter. Because then there's actually no way to hold them to account for that, that the system is not designed to do that. It's explicitly designed not to do that. And it's understandable when people look at it as a result and think this is corrupt, this is ineffective, this cannot protect people. And at the end of the day, nothing that happens to the Security Council in this way is going to stop Russia from invading Ukraine, is going to alleviate the suffering of Ukrainian people. The reason it remains an important chamber, I think, has to do with the fact that it is not just a space for those permanent five members in these moments of crisis. It's also a space for other states to reassert the value of multilateralism and to reassert the value of saying this is an illegitimate action. You may have done it, you may have been able to do it, we can't stop you from doing it. But we can say that this is not the order we chose to live by, that this is not the charter we signed on to, that we signed on to a charter in which sovereign non-intervention and the peaceful settlement of disputes are the first and second articles that you agree to. And as a result, being able to establish that diplomatic baseline for everyone, being able to establish that that's the system of rules that Russia itself signed on to is critical for smaller states. And when I say smaller, you know, like many of these states are quite large, right? I mean, in comparison to the permanent five members, they don't exercise this outsize role in international peace and security. But for them, this question of whether or not the terms of this charter can be upheld as a question of life or death, right? It's an existential question. Do we live in a world where it is possible for a powerful permanent member to invade another country to try and take that territory and to have that not be a problem? Or do we live in a world of sovereign non-intervention, being the cornerstone principle of international law, where nothing may be able to stop Russia from doing that. But diplomatically, states can come together and say, this is not what we agreed on. And I think as a result, you know, that's one important thing the Security Council does in the world in moments like this. The other thing I will say, and I think, you know, Ashishka speaks this better than I can, but like in this moment, for instance, much like they did in Syria, Security Council has separated humanitarian and political portfolios for Ukraine, which means that it may be possible to get some motion and some activity around humanitarian relief for people. And here's where the sort of other bodies of the UN become very important. Being sort of mandated and authorized and requested to do things like assist people who are fleeing, right, like sort of mobilizing apparatus of aid are also critical things that can happen in a sense. Ashishka, I'd love to bring you in on this question too. So did you have kind of takeaways from the past week or so of conversations in the Security Council and the General Assembly about Russia's invasion of Ukraine? What are you kind of hearing from UN officials or member states and how they're kind of seeing the role of UN institutions in this crisis? Yeah, and I think Anjali spoke about this in really eloquent ways. I think that that sort of introspection about the fit for purpose-ness of the Council in specific, but the UN as a whole, and it's been something that I think many of us have been thinking about. And I think to be to be honest, especially to Anjali's point about the fact that it's not just about the five permanent members, the other members and their efforts in Anjali, you detailed this in your piece again, which might be either last week or last month at this rate, it's hard to tell. But in a sense, that pattern is certainly not new. Again, those of us who've been following this stuff for a while recognize that P5 gridlock has been hindering the Council for years and it's actually had, I think, what's been one of the more positive trends on the Council in recent years is the sort of oversized role that the 10 elected members have been playing. And Anjali, you mentioned the separation of the humanitarian and political tracks on Ukraine and in Syria. And certainly the elected members in 2015, if I remember correctly in the work, were critical to separating that track, compartmentalizing the political issues on Syria where there was veto after veto from a humanitarian track, which at least enjoyed a level of consensus until recent years. And if the Council can establish that kind of compartmentalization on Ukraine, I think on balance it would be good because we've clearly seen that on the political side, it's not going to see eye to eye and there will be no consensus because of Russia's veto. So the efforts to try to engage on that might be a dead end, but it doesn't mean that the Council has no role to play on at least mitigating and dealing with the symptoms of the conflict and of the invasion in Ukraine. And I think that's the other takeaway for me from both the General Assembly and today's Human Rights Council discussions and resolutions is that even if the other bodies of the UN might not be able to adequately help address the causes of the fighting, they can at least help mitigate some of the impact and the suffering of the populations. So we saw quite a lot of good humanitarian language in the General Assembly resolution. That's really again meant to help really mitigate and help people that are, for example, trying to leave Ukraine in a safe orderly way, calling for not just Ukrainian citizens, but also migrants, diaspora and others to be given safe passage