Bio
Winrich Kühne is Senior Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe
Founding director of the German Center for International Peace Operations (ZiF) in Berlin; former deputy director of the German Research Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP); consultant to the Association of European Parliamentarians (AWEPA); member of the international advisory group to the U.N. Peacekeeping Lessons-Learned Unit: field visits and performance assessment of past and ongoing missions like UNAMIR in Rwanda, UNAVEM I & II IN Angola, UNOMOZ in Mozambique, UNOSOM II in Somalia, UNPROFOR in former Yugoslavia etc.; senior adviser to the former EU Crisis Prevention Network; member of the United Nations and Civilian Crisis Prevention Advisory Groups of the German Foreign Office; member of the editorial boards of the
Journal of International Peacekeeping and Global Governance; election observer in Malawi (1993), South Africa (1994), Mozambique (1994), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2010), among other places; recipient of the
Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit, Federal Republic of Germany); PhD, international law, University of Munich
Courses
- Afghanistan and the Failure in Mali: Any Future for Peace Operations, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding?
Peace operations, conducted by a variety of international actors like the UN, EU, NATO, AU, have in recent decades become a strategic pillar of international conflict management starting with the first UN peacekeeping mission UNTSO in Palestine in 1948. In 2023 more than 130,000 persons (115,000 military, 10,000 police and about 7,000 civilians) were active in a variety of peace operations, most of them led by the UN. By and large, the performance of the missions was considered encouraging, except for dramatic failures in Rwanda and Somalia in the early 90ies.
This perception totally changed when in August 2021 the international media reacted with much surprise to the dramatic events at Kabul airport. Thousands of Afghans were desperate to get on the last Western flights to escape Taliban rule. Western commentators were quick to proclaim that the failure in Afghanistan would be the end of the longstanding, Western inspired conflict management strategy to end violent conflict in failing states by deploying peace operations and getting involved in long term peace- and nation building processes. The fact that in 2023 the military regime in Mali informed the UN that its mission, MINUSMA, would no longer be tolerated and would have to leave the country by the end of the year, seemed to confirm this view.
But do the failures in Afghanistan and Mali really imply that there is no future for peace operations and peacebuilding? That would, indeed, be a dramatic change regarding the future of global conflict management. In the class, therefore, we will take a thorough look at the history, concepts, changing doctrines as well as unsolved problems of UN-lead peace operations to enable students to give practitioners as well as academics a convincing answer.
