Needed: a United Nations Administrative Academy.

ALTHOUGH SOME MEASURE of reconstruction in failed States might, under the proper circumstances, be carried out by UN peacekeeping forces or an occupying army, recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that no matter how well trained its soldiers may be, some administrative functions are best reserved for civil servants. A problem exists, however, in respect to recruitment. Many capable civilians will be unwilling to serve in areas of political instability and endemic danger, while others who are willing might not be especially able. In view of this, I propose the establishment of a United Nations Administrative Academy (UNAA). It could graduate 1,000 or more highly trained individuals annually, who would then enter a UN Administrative Reserve for a period of ten years, during which they would be on call for duty in failed or endangered States as, when and where needed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The academy would initially provide instruction in English, Spanish and French, and would have three appropriately situated campuses in stable host countries, such as Canada, Costa Rica and Switzerland. In Canada, for example, it might be based at the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Center in Nova Scotia; in Costa Rica at the United Nations University for Peace in San Jose; and in Switzerland at the UN complex in Geneva. A fourth campus offering instruction in Arabic might also become feasible. Academy faculty and administrators would be drawn largely from a pool of persons who have had relevant experience in UN peacekeeping missions, supplemented, as needed, by others with specialized professional expertise. Support staff would be locally hired.

Students would be selected competitively on the basis of merit and initially have to pass tough qualifying examinations given periodically in one of the three working languages. While an attempt would be made to attract qualified individuals from all over the world, special efforts would be directed at recruiting from developing countries. Additional eligibility requirements would include possession of a baccalaureate degree or equivalent experience, age ranging from 21 to 35, good health and a moral record free from serious blemish. The application and testing processes would be handled through national offices of the UN Development Programme (UNDP). Where needed, travel support to reach testing places would be provided.

Instituting competitive examinations as the chief determinant of eligibility entails costs not existing in the present system of recruitment for civilian positions in UN peacekeeping missions, in which arguably class privilege, personal connections and country of origin play too large a role. Top posts tend to be staffed disproportionately by personnel from relatively affluent countries or by elite social strata from a small number of developing countries. Whether such individuals have been sufficiently sensitive to the cultures and economic situations of those whose needs they are intended to serve is often open to question. Although there is no guarantee that those with less privileged backgrounds will be better equipped to perform their jobs, it does seem likely that properly trained academy graduates will show the requisite empathy and understanding. As in many military academies, students would be given a modest monthly stipend, in addition to food and lodging, a portion of which might be set aside in a personal escrow account redeemable only on successful completion of the stipulated ten years of reserve service. Where necessary, stipends would be supplemented by allowances for dependents. Books, supplies and other related expenses would be borne by the academy; paid leave and travel allowances would enable students to make periodic home visits.

The period of instruction would normally be three years, though for certain specialties a fourth year might be required. At the start of the third year, there would be a four-to-six-month field internship within an existing peacekeeping mission, where possible, or in some other troubled area of the world. Internships with both governmental and non-governmental agencies would be negotiated. The subjects of instruction and the nature of curricula would evolve on the basis of experience. But the body of experience already accumulated by administrative training programmes maintained by certain States, such as India in respect to its own Indian Administrative Service, would also be tapped in devising the UN programme.

UNAA would, of course, have a core curriculum that all students would have to master, which would include instruction on the history, structure and functioning of the United Nations system, and on how the military aspect of peacekeeping is conducted. Other core activities would include: study of general management techniques; workshops in effective written communication; honing critical skills in the reading of history and political propaganda; and training in cultural sensitivity, conflict resolution and personnel management. Since staff would be expected eventually to train indigenous personnel to take over their functions, some instructions in pedagogy might also be required. Finally, physical training would be mandatory.

More specialized courses of instruction would include, inter alia: police supervision; fiscal management; community development; basic education and educational reform; public health and sanitation; disaster relief; and so forth. Intensive multidisciplinary study of at least one major world region would be compulsory, and specialized language training, especially in such lingua francas as Arabic, Persian, Swahili, Hausa, Hindi/Urdu and Bahasa Indonesia/Malay, would also be encouraged. Diverse means of testing mastery of subject matter would be utilized. Students who failed to maintain a high standard of achievement would be dismissed from the programme. Quite apart from the academic content, the academy would seek to instil in its students a global ethos in which respect for universal human rights and loyalty to humanity as a whole would complement allegiance to one's own nation and would foster a sense of planetary stewardship. In this way, the academy would significantly promote world citizenship.

Upon completing their studies, all graduates would begin a ten-year contractual obligation as members of a UN Administrative Reserve and be subject to call to duty. In all likelihood, some would be assigned immediately to UN peacekeeping or peacebuilding missions with pressing civilian staff needs. The rest would return to their home countries, most of them would presumably join or rejoin their respective administrative services or accept other jobs, perhaps with the local UNDP office, and work in such positions until their services were needed by the United Nations. It would be necessary for the United Nations to work out arrangements with the countries supplying the students, whereby they would be released for duty when needed and on completion of their UN assignments be guaranteed the right to return, with no loss of seniority, to the jobs they left in their country. It would also be possible for those wishing to extend their academy reserve status beyond the ten-year period; however, the United Nations would have final discretion in this matter.