if they're trying to leave Ukraine. And that's been an issue that's been covered a lot in the media. And at the same time at the Human Rights Council today, we saw again with resounding numbers the commission or the sort of approval or authorization of a commission of inquiry, which will be tasked with collecting evidence which can be used for prosecution downline for accountability purposes. And it might feel in the moment like it is a little bit clutching a straws or what have you, but in terms of the atrocities that are being reported so widely now and maybe with increasing brutality, as we might see in the coming days and weeks, the accountability piece will be of increasing importance. So the fact that the UN can play a role there, I think at least underlines the fact that, again, at least in terms of the symptoms, it can be an important player. And I think just the final thing I'll say is whether the council as a whole and the place of the UN Charter that Anjuli talked about, and just the sort of admission of guilt from my own perspective, I've been working in and around the UN for about six years and I have to admit, usually in watching speeches and statements, I would usually sort of fast forward through the parts where ambassadors or foreign ministers would be reaffirming their commitment to the UN Charter and to sovereignty and territorial integrity because you took that as a given. But I think again, one of the, again, this is civil lining, maybe I'm clutching it at my own straws, but the fact that in the past week, we've really seen the meaning of that and the fact that for small states this is not just a case of adding a few lines to their speeches, it's an existential issue for them. I think a couple of speeches at the GA session, which maybe were a little bit underreported because so much has been happening, but the German foreign minister who made an appearance in New York spoke about the fact that every member state in this General Assembly Hall has a bigger neighbor that they might be afraid of. So this issue that Ukraine is dealing with isn't just an issue for Ukraine, it's also an issue for you. And then the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, who I think has done a very commendable job, given the almost impossible circumstances, he talked about the fact that it's really easy to express your commitment to the UN Charter in times of peace. It's a time of war that it's really the responsibility to recommit to it and reaffirm it. And I think that in itself really highlights the usefulness of the UN of these norms and the fact that these norms are under threat now in much more sort of obvious ways, especially by such a powerful member like Russia, in a strange sense, I think speaks to the importance of others that are trying to uphold it and keep the system together even though it's sort of stretching at the seams at the moment. So Anjuli, turning back to the research from your book for a second, your work talks about the social context of international peacekeeping. Can you say a bit about what that means? What does it mean to say that peacekeeping is a social endeavor and maybe if you have some examples of how combatants learn from other contexts from your own research? Absolutely. Essentially, saying that peacekeeping is embedded in a social context is basically saying that peacekeeping is a historically and socially grounded undertaking. It's one where parties to conflict can look around the world and see what else the UN has done in other places and make their decisions accordingly. So we have this tendency, I think, certainly in the scholarly world to sort of treat these cases as closed circuits, to treat them as one-off units and to think about peacekeeping mission in X place or Y place as being independent from one another. And in the policy realm, we see that given the fact that the authorization of mandates, for instance, necessarily reflects first the reality of the case at hand and political contingencies of that situation. But if you are a party to a conflict in a civil war today and you want to know what is going to happen to you if you turn to the UN, you could look around the world and look at what the UN was doing in Mali. You could look around the world and look at what the UN was doing in Central African Republic. You could look around the world and see what the UN is doing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And that is important context and information that is going to be of interest to you if you want to know whether the UN can provide you with security, whether if you want to know whether the UN can help you uphold your peace agreement. If you want to know what potential other side effects or benefits that might be from UN involvement. And this isn't necessarily just looking around the world and seeing what's happening right now. It's also that peacekeeping has a historical record at this point that you may be very familiar with. You may have as many of us do this sense of the UN's paradigmatic failures in the 1990s as being the dominant mode of UN peacekeeping, as being the big lessons from UN peacekeeping. Or you may, in fact, and this is something that I found in interviewing parties to the Rwandan negotiation process, the historical sense you have of the UN can be from your own lived experience in refugee camps. A lot of the parties to that conflict, their first experience was with the UN decolonization authority in 1960. And then their subsequent lives as refugees in UN administered camps. And so their sense of what they couldn't couldn't get from the UN was grounded in the historical reality of their own lives. And of this role