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The words of Isaiah 2:4 are carved into the wall on a stairway landing in New York City, directly across First Avenue from where the flags of member nations fly in front of United Nations headquarters: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.”
In some ways, the world has come to follow those words. In the 21st century, wars most often are no longer fought between nations. Rather, wars are waged within nations over religious or ethnic issues behind a wall of political rhetoric. And as difficult as it may be to end the fighting—sometimes after decades—the really hard work begins after the guns are silenced, when the peace must be kept even as a severely damaged society is being rebuilt.
Early in 2004, Dawn Denvir ’81 (SFA) stepped into the middle of the United Nations effort to find better ways to maintain peace after the fighting has ended. As chief of the newly created civilian training and development section within the United Nations department of peacekeeping operations, Denvir leads a core group of training staff in New York City that supports a field staff of 18,000 civilians posted in 31 UN missions around the world, including those in Haiti, Lebanon, Kosovo, Sudan and Liberia, among others.
“The UN has always had a training component for the military contingent of peacekeeping. They delivered that to member states,” Denvir says sitting in her office located across the street from the landmark UN Secretariat building. “Now we’re trying to rebuild civil societies. That takes time.”
A more formalized approach to training civilians involved in UN peacekeeping missions is one of the direct results of The Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, known as the Brahimi Report, issued in 2000. The document was produced by a panel of international experts led by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, a long-time adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The panel also recommended the establishment of a Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit to analyze lessons learned from previous peacekeeping efforts and to advise UN missions on gender issues.
“We needed a different approach to peacekeeping. What’s driving change is changes in the nature of conflict. We’re learning hard lessons from the past,” says David Harland, chief of the best practices unit. “What we’ve come up with is this full-court press that we call robust peacekeeping. We’re dealing with the causes of conflicts as well as peacekeeping.”
Harland says the shift in conflict from warring nations to internal battles within nations has moved UN peace operations from “ceasefire observation and monitoring tasks to a much broader set of ‘peace building,’ ‘state building’ or even ‘nation building’ roles.” The best practices unit is reconfiguring the peacekeeping process around these new responsibilities, he adds.
“I see the peacekeeper training and human rights education as intricately linked,” says Amii Omara-Otunnu, executive director of UConn’s Institute of Comparative Human Rights and holder of the only United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in North America. “Our human rights education is complementary with peacekeeping. The question is, how do you train people in a world that is very interdependent, where you essentially have a global village? Training is educating people. That’s why I think the solution we have is to effectively educate people to respect one another despite our differences. This, I think, reinforces the work of peacekeeper training.”
Denvir describes what her training unit does as “a work in progress within the UN structure.” It is responsible for all types of required training for peacekeeping work, ranging from language and communication skills to aviation fuel safety and what are termed “substantive capacity building,” such as disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.
The civilian training and development staff would also have responsibility in a situation such as when the UN buys a fleet of automobiles for use in peacekeeping somewhere in the world. The training staff then would work with the auto manufacturer to teach civilian peacekeepers to maintain the fleet, providing job skills that could later help rebuild the nation’s economic base.
“In a place such as Liberia, where there are a thousand or more Liberians working with the UN in a variety of capacities, we can have people who come in as drivers or mechanics. We can build their skills so potentially afterward they can run a repair shop or start a taxi service,” Denvir says. “Or we could have political affairs officers who will do substantive work and then continue to build their country or build a police force that will enforce the rule of law.”
A more complex area for UN civilian peacekeeper training is how to create an ever-growing corps of experienced, knowledgeable and skilled individuals who can move from one peacekeeping mission to another around the world.
“Can you make peacekeeping a profession as you would for a doctor or a lawyer who needs certain accreditation? We may not be able to create that sort of thing and I’m not sure we want to,” Denvir says. “What we can do is at least provide some fundamental, foundational knowledge to our trainees to help them understand core areas of the United Nations, so when we talk about human rights,—what the international law is for human rights, for example— they know what is expected of them. A lot of people may come in with areas of expertise, but they may not know the UN policies and procedures, so helping them to understand the complexity of the UN system itself is important.”
