Needed: A United Nations Administrative Academy
By Joseph E. Schwartzberg
|
Why Is an Administrative Academy Needed?
Consider Afghanistan in the years since 1989 when the formidable Soviet army was forced to vacate its decade long occupation of the country. Although the Afghan mujahideen might eventually have achieved that objective without foreign support, the abundant flow of American arms into the country via Pakistan undoubtedly hastened the Soviet defeat. From an American perspective, that outcome climaxed a major battle in the waning days of the Cold War. Three years later the communist regime left behind by the Soviets was overthrown. The job was done. And the Afghan people, about whom so much solicitude had previously been expressed, were soon forgotten. But the civil war raged on.
In 1995 the Taliban took over. Exhausted by strife, most Afghans were willing to accept whatever regime promised to restore some semblance of order. The international community might have anticipated some of what would then ensue, but really didn't care. And so, at enormous cost, a war was won and the peace quickly lost. While our greatest concern should be the staggering human toll of that war, we must also think of the financial outlay in that monetary considerations loom so large in the political calculus of the great powers. Although we cannot obtain a reliable figure, because so much of the assistance to the Afghan resistance was covertly provided by the CIA, the US Center for Defense Information estimates arms deliveries in excess of two billion dollars. 1
Neglected by most affluent countries and unable, without help, to forge a viable administration, Afghanistan under the Taliban became a haven for al Qaida whose supporters in various parts of the Islamic world provided the regime some measure of economic support. And then, after several preliminary dramatic acts of terrorism presumably perpetrated by the al Qaida network, there came the horrendous events of September 11. The failure to act prudentially during the window of opportunity opened up in the aftermath of the Cold War helped usher in a new and tremendously costly global struggle, the so called "war on terrorism," a war which President Bush proclaims will be of long, but indefinite duration.
What happened in Afghanistan could also happen in other failed States and might even recur in Afghanistan itself. Terrorism, after all, is an aspect of globalization that thrives in the absence of democracy and stable government. Enlightened self interest, then, combine with elementary considerations of humanity in pointing to the need for the world community to promote good and stable governance where regimes break down as many surely will in coming decades.
Even in respect to Afghanistan, however, where that lesson should be most clear, it seems not to have been learned. After having already spent well over $15 billion for its ongoing high-tech assault on the Taliban and al Qaida, the American led alliance again shows signs of forfeiting the peace.2 The total sum pledged for Afghan reconstruction as of January 2002 came to a mere $2.4 billion and that was to be allotted over periods of up to five years’ duration.3 Moreover, pledges made often fail to be honored.
More serious, perhaps, than the looming financial shortfall is the deficit of human capital. Peacekeeping forces are largely confined to the area around Kabul, as are most international civilian personnel. Afghan administrative skills are in very short supply and the infrastructure of government is embryonic at best. These shortcomings make evident the need for much greater aid for Afghanistan. Military and police assistance is required to curb local war lords and restore civic order; and a substantial cadre of foreign civilians is needed to support essential ministries and train Afghans to regain effective control of their own affairs.
In an article published in Global Governance in 1997 I put forward a detailed proposal for a standing all volunteer, internationally recruited elite United Nations Peace Corps that could perform not only peacekeeping functions, but also, where needed, carry out certain police and peace building functions normally performed by civilian personnel.4 The cost effectiveness of the proposed UNPC was, I believe, amply demonstrated and I invite you to weigh the case for yourselves.
But, no matter how well trained soldiers may be, some administrative functions are best reserved for civil servants. A problem exists, however, in respect to recruitment. Many capable civilians will be unwilling to serve in areas of political instability and endemic danger, while others who might be willing, will not be especially able. To deal with this problem I propose the establishment of a United Nations Administrative Academy (UNAA). This academy would graduate a thousand or more highly trained individuals annually. Graduates would then enter a UN Administrative Reserve for a period of ten years during which time they would be on call for duty in failed or endangered States as, when, and where needed. I shall devote the balance of this presentation to a discussion of what the academy would entail, what its graduates might do, and the anticipated costs and benefits.
What Would the Academy Do and How?
The academy envisaged would initially provide instruction in English, Spanish and French and have three appropriately situated campuses in stable host countries, such as Canada, Costa Rica and Switzerland. In Canada it might be based at the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Center in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, where ACUNS held its annual meeting in 1999; in Costa Rica at the United Nations University for Peace in San José; and in Switzerland at the UN complex in Geneva. In time, a fourth campus offering instruction in Arabic might also become feasible.
Academy faculty and administrators would be drawn largely from the pool of persons who have had relevant experience in UN peacekeeping missions, supplemented as needed by others with specialized professional expertise. Support staff would be local.