that the UN did play in the region. And accordingly for them, even before the Rwandan genocide, even before the demonstrated lack of willingness for heavy UN involvement in Rwanda, there was very little faith in the UN's ability to secure a peace. There was very little faith in the UN's ability to provide real lasting security anchored in their own experiences as children in the 1960s and onwards with the UN's decolonization authority. So in that sense, when I talk about UN peacekeeping being a social endeavor, I mean, because we have this apparatus of global conflict management now that's centered at the UN, parties to conflict are not making decisions in a vacuum about what they want from the UN, about what the sort of next steps in their negotiation process is going to be. They're looking around the world. They're looking at past historical cases. They're looking at their own experiences and grabbing their expectations of the UN in that knowledge as well. Understandably, the thing before everyone, primarily, are going to be the realities of their own case at that moment. And so that's often the thing we understandably focus on. It is going to be the most important thing. But sort of being aware that these other things are on in play can tell us something about what you might want from the UN and why you might have very little faith that what the UN is going to bring you to peace. I just want to remind members of the audience that you can drop us your comments or your questions and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible. So think of your questions. Let us know. Anjali, I'd love to kind of draw out the potential policy implications of your research a bit more. You've already spoken to this a bit. But what does your work, for example, tell us about how we might make peace negotiations more successful about why parties engage with the UN? So the sense that I got from my research is that these other potential benefits of negotiation with the international communities, material and tactical and political benefits are possibilities and important bras for combatants, even when they don't think they're going to get peace. And for me, that sort of understanding means that there is a full, as we just talked about when talking about what the UN can still do in Ukraine, right? Or what the UN has been able to do even when the P5 are divided on other cases. There is an aid and refugee resettlement and refugee management and political apparatus that the UN has that's really attractive to combatants that doesn't rely on the military power that peacekeeping can bring to a case. It's very rare that what combatants want from the UN is the coercive ability to uphold their agreements. They do not usually seem to want an armed intervention that's going to help them uphold the terms of their agreement. Now, a lot of the policy and scholarly understanding of this frames this as being a set of tools where what the UN is doing is preventing accidents from spiraling out of control and preventing backsliding into war by providing information and engaging in diplomatic good offices between warring parties. And at its absolute best, in cases like Cyprus, this is what the UN is really doing. It's really serving as a lightly armed buffer between two parties and enabling communication and keeping small accidents from spiraling back into full-scale war. The understandable lesson a lot of people took from the 1990s, though, and the understandable lesson that a lot of people take from looking at active crises where people suffer enormously at the hands of armed actors is that turning towards a model where peacekeepers use more force is a good way to counteract some potential weaknesses in this sort of multilateral system. And states, for understandable reasons, tend to really like a model of intervention that deals with state civilization or counter insurgency or counter terrorism. So in the last couple of years, we've seen the rise of this kind of mission through the UN system. It is a very state-centric model of security. It puts UN peacekeepers, or not necessarily peacekeepers, UN mandated missions into a conflict on the side of the state. And via this sort of understanding of peacekeeping as being a primarily political or aid tool, that's a real challenge. If you are a party to a conflict and what you want is legitimacy of being seen as equal political actor and you think sitting down with the UN is going to get you that, it seems less likely that you would do that if this UN has already demonstrated its willing to partner with the state to take you on or it's willing to sign off on the state, viewing you as an illegitimate threat. And in saying this, I don't need to either like sign on to or affirm any of the goals of people who either take up arms against the state or seek to squash insurgents. Just to say this is clearly an important function that the UN has served in the world and undermining it may be dangerous in the sense that there aren't that many other organizations that can serve this role in the world. Shusha, I'd love to hear your take on this too when you're reading the book, Incredible Commitments or hearing about the findings from Anjuli's research. Are there ideas that come to mind to you from based on your own experience about what kinds of policy implications those insights might have? For sure. Again, quite a few of them, what Anjuli was saying about the state-centric model, for example, and the UN missions place in the conflict landscape and how they're viewed within the spectrum of government actors on one side, non-governmental combatants on the other side, I think is one of the classic dilemmas for