In addition to being on standing call for active duty, reservists would be expected to be available for several weeks every three years or so following their graduation to participate in regional camps, in which they would review successes and shortcomings of prior or ongoing UN peacekeeping missions and be made aware of other new knowledge and technological developments relevant to their mission. They would receive modest payment for these periods over and above the expenses entailed for their participation. Periodically, they would be sent and expected to study relevant literature from the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. At the outset, most academy graduates would serve in relatively junior positions under more experienced UN personnel. One would anticipate, however, that those who performed especially well would be marked for positions of increasing responsibility in subsequent assignments and possibly shift to permanent jobs within the UN system.

As of January 2006, in its fifteen peacekeeping missions around the world, the United Nations fielded a total of 71,811 men and women, including 61,748 military personnel, 7,371 non-local civilian police and 2,692 observers. In the previous year, they were recruited from more than a hundred countries and were assisted by approximately 4,000 civilian personnel, who performed a wide range of ancillary functions. Even within a single country, the staff was often exceedingly heterogeneous. For example, in 1992 the police personnel serving in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone came from no fewer than 43 countries; similarly, diverse compositions of military and/or civilian peacekeepers have characterized other major missions, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Gameroon, Timor Leste and Cambodia. As these forces would have trained and worked under widely differing conditions in their respective countries, coordination among them on UN missions could not possibly be easy; anecdotal evidence suggests that serious misunderstandings have occasionally occurred. Greater use of UNAA graduates would obviate this shortcoming. These graduates could take over the execution of many tasks that the military personnel are typically not well equipped to carry out, which would not only ensure better performance but would also lead to a somewhat less pervasive and potentially unpopular military presence in strife-torn areas.

The relatively low ratio of civilian to military personnel (less than 1:6) in peacekeeping operations does not signify a lack of need for the former. Recruitment is a serious problem and so is cost. Civilian personnel are far more costly per individual than soldiers and, given the tight budgetary constraints within which the United Nations must operate, their numbers are fewer than needed. Afghanistan, for example, is a case where the United Nations has scarcely begun to meet the need. If a UNAA already existed, it could go far toward correcting that deficiency. The same might have been true in Iraq if the requisite diplomatic groundwork and follow-on planning had been carried out. Since each Academy graduate would have a contractual obligation to the United Nations, in effect a debt to repay for a free and high quality education, their salaries while in the field could quite legitimately be set at lower levels than those of other UN civilian personnel. Also, housing and other needs in the field might also be at more modest, yet perfectly adequate, levels.

The UN Administrative Reserve would not even come into existence until the graduation of the first cohort of students three years after the academy's inauguration. Its size would vary over time, thereafter growing at the rate of 1,000 or more persons per year depending on the need for additional personnel and the academy's ability to expand to meet that need. Much would also depend on the willingness of graduates to extend their reserve commitments beyond the required ten-year minimum. I would suggest that a reserve corps on the order of 15,000 could easily be maintained. It is entirely possible that many graduates will never be called for active duty. Given the uncertain nature of politics, there is no way to meaningfully predict who might be needed where. But that does not mean that the money spent on students' training will have been wasted. On the contrary, the development of human capital, one of the missions of the academy, has relevance in a wide range of contexts. Service by well-trained personnel in the administration of their respective home countries could contribute substantially to their economic, social and political development. Many academy graduates, whether or not they have had foreign peacekeeping experience, are likely to rise quickly in the ranks of their country's bureaucracy, especially in the case of developing countries, where the pool of highly trained administrators is probably limited.

The costs of creating a UN Administrative Academy would be remarkably modest in comparison to the benefits derived. Foremost among the many potential benefits would be the establishment of political stability and the concomitant inhibition of the spread of domestic and international terrorist networks, as was the case with Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. If even a single major act of terrorism were thereby averted, the benefits might well be incalculable. In monetary terms, I would estimate that after meeting start-up expenses, UNAA could be maintained at a cost of approximately $200 million per year. This is roughly the current annual budget of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, where I taught for 34 years, and only a tenth or so of the budget of the University as a whole. My estimate assumes the existence of three UNAA campuses, a student body of about 3,300 (1,200 in the first year of study and, because of attrition, 1,100 and 1,000 in the second and third years, respectively), some 300 faculty members and administrative personnel, and approximately 300 workers providing technical, secretarial and maintenance services. The estimate also figures in the costs of maintenance and overhead, home leaves, supplemental support for dependents and testing of applicants. Given the enormous potential benefits, can anyone seriously argue that the international community-perhaps aided by private foundations, especially in the formative years-cannot afford the relatively trivial sum required for the proposed academy?

The costs of maintaining members of the UN Administrative Reserve in actual field operations would be entirely separate from those for UNAA. But considering the much greater preparedness and efficiency anticipated for graduates in comparison to the more expensive ad hoc civilian staffing in UN operations to date, the establishment of UNAA would very likely result in substantial overall savings in future operations. In any event, the cost of using the reserve would be but a small fraction of the overall costs of peacekeeping, which have recently been running on the order of $5 billion to $6 billion per year. To put the whole matter of costs into a meaningful perspective, we may note that for the fiscal year 2007 the United States Government alone is proposing a budget of $439.3 billion for the Department of Defense (not counting huge supplemental requests to pursue military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan) and another $35.6 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Justifying this extravagant unilateralist pursuit of the chimera of security, while simultaneously denying the United Nations the means of maintaining an adequate peacekeeping capability, makes very little sense.

Joseph E. Sehwartzberg is an emeritus professor of geography and a former Chair of the Department of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has lectured extensively on South Asia and on UN reform. His book, Revitalizing the United Nations: Reform through Weighted Voting was published in 2004.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]