Reading the Wind: What makes UN Special Political Missions effective?
Raja Gundu
UN Special Political Missions (SPMs) are funded out of the UN’s regular budget and do not contain peacekeepers/“blue helmets”. As a result, they tend to be smaller in logistical footprint and budgets than peacekeeping missions . In recent years, the Security Council has been increasingly inclined to establish Special Political Missions. Over the past decade (2012-2022), the Security Council only established two peacekeeping missions but mandated 11 Special Political Missions. As of April 2022, there are 25 UN Special Political Missions deployed across the world. This study focused on country-specific missions and regional offices. The author interviewed 12 senior leadership and/or senior substantive mission personnel (of grade P5 – ASG, with a quarter of those interviewed being women) involved with 11 SPMs for this study, to discover what makes a SPM effective. The average UN experience of those interviewed was 18 years.
This study defines Effectiveness of a SPM as the successful delivery of the mission’s mandate in the eyes of the host country’s population. Guided by faculty of the University of Oxford, responses from the interviews suggested that Effectiveness of SPMs consists of six dimensions: Mission Environment, Mission Leadership, Mission Management, Mission Approach, Mission Communications and Mission Measurement (encompassing the preceding five dimensions).
Raja Gundu is a Political Affairs Officer in the United Nations Secretariat supporting the General Assembly's deliberations on the Middle East. He has previously served with UN special political missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and led the Global Programme on Preventing Violent Extremism at the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism where he supported governments across Asia and Africa in developing inclusive policies to counter violent extremism. Raja was a Visiting Research Fellow at CCW between October 2021 and January 2022.