any UN special representative or envoy that's posted to these conflict zones, where establishing a certain level of trust, ideally with all parties, is what you would want, but naturally because of how you go in and the fact that you, just for the sake of your presence, you generally have to have the consent of the host government, it usually means that you're going in some senses on the terms of one of the main actors and potentially one of the main belligerents, and now that doesn't mean that it's carte blanche, and one of the things that I was thinking of and one of the points Anjuli was raising about this reminded me that the UN obviously also has a role in negotiating this, that it knows what, for example, what the government might want as a sort of a baseline for its consent, but then the UN might know where its sweet spot will be in terms of where it wants to end up in terms of its priorities, tasks, and focus on the ground, and negotiating that down, finding some way that works so it doesn't seem completely on the side of the government, and it's still relatively partial, and I think that's a challenge that the UN does it better in some places than others, but also this is something else that you've written about Anjuli in your book is, and I think you flagged at the start as well, is how this can for conflict actors also impact their own internal dynamics, and obviously no conflict actors are monolithic, you know, they have their own internal pushing and pulling, and so we saw this play out quite clearly in the case of Sudan a couple of years ago, when the old UN mission in Darfur, which was sort of the more traditional peacekeeping mission, quite large in size and scope at one point, was drawing down, just as around the time that the revolution in 2019 happened, Bashir was ousted, and conversations then turned to how can we support the new civilian led dispensation, and how can the UN be supportive of former Prime Minister Hamdok, and the focus then became, all right let's now look at political support, potentially development support, marshalling international support to Sudan in general, and for that in new UN mission, smaller, more politically oriented, based in Khatum was the sort of end product, but in the course of this, what we also saw was a fascinating dynamic where the conflict situation in Darfur certainly hadn't completely eased up, the threats to civilians had been completely put behind by the UN mission there, so there was an effort by a couple of council members in New York to see if there's a way to retain some level of military or police presence, UN presence on the ground to address these issues, but what we saw play out in almost real time over maybe I think five or six months in late 2018 and 2019 was different parts of the Sudanese establishment relay its views to the UN, so we had not, this might sound a little bit boring, but there were a couple of letters in specific, both from the Prime Minister, but conveying completely different messages, the first one was agreeing to retaining some level of police presence, acknowledging that these risks are still there in Darfur, and the second letter, and it wasn't too long after, I think it was a month or two afterwards, was saying that actually we don't want any UN boots on the ground and or a chapter submission, and that really reflected as it was received in New York, it reflected the view of the military and what they wanted, the terms that they want to set for the UN's presence and work on the ground, and eventually that was the view that won out, there was no retained police presence in Darfur, and what we pivoted towards was this more smaller narrow remission, again with that sort of fascinating mandate of not just serving the good offices role, but also helping Marshall international support and helping donors find avenues to which they could send in assistance to Sudan, so maybe unusual in a sense, but really I think underscored the fact that the UN and how it sort of fits into conflict dynamics between parties, but also sometimes within parties, it's something that Anjali has really brought out quite well, and we see that sometimes even from our armchairs in New York sort of play out quite in a sort of evident way. So we have a few really interesting questions from the audience. I think this one is for Anjali, but are there differences between how state and non-state actors relate to peacekeeping and its role beyond peace? I think there are, and I think particularly non-state actors are anxious for legitimacy that working with the UN could bring them, and this is something I think that not just my work highlights, but thinking of like Tanisha Pazal's work on international law, working with an international organization proving that you are willing to undertake sort of things like political reform or like political dialogue with international representatives or the representatives of say the UN. It's a really good way to demonstrate that you are politically serious actors, that you are not uncontrolled, chaotic, like warmongers, and that's something that non-state actors can get from the UN in a really critical way, that state actors don't really need in the same way, right? State actors have for themselves like the totality of legitimacy, right? They are clearly in this situation already assumed to be legitimate actors, regardless of their relationship with the population in many cases, and non-state actors don't have that feature attached to their politics and to their goals. And so for them turning to the UN, that's an important way to say we have real political projects, we have ideas about governance, we can be good