United Nations Civil Affairs
The UN uses the term "Civil Affairs" differently from other - mainly military - institutions. Civil affairs officers in UN peace operations are not military officers but are civilian UN staff members who are often at the forefront of a mission’s interaction with local government officials, civil society, and other civilian partners in the international community.
Definition: "UN Civil Affairs components work at the social, administrative and sub-national political levels to facilitate the countrywide implementation of peacekeeping mandates and to support the population and government in strengthening conditions and structures conducive to sustainable peace.",
There are currently around 500 UN Civil Affairs Officers in 13 UN Peacekeeping Operations worldwide. Civil Affairs components perform one or more of three core roles, depending on the UN Security Council mandate given to a particular peacekeeping mission. In each role the work of Civil Affairs intersects with, supports and draws upon the work of a variety of other actors. Depending on the mandate, the three core roles are:
- i. Cross-mission representation, monitoring and facilitation at the local level;
- ii. Confidence-building, conflict management and support to reconciliation;
- iii. Support to the restoration and extension of state authority.
Read more about this topic: Civil Affairs
Famous quotes containing the words united, nations, civil and/or affairs:
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“And who in time knowes whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent,
T’inrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident
May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?”
—Samuel Daniel (c. 1562–1619)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)