The complex and increasing demands placed on African peacekeepers coupled with high expectations requires a significant amount of rethinking by the African Union (AU), the United Nations (UN), and African Regional Economic Communities (RECs), as well as troop-contributing countries, General Martin Luther Agwai of Nigeria, the former Force Commander of the joint AU/UN Mission in Darfur, said in an expert roundtable on enhancing robust peace operations on August 14, 2013, in Washington DC.

He was speaking to a group of African military and civilian peacekeepers attending the Enhancing Peace Operations in Africa Workshop organized by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), which ran August 12-15.

“For robust peace operations to work, we the peacekeeping community should agree to develop robust ideas at the strategic level, ensure political will and sound understanding by troop-contributing countries, and adequately prepare our forces at the operational and tactical level,” Gen. Agwai said.

“Peacekeeping and peace enforcement are conceptually different,” he cautioned. “We are increasingly seeing a trend towards combining peacekeeping, peacemaking, peace-building, and peace enforcement, but care must be taken to ensure that military and civilian peacekeepers are not asked to perform roles and functions for which they are ill-prepared,” he advised.

“If the AU, UN, and troop-contributing countries are not on the same page, there will be a mismatch between mandates, operational doctrine, and troop size,” he said. “There needs to be better communication, cooperation, coordination, and consensus.”

Drawing on his own peacekeeping experience, Gen. Agwai urged participants to reflect on the following: Vastness of the area of operations; relatively small numbers of troops; high and often unrealistic expectations; unclear mandates; lack of peace between belligerents; and lack of financial independence and sustainability.

“We need to get to the root of these challenges instead of addressing only the symptoms,” he said.

U.S. Colonel Sue Ann Sandusky, a regional specialist on Africa and former defense attaché in Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), reminded participants about the growing complexity of UN peacekeeping.

“Increasingly, African peacekeeping troops are called upon to deter threats, protect civilians and create political conditions for political reconciliation all the same time,”she noted. “We therefore need to work more closely to tailor available training and capacity building programs to meet these challenges.”

Col. Sandusky identified the key challenges as: Mandate development; national ownership; financial resources; and the difficulty of reconciling different military cultures and traditions.

“These challenges need to be incorporated in pre-deployment and post-deployment training, as opposed to merely imparting generic peacekeeping skills, which is where the focus seems to be at the moment,” she said.

ACSS is the pre-eminent institution for strategic security studies, research and outreach in Africa. The Africa Center engaged African partner states and institutions through rigorous academic and outreach programs that build strategic capacity and foster long – term, collaborative relationships. Over the past 14 years, more than 6,000 African and international leaders have participated in over 200 ACSS programs.