international citizens, we can be committed multilateralists if we need to. And so in that sense, that's a big distinction I saw between the two sets, broadly speaking, of like state actors, non-state actors. It's that actually sometimes non-state actors can prove to be more anxious and more willing to be sort of working alongside the UN politically and diplomatically. Just to tie on to Ashish's point a minute ago, one of the things we see in the scholarship on UN peacekeeping is that peacekeepers are really good at protecting civilians from non-state actors. They are not very good at protecting civilians from the violence of the state. And part of that has to do with the complexity of consent, as Ashish just said, you know, to some extent this is about requiring the state's consent to operate, which may curtail where you can go, it may curtail what kinds of situations you find yourself involved in. It may simply be a matter of capability, right? You may be outmatched by the state in some cases, but in either way the relationship between peacekeepers and non-state actors tends to be one in which actually peacekeepers can better curtail the sort of potential violence that non-state actors visit on civilians, and the sort of relationship politically between non-state actors and the UN tends to be one in which seeking out the UN's legitimacy is more important to non-state actors than it is to the UN. So looking ahead to where maybe the future of UN peacekeeping is going, an audience member asked, do you see the UN peace function evolving over coming years, given heightening UN polarization around China's role? And maybe I'll tack on my own question, which is you've described this transition or kind of pattern where historically we saw maybe peacekeepers as lightly armed diplomats and more often peacekeepers are getting involved kind of directly in these conflicts almost as combatants themselves, wondering how that trend will kind of shape what you see as the future role of UN peacekeeping. I actually think that she can speak to some of these complexities better than I can, but you know, when we think about China's relationship with the UN with peacekeeping, it is a complicated one, in part because China has been really committed to demonstrating it is a serious actor at the UN, who takes the UN seriously, in part because China has also committed or has historically been committed to trying to curtail the more interventionist plans or perceived more interventionist plans of the of the P3, the US, the UK and France. And in part because China has also committed to exercising influence at the UN by increasing the numbers of Chinese staffers, for instance, across different UN bodies, UN agencies. And part and parcel of that movement is this idea of responsible protection that China is sort of planning to try and to try and reshape particular doctrines of peacekeeping and intervention into a model that they are more comfortable with. Some of my understanding at least is that some of what this entails is actually trying to curtail some of the more sort of like human rights dimensions of mandates and to really focus on a more streamlined set of missions in some cases or to emphasize priorities of aid over the priorities of things like protection or human rights abuses. And so I want to put that on the table, but say that I think that she's probably better positioned to answer this question about the sort of dynamic future of this as he sees it playing out right now. Yeah, happy to get into that. And I think, again, until your point about peacekeepers as diplomats, I think really speaks to where the examples and missions in recent years where the UN has been able to play a more constructive and helpful role on the political side. And I think we can acknowledge that most missions serve different functions and I think have been successful to varying degrees in those functions, but there are some that are again, particularly sort of better at the political side than using their good offices. And I think this is especially true in and there's a lot of work that's gone into this, peacekeeping and what we call sort of complex security environments, especially asymmetric in the face of asymmetric threats, especially in the context of where terrorist groups are operating. And whether it's in places like Mali, which has I think been in focus for a number of years for the very unique set of circumstances that mission finds itself in, where for sure certain parts of the mission are bunkered down, they're deployed in remote parts of the country and central and northern Mali, where there aren't many international actors. So they obviously also have a target on their back in which limits what they can do. But I think the mission has done well again to the extent that it can to use almost sort of its presence and footprint in these remote areas to have some level of engagement, some level of what we call sort of bottom up political processes or engagement, maybe not completely sort of negotiation dialogue, but at least certain amount of engagement. And especially when you're considering the fact that these are our environments where again, there are a few others that are present, there's value in having certainly the eyes and ears on the ground, but to also have that exchange and that engagement with conflict actors. And certainly I think crisis group has done a lot of work in terms of the need to engage with even some of these actors in the South Halloween and Mali and the other countries in the South, about pursuant dialogue where possible with some of these groups. And it's easier said than done, especially for governmental actors and for