The United Nations has a record 100,000 peace operations personnel in the field. NATO has 46,000, and the European Union and African Union have 7,000 apiece. These numbers are all record highs and they are still growing. Now is a good time to step back and look at what makes such commitments necessary, what makes them work, and how much outsiders can really do to bring sustainable peace and security to war-torn lands.

The United States Institute of Peace and The Henry L. Stimson Center invite you to a discussion of these critical issues on the occasion of the publication of a new book, Twenty-First-Century Peace Operations, edited by William J. Durch, the culmination of a four-year project to examine in detail the origins and outcomes of six key operations: in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Timor Leste, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan.

Speakers

• Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi
  Visiting scholar at Princeton University; Special Adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations
• Andrew Natsios
  Special Envoy for Sudan; former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development
• William Durch
  Editor of Twenty-First-Century Peace Operations; Senior Associate and Co-Director of the Future of Peace Operations program at The Henry L. Stimson Center
• Ambassador Carlos Pascual
  Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution
• Paul Stares, Moderator
  Vice President of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the U.S. Institute of Peace