Professional Training

Professional Training Program Officer Jonathan Morgenstein completed three highly successful seminars on conflict management and negotiations at the Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU) in Vicenza, Italy. Each seminar was one day long with a focus on how such skills could be utilized by constabulary forces in peacekeeping environments.

Participants in the workshop came from five countries: Jordan, Kenya, Cameroon, Senegal and India. All of the participants were officers of their nations’ respective stability police forces. Stability police (often called “constabulary forces”) are a hybrid force somewhere between police and military police, designated with law-enforcement and riot-control capabilities but also trained in combat tactics. CoESPU is a school established by the Italian version of a Stability Police force, the Caribinieri, with assistance from the G8 countries and the United States Institute of Peace. CoESPU’s intent is to train constabulary forces from around the world in order to increase global capacity for sustaining peace support operations.

The workshops were condensed from a standard three-day workshop into one day each, and therefore each workshop was very high-paced and intense. This was reflected in some of the feedback from workshop participants. The evaluation sheets indicated strong support for the program, with the major exception being that participants wanted more of it, and more time to digest it. Typical remarks to this effect were, “More simulations to make the students master the subject,” “We needed more time, and more like this workshop”, and “A good effort with more time could give better results.”

The participants seized on the opportunity to become much more engaged than in their typical course work during role-plays and discussions. Other than discussions of wanting more time and more exercises, the participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive. “The whole workshop was a new fulfilling and satisfying exercise, conducted in a nice, crisp thorough and professional way,” wrote one Indian officer and a Senegalese officer wrote, “This kind of seminar is very useful according to the background you’ll get to face.” Based on the response, USIP has been asked to return to CoESPU and give these workshops to future classes.