Students, both male and female, would be selected competitively on the basis of merit and would initially have to pass tough qualifying examinations given periodically in one of the three working languages of the academy. While an attempt would be made to attract qualified individuals from all parts of the world, special efforts would be directed at recruiting from developing countries. Additional eligibility requirements would include possession of a baccalaureate degree or equivalent experience, falling in the age range from 21 to 35, being in good health, and having a moral record free from serious blemish. The application and testing processes would be handled through the national offices of the UNDP. Where needed, travel support to reach testing places would be provided.
Instituting competitive examinations as the chief determinant of eligibility obviously entails costs not present in the present system of recruitment for civilian staff positions in UN peacekeeping missions, in which, arguably, class privilege, personal connections and country of origin play too large a role. Top posts in such missions tend to be staffed disproportionately by personnel from relatively affluent countries or by elite social strata from a relatively small number of developing countries. Whether such individuals have been sufficiently sensitive to the cultures and economic situations of those whose needs they are intended to serve is often open to question. While there is, of course, no guarantee that those with less privileged backgrounds will be better equipped to perform their jobs, it does seem likely that properly trained academy graduates will show the requisite empathy and understanding.
As in many military academies, students would be given a modest monthly stipend in addition to food and lodging. Where necessary, such stipends would be supplemented by allowances for dependents. Books, supplies, and other related expenses would be borne by the academy. Paid leave and travel allowances would enable students to make periodic home visits.
The period of instruction would normally be three years, though for certain specialties a fourth year of study might be required. At the start of the third year of instruction there would be a four to six month field internship, within an existing peacekeeping mission where possible, or in some other troubled area of the world where not. Internships with both governmental agencies and NGOs would be negotiated.
The subjects of instruction and the nature of curricula would evolve on the basis of experience. But the body of experience already accumulated by administrative training programs presently maintained by certain States such as India would also be tapped in devising the UN program. A noteworthy precedent for the present Indian program is that sponsored by the British East India Company at Haileybury College in England over the period 1806 57. Despite its obvious and, in some respects, distasteful colonial associations, there can be no denying that the Haileybury program produced many outstanding administrators and scholars. It provided a corps of dedicated and efficient company servants who were able to communicate effectively with one another and who had a deep understanding of what their jobs required of them.5
For the UN Administrative Academy, there would, of course, be a core curriculum that all students would have to master. Included in such a core would be instruction on the history, structure, and functioning of the United Nations system and on how the military aspect of peacekeeping is conducted in that civilians and military staff will have to be able to work together effectively in the field. Other core activities would include study of general management techniques; workshops in effective written communication, honing critical skills in the reading of history and political propaganda; and training in cultural sensitivity, conflict resolution, and personnel management. Since staff would be expected eventually to train indigenous personnel to take over their functions, some instruction in pedagogy might also be required.
More specialized courses of instruction would include, inter alia, the following: police supervision, fiscal management, community development, basic education and educational reform, public health and sanitation, disaster relief, and so forth. Intensive multi disciplinary study of at least one major world region would be compulsory and specialized language training, especially in such lingua francas as Arabic, Persian, Swahili, Hausa, Hindi/Urdu and Malay/Bahasa Indonesia would also be encouraged. Diverse means of testing mastery of subject matter would be utilized and students who failed to maintain a high standard of achievement would be dismissed from the program.
Quite apart from the academic content of the program, the academy would seek to instill in its students a global ethos in which loyalty to humanity as a whole complemented allegiance to one's own nation and in which a sense of planetary stewardship was developed. In this way, the academy would significantly promote planetary citizenship.
What Will Academy Graduates Do?
Upon completing their studies, all graduates would begin a ten year contractual obligation as members of a UN Administrative Reserve and be subject to call to duty as, when, and where their services might be needed. In all likelihood, some would be assigned immediately to UN peacekeeping or peace building missions with pressing civilian staff needs. The remainder would return to their home countries. Most of the latter group would presumably join or rejoin theft respective administrative services or accept other jobs for which their training qualified them and work in such positions until their services were needed by the UN. It would be necessary for the UN to work out arrangements with the countries supplying the students whereby they would be released for UN duty when needed and also be guaranteed, on completion of their UN assignments, the right to return, with no loss of seniority, to the jobs they left in their home country. While the minimum reserve obligation would be for ten years, it would be possible for those wishing to do so to extend their reserve status beyond that period. But the UN would have final discretion in this matter.
At the outset, most academy graduates on UN duty would serve in relatively junior positions under more experienced UN personnel appointed as chiefs of mission, deputy chiefs, or other senior posts. One would anticipate, however, that those who performed especially well would be marked for positions of increasing responsibility in subsequent assignments and possibly shift to permanent jobs within the UN system.
