POLICY BRIEF 2015:5 Implementing the HIPPO Report: Sustaining Peace as a New Imperative?

As the United Nations High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) was focusing on their encompassing review, it became of particular concern to its Members that in reverse to the gains made in the 1990s and the following decade, the number of states lapsing or relapsing into armed conflict was once again on the rise. Clearly, the track record of the United Nations and the international community as a whole in helping certain countries and regions to sustain and deepen peace processes has become inadequate. This includes UN peace operations. Noting that ‘UN peace operations struggle to achieve their objectives,’ HIPPO called for change ‘to adapt them to new circumstances and to ensure their increased effectiveness.’

The author of this paper, Mr Alexander Ilitchev, served as a Member of the UN High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (2014-2015). Before his retirement from the United Nations in 2014, Mr Ilitchev was Senior Officer in the Department of Political Affairs, preceded by positions with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including in New York as Alternate Representative to the Security Council.

The policy brief was originally written as a background paper for the Challenges Annual Forum 2015 on ‘Institution- and Capacitybuilding for Peace: Implications of the UN’s Review Panels’ Recommendations for Future Missions’, hosted by the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), Ministry of Defence, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, 5-6 October.