Lesson 7: Civil Assistance

 Transcripción del video

Welcome to Lesson 7. Now, in Lesson 6 we talked about liaison and information sharing – and liaison and information sharing is really more focused on supporting the civilianizing effort that Cedric talked about. Shifting now to the other major activity or function of UN-CIMIC – civil administration – which is what this lesson is about. The emphasis is a little bit more now on civilianizing, and there’s a reason for that. Civilian assistance basically itself has two components, one of which is called mission support. The other is called community support. Now mission support is really supporting those external actors that you work with to enable them to do their job better so that we don’t have to use the military resources, we can conserve those. That’s part of the civilianizing. Community support is really getting down to the community level and helping the local communities gain a greater sense of control over their futures. That can be political, that could economic, and social, and so on. That is of course done in coordination with those civilian actors, those external actors that we’re helping to civilianize the effort with. There are major steps in doing community assistance, and many different ways of doing it. The steps basically are about identifying the common objective, collaborative planning, operational coordination, and collaborative evaluation. So community support activities are undertaken in support of the local community, and that’s the major difference. But the real aim of that is to build the capacity and the confidence of those local or internal actors, such as local governments, to deliver the essential services to their populations and constituents. That includes, by the way, security. So that could mean working with and through local security actors who are recognized by the international community as being legitimate. Again, you’re doing civil assistance to transition focus away from peacekeeping to peacebuilding. This is a major transition management activity that you’re doing when you’re doing civilian assistance. The goal, of course, is to work you and your commanders and the mission forces at large out of a job, and facilitate your eventual withdrawal. There’s a couple of words of wisdom that are used in this process. Peacebuilders are great practitioners of this old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, then you feed him for a lifetime.” And that enables, again, your eventual departure. So UN-CIMIC in every peacekeeping mission contributes to the linkage between security and development, as well as with the humanitarian space through its civil assistance activities. That includes gender mainstreaming, particularly youth, which is becoming extremely important in helping to stabilize fragile and failing states, and, of course, and perhaps even above all, the rule of law.