She says many of the “clear cut areas are not a problem,” for training civilian peacekeepers, such as efforts to train individuals to build new schools, roads and businesses damaged by war. Often this requires working with young people who have been fighting as soldiers since they were children without knowing any other type of life and who must learn how to work and hold a job. The difficulty comes around the “more nebulous areas” of management and leadership skills. “There is not always agreement where it is necessary or how we can even deliver it,” Denvir says. “We’re in the early days of how all this will work and how to provide it.”
Most senior professionals arrive at the UN after careers working in non-governmental humanitarian organizations; however, Denvir’s path was much more indirect. The daughter of a U.S. Air Force master sergeant, she grew up moving to different military bases every 18 months. She aspired to be an actor and after completing her UConn degree from the School of Fine Arts she performed on stage in Connecticut, New York, India and in national tours.
“There is a direct connection between what I learned at UConn to my work now,” she says. “My acting training prepared me to be comfortable in front of people and to be able to deliver a wide variety of training with commitment and conviction. In my electives, I took a wide range of liberal arts courses that prepared me well and gave me a foundation of knowledge in a variety of areas.”
Denvir says that like most actors, “I always had a day job,” and 11 years ago when she moved to New York City, she worked in financial services and continued her education by earning a master’s degree in human resources and organizational development at Fordham University.
Soon after, she helped to launch a new training and development function at Olgilvy Public Relations, a major public relations firm, where she worked with clients such as the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. “I got to do a lot of great work there,” Denvir says. “For the first time, I started focusing on what I wanted to do next.”
She began to consult with a variety of businesses on training and development issues, but she also thought about working at the United Nations. She applied for a job and was called in for an interview. While she was waiting to hear back, the UN mission in Baghdad was bombed. She called the person who had set up her UN job interview to ask if there was anything she could do.
“He told me many others in that circumstance would have called to say they were no longer interested in working for DPKO,” Denvir says. Soon after she was offered the position at the UN and also was offered a training and development position at Music Television. “There was really no choice,” she says. “When would I have this kind of opportunity to work in an organization like the UN, doing this kind of work? It’s very humbling.”
Denvir spends two or three weeks each month traveling to lead training sessions in different parts of the world, reminiscent of her childhood in a military family regularly on the move. But now she is working in the civilian sector of peacekeeping, where politics, human rights and nation building come together.
“The guiding principle in human rights is that we help people to help themselves in rebuilding a broken society. So there is enormous work to be done on the civilian side,” she says. “As they say, it doesn’t look like world peace will be breaking out any time soon.”
UConn promotes human rights
United Nations peacekeeping operations have expanded in recent years to include a number of key areas, such as rule of law, civil administration, economic development and human rights.
 Photo by Peter Morenus |
| Rosalyn Odera of the UN division for the advancement of women speaks at UConn. |
This past summer, more than 35 young human rights workers and activists from more than 20 nations gathered on UConn’s main campus for the first Intergenerational Conference on Human Rights. It was organized by Amii Omara-Otunnu, holder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair; UConn’s Institute of Comparative Human Rights; and the Coalition of Human Rights Organizations, New England.
“The University of Connecticut has designated human rights as a priority,” says Omara-Otunnu, the only UNESCO Chair in North America. “We try to bring people together across racial, regional and ideological lines to say that we have to learn from one another reciprocally and move forward.”
Omara-Otunnu says most of those who attended the conference work in isolation on various issues and the conference helped to show them how their work is integrated.
“Now they can share information and dialogue. The other important thing is that by bringing generations together, the older human rights leaders are the mentors of the younger leaders,” Omara-Otunnu says.
At the same time, their image of the United States also changed from their experience at the UConn conference, he says.
“Each of them said, without exception, that they had not known that Americans are so wonderful until they experienced their hospitality,” he says. “They went back positively impressed about the United States. There is no more powerful group than these young people going home and telling others about their experience in the United States. We are trying to convey a human face for the United States to the rest of the world.”