Business and International Crimes
Conflict Prevention
Teresa Whitfield:
Friends Indeed; The United Nations, "Groups of Friends" and
the Resolution of Conflict
Teresa Whitfield is a Visiting Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, where she is undertaking a two year project involving the research and writing of a book, Friends Indeed: the United Nations, "Groups of Friends" and the Resolution of Conflict. The project, which is supported by the Department for International Development (UK), the United States Institute for Peace, Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies in Oslo, and the Ford Foundation, will involve comparative analysis of the instances in which Friends' groups (or other analogous groups such as the Core Group on East Timor) have been employed to further United Nations peacemaking. It will also involve the development of observations regarding the circumstances within which groups of Friends may be most usefully engaged within a peace process and how they may be structured to do so.
Since the early 1990s a number of informal groups of member states have been established to support the peace related efforts of the United Nations. Such groups, most commonly known as the Friends of the Secretary-General or of a particular process, are generally composed of some four-six members, at least one of which will be a member of the Security Council. The groups vary in origin, size, composition, in their relationships to the conflict in question and with both the Secretary-General and his representatives and the Security Council. They also vary greatly in effectiveness. However, despite the proliferation of Friends and other groupings of member states since the early 1990s, the mechanism has been rarely studied, in part because their actions are largely confidential and little documented.
The research will explore the relationship of the United Nations Secretary-General to the multiplicity of actors who make up these groups - members of the Security Council, neighbouring and regional states and others with either interest or influence (or both) in a particular process - through a series of interlocking case studies. In doing so it will attempt to shed light on the circumstances in which the UN can productively enhance the effectiveness of its good offices efforts within the complex international and regional dynamics of peacemaking.
Friends Indeed will try to answer some key questions regarding the nature of groups of Friends and their engagement in peacemaking: What are groups of Friends and how are they formed? How do they differ from other international groupings of states, such as the Contact Group in the former Yugoslavia, or the "Six plus Two" in Afghanistan? How do they relate to the good offices of the United Nations Secretary-General? And to the work of the Security Council? Do Friends' groups work better in some circumstances than in others, or at some phases of peace processes than others? Do different configurations of interested actors (members of the Security Council, regional actors, donor states) lead to more predictable outcomes? Are there cold war vestiges (e.g. spheres of influence motivations) in the engagement of the United States and Russia, and differences between their actions and those of regional or former colonial powers? How can lessons learned from past experience best be applied in the future?
The primary product of this project will be a book of 250 pages. Friends Indeed will aim to be of immediate utility to policy makers at the UN and elsewhere and of interest to the general student of conflict resolution. It will draw on direct experience of the Friends mechanism through interviews, published first hand accounts of mediation processes (where they exist), UN documents and the policy and scholarly literature on peacemaking. During the course of the research Whitfield will be contributing a chapter on Friends groups to a book on the United Nations Security Council edited by David M. Malone and to be published by Lynne Rienner Publications in 2004. Whitfield will also be exploring with the United Nations how my research may helpfully feed into the thinking of policy makers.
September 2003
Teresa Whitfield can be contacted at teresa.whitfield@nyu.edu