As of 31 March of the present year, there were 46,445 military personnel and civilian police from 87 countries serving in fifteen ongoing UN peacekeeping missions around the world. An additional 4,003 civilian personnel performed a wide range of ancillary functions." I lack complete data on the total number of countries contributing to the latter group, but it would surely be not much less than the total for the military and civilian groups combined. For example, the police personnel serving in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone came from no fewer than 43 countries from all parts of the world. Similarly diverse compositions of military and/or and civilian peacekeepers characterized other major missions such as those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, East Timor, and Cambodia?7 In that these forces would have trained and worked under very diverse conditions in their respective home countries, coordination among them on UN missions cannot possibly be easy; and anecdotal evidence suggests that serious misunderstandings have occasionally occurred. Greater use of UNAA graduates would obviate this shortcoming. Moreover, such graduates could take over from military personnel the execution of many tasks which soldiers are typically not well equipped to carry out. This would not only ensure better performance, but would also lead to a somewhat less pervasive and potentially unpopular military presence in strife torn areas.
The present relatively low ratio of civilian to military personnel in peacekeeping operations does not signify a lack of need for the former. Recruitment, as noted earlier, is a serious problem; and so is cost. Civilian personnel are far more costly per individual than soldiers and, given the tight budgetary constraints within which the UN must operate, their numbers are much less than needed. Afghanistan, for example, is a case where the UN has scarcely begun to meet the need. If a UN Administrative Academy already existed it could go far toward correcting that deficiency. Since each UNAA graduate would have a contractual obligation to the UN, in effect a debt to repay for having received a free and high quality education, the salaries they would be paid while in the field could, quite legitimately, be set at lower levels than those of other UN civilian personnel. Additionally, their housing and other needs in the field might also be at more modest, yet perfectly adequate, levels.
The size of the UN Administrative Reserve would vary over time. It would not even come into existence until the graduation of the first cohort of students three years after the inauguration of the academy. Thereafter, it would grow at the rate of a thousand or more persons per year, depending on the need for additional personnel and the ability of the academy to expand to meet that need. Much would also depend on the willingness of graduates to extend their reserve commitments beyond the required ten year minimum. I would guess that a reserve corps on the order of 15,000 could easily be maintained.
It is entirely possible that many academy graduates will never be called upon for active duty. Given the uncertain nature of politics, there is no way to predict meaningfully who might be needed where. But, even if an individual is never called to UN service, that does not mean that the money spent on his/her training will have been wasted. On the contrary, the development of human capital, which would be one of the missions of the academy, has relevance in a wide range of contexts. Service by well-trained personnel in the administration of their respective home countries could contribute substantially to their economic, social and political development. Many academy graduates, whether or not they have had foreign peacekeeping experience, are likely to rise quickly in the ranks of their home country's bureaucracy. This seems especially likely in the case of developing countries in which the pool of highly trained administrators is likely to be rather limited.
What Would the Academy Cost?
The costs of creating a UN Administrative Academy, like the costs of UN peacekeeping in general, would be remarkably modest in comparison to the benefits derived. Apart from the many potential contributions already indicated, the political stability which the use of UNAA graduates would promote would inhibit the spread of domestic and international terrorist networks. If even a single major act of terrorism were thereby to be averted, the benefits might well be incalculable.
In monetary terms, I would estimate that, after meeting start up expenses, the academy could be maintained at the cost of not much more than $100 million per year. This is roughly the budget of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota from which I recently retired. My estimate assumes the existence of three campuses, a student body of about 1,000, some 150 faculty members and administrative personnel, and approximately 300 workers providing technical, secretarial, and maintenance services. Can anyone seriously argue that the international community cannot afford the trivial sum required for the academy proposed in this paper? The United States government alone sees fit to allocate roughly $400 billion to meet its assumed military needs in the coming fiscal year and another $39 billion for the projected Department of Homeland Defense. Justifying this extravagant unilateralist pursuit of the chimera of security while simultaneously denying the UN the means of maintaining an adequate peacekeeping capability makes very little sense.
|
| This paper was presented during a panel on “United Nations Responses to Terrorism and Security” at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, Cascais, Portugal, June 23, 2002 |
|
| 1. | Data supplied by Center for Defense Information, Washington, D.C., telephone call dated June 6, 2002. |
| 2. | Ibid. |
| 3. | Barnett R. Rubin, "A Blueprint for Afghanistan," Current History, April 2002, Vol. 101, No. 654, 153-159, data on p. 157. |
| 4. | V Joseph E. Schwartzberg, "A New Perspective on Peacekeeping: Lessons from Bosnia and Elsewhere," Global Governance, vol. 3, 1997, pp. 1 15. |
| 5. | The best work on this subject is Frederick Charles Danvers et al Memorials of Old Haileybury College, Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co. 1894. |
| 6. | www.un.org/peacekeeping/ |
| 7. | www.un.org/peacekeeping/ |
|
| Joseph E. Schwartzberg is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Minnesota in
Minneapolis, USA. |
Go Back Top
|
|
Print