G. The Criticality of Civil-Military Transition Management in UN Peace
Operations (Lesson #2651)
Observation.
Transition management along the civil-military nexus of mission coordination – from
peacekeeping to peacebuilding, from security to development, and from military to civilian
lead – is the central challenge and measure of success in the successful fulfillment of the
mandate of a UN integrated field mission.
Discussion.
Perhaps among the most impactful lessons from the recently-closed UN Mission in Liberia
(UNMIL) experience is the centrality of transition management along the civil-military nexus
of mission coordination – from peacekeeping to peacebuilding, from security to develop-
ment, and from military to civilian lead – to the successful fulfillment of the mandate of that
UN integrated field mission. Related to that is the need to have a clear and well understood
concept of civil-military management of that process.
The core obstacle to UNMIL's stabilization process to end the peacekeeping consolidation
phase and start the drawdown phase (transitioning to peacebuilding) in January 2008 was
“the increasing dependence of the Government of Liberia on the assets of the Force,”
highlighted in numerous UNMIL Force Command reports, as the greatest risk to security
and stability there. There are copious discussions of this central transition management
challenge in numerous UN Security Council Reports (including UNMIL and other multi-
dimensional mission reports and especially UNSCR 2086 and the “HIPPO Report”). I also
go into depth to explain this challenge in my Conflict Trends article and the UNMIL case
discussion in the POTI civil-military coordination course handbook. Additionally, in my
March 2018 UN Dispatch podcast, I discuss how UNMIL needed to “work itself out of a job”
by transitioning from military-dominated peacekeeping to civilian-dominated peacebuilding.
(“References” section below provides links to article, handbook, and podcast.)
In order to tackle this challenge at this critical juncture at UNMIL, however, as Chief of
CIMIC and the only person trained in civil-military operations in the mission, I realized the
need to overcome numerous handicaps and mission capacity gaps. For one, the role of the
Force in building civil authority and enabling this transition management process was not
well understood by most of either the mission leadership as well as the majority of opera-
tional leaders from most components (civilian, police, and military). In particular, most troop
contributing countries had little or no civil-military doctrinal, operational, or human capital.
Second, the UN lacked an overarching concept of civil-military operations that went beyond
“CMCoord” (the UN concept for humanitarian civil-military coordination) to synchronize such
a comprehensive and complex effort.
To address these shortfalls, a two-pronged effort emerged. First, drawing on the experience
of my U.S. predecessors in the job as well as some progress in other UN missions (e.g.,
MINUSTAH), I drafted and published the UNMIL Force CIMIC Directive, which provided a
conceptual guideline as well as operational instruction function. Highly cognizant of the just-
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