the UN, because again, you get into the sort of troubling territory of conferring legitimacy on an otherwise illegitimate actor or very violent actor. But I think again, informally behind the scenes, as much engagement as can happen through the UN, through its peacekeepers, I think is its ultimate benefit. And the other part of this is that the UN's political function, I'm curious to see how that evolves. And I'll use the example of Central African Republic to maybe underscore, I think, one of the risks for the UN going forward and the risks to UN peacekeeping, because I think it's gone from a country where the UN mission and its head, the special representative of the UN, he used to almost play a political advisory role to the president. It's a political system where I think, especially with the current president when he first came into office, it was relatively politically green, let's say, and needed as much hand-holding as possible in those early stages. I think the UN managed that role quite well before the geopolitical scene got much more complicated with Russia entering the fray with its military cooperation agreements with the Central African Republic government. But up until that point, I think that the UN served almost in a way to guide the presidency to say, look, even on little things like making gestures towards the country's Muslim population, to say, look, we acknowledge that some of the conflict dynamics, there was a lot of antagonism towards the Muslim community when we're doing our best to include more Muslim members into the cabinet, observe Muslim holidays, little things like that. The UN played a critical role in making sure that there's at least that level of thought put into the government's actions and policies in the early days. But what we see now is a completely fast-forwarding six, seven years later, a very different environment, especially because of the way in which the UN has had to deal with and has been the subject of myths and disinformation campaigns, where it's become the subject of real-life massive street protests to say that the UN is trying to subjugate, neocolonialize the country and its citizens. It's found it very hard to grapple with, that's because of the, in some ways, the infrastructure of the UN, its difficulty in responding to these sorts of new dynamics, maybe not conflict dynamics, but certainly sort of challenging dynamics in that conflict zone. And I think how and whether and as much as sort of the situational awareness of the UN can be robust enough to account for that going forward and then be able to address and let's say, nip those situations in the bud will be something to watch because I think that's one of the key sort of changes we've seen in recent years. Well, I feel like I have dozens more questions to ask both of you and could keep talking for a long time, but our time is drawing to a close. So maybe this might actually be a last question, but I also want to look ahead to the future, not just of peacekeeping, but also of the UN Security Council itself, especially in the context of conversations over the past week, about kind of the role of the P5, the legitimacy of the P5, lots of kind of questions coming up about potential options for reform. I know reform of the Security Council is a long standing conversation, but seems like maybe there's renewed interest in that conversation. I'd love to hear what you both think about the possibilities of reform and kind of the future of the Security Council. And then absent reform, do you think, is it possible that we're witnessing or likely even that we're witnessing the decline of the importance of the Security Council as kind of a central institution of the post-World War II order or are we seeing maybe something else? And I think, why don't we start with Ashish and then Angelique can have the final word. Thanks, Alex. That's something that we at Crisis Group have been thinking about as well. And I'll make a bit of a shameless plug. My boss, Richard Gowan, will have a piece on basically this question, I think sometime early next week. So we'll make sure to share that. But I think in the short run, this sort of question of the Council's ability to function, right? And I think we saw in the immediate aftermath of the invasion and even until today, the Council has been able to carry out its meetings and functions, renewal mandates of missions and renewal sanctions regimes, et cetera, relatively business as usual fashion. But I am worried about the fact that as the potential level of brutality on the ground in Ukraine increases and is much more visible. But also if Russia tries to take this approach, they've taken over the last couple of years at the Council, which is to bring its own narratives to the UN, which they've done bringing in pro-Russian stakeholders from Crimea and Donbas to brief the Council to say that, actually, Ukraine is the bad actor in this. If that's sort of the dual dynamic of more brutality on the ground and more, let's say, provocative diplomacy on the Council increases, I think that could really make a compromise between, again, the P3, US, France, and UK, and Russia, really less appetizing for Washington, from Moscow, for Paris. Because at one point, it might start to become toxic to have a sort of good faith give and take, even on issues where they do have common ground. So I'm worried about that. We certainly hope that there will be a level of compartmentalization. We talked about the Syrian humanitarian track. That was one of the, I think, most notable areas of convergence between Russia and the US last year, and one of the few positive notes for the Council, again, in the last year, whether that'll fall victim to the, obviously, this new reality that we're in, we'll find out in the summer. So all of that means that, I think, the sort of short-term sort of challenges and questions about the Council legitimacy, we might just be sort of starting to hear those. And I think the final word I'll say on this is, again, I think it'll increase the importance of the 10 elected members who rotate and certainly don't have the advantage of continuity on the Council, et cetera. But they are able to drive certain things. So whether it's bringing their own initiatives to the table at the Council, or basically sort of nudging behind those doors, the permanent members, to define areas of common ground or to propose things on the table that tries to bridge the gap between the P3 on one side and Russia and China on the other, I think that gives me a little bit of hope that with proactive members of the Council, there can be certainly at least a minimum level of cooperation. But again, I think a lot of this will depend on how bad things get on the ground in Ukraine. So we'll have to see. Go ahead, Anjali. Just following from what she said, I agree with everything he said. A lot will depend on the next couple of months and the dynamic that emerges at the Security Council. But when we weigh the sort of when we weigh the sort of two competing strands against each other, what we have is, oh, sorry, let me try that again. We have to weigh two competing impulses, I think, on the part of the P5 against one another. One is that actually they need this chamber in many ways in order to keep exercising this outsized influence on international peace and security in a comparatively costless way. And that is true for all P5 members. The Council has legitimacy because they invested with legitimacy, because they take problems that they want to solve multilaterally to the Council and try and resolve them there. It is much more challenging. It is much more difficult to try and resolve these problems outside the forum of the Security Council. And here I'm talking about problems that are not of primary national interest to them. I'm thinking of questions like what to do with an outbreak of civil wars that are distant from their primary national interests. And in that sense, working through the Security Council, just being entirely cynical here, working through the Security Council is a good way to manage that problem in a way that still leaves you with the final sort of set of voices on what the nature of war and peace looks like in the world. But we have to balance that against the fact that when you have primary interests, you may be willing to use the Council in ways that actually torpedoes legitimacy in a larger sense. You may as a result find that other actors are willing to act outside the Council to secure their particular ideas of what peace and war look like in the world and in doing so strip legitimacy of the Council for the other members. And I think when we talk about UN Security Council reform, we hit up against the problem we always hit up against when we talk about reforming powerful institutions. The actors that benefit from them are not invested in reforming the institution. Right. If you are P5 member, what incentive do you have to give up your veto? What incentive do you have to expand the Security Council? Every once in a while, like the U.S. will toss out the idea of adding another permanent member to make it more representative. But we know that's not a serious proposition, because almost always what they raise is a state that will immediately be objected to by another permanent member. And they know that. So it's a sort of like easy political way to score some points on a problem you never are really intending on solving, I think. And there are not, I know this has come up a number of times recently. There's no internal process of reform here. And I know it's understandable that people are turning to this. And it's understandable that it's entering the sort of mainstream political discourses of possibility. But by the terms of the charter, there's really no way to reform the UN Security Council without the consent of the UN Security Council. And there's really no way to remove one of the veto wielding permanent members. Beyond that, we probably wouldn't want to, right? Because we need a world in which these permanent members believe they are bound by this body of law, even when they act otherwise. And we sort of see that they accord this institutional legitimacy because they feel the need to do things like bring in actors to spread disinformation, as opposed to just saying, we did it, deal with it, right? And so in that sense, there is this sort of competing set of interests to balance. And I don't know which one will emerge. But I do think we're at a very dangerous spot. In the same way, we were in the early 2000s as well, following the US invasion of Iraq. This is another sort of turning point where we try and see what emerges and hope that it turns out to be something that furthers the interest of people who live in fear of violence and fear of death. Well, thank you so much to you two for these incredible insights. Thanks to our fabulous events team at New America who makes everything happen. Thank you to our friends at Bridging the Gap, Jim, and everyone else. We're really thrilled about this new partnership. And we'll have a series of upcoming events featuring new and kind of exciting research to share with policymakers. So keep an eye out for that. And thanks so much, Anjali, for sharing your research with us. And everyone should check out her book, Incredible Commitments. So thanks, everyone. Bye.