Specialized Police Teams in UN Peace Operations: A Survey of Progress and Challenge

One of the benefits of SPTs is that they are generally competent and focused. Members of the teams meet high standards and provide a coherent project-oriented approach to their work in skills-transfer. This approach for capacity building maximises the use of the officers' capabilities, helps build relationships due to priority being set for officers with a cultural or linguistic affinity for the host state, and enables team to quickly deploy and adapt to the challenges faced in a particular context. This has some advantages over individual officers and formed police units, where deployments may be open-ended, without measurable goals, and distant from local forces. 

 However, there are a variety of challenges in the assembly and deployment of SPTs, first and foremost being supply-side issues. There are administrative barriers that limit access to funding as well as a shortage of officers who meet the necessary skills requirements for this voluntary programme. The officers that are seconded also come disproportionately from global north countries, and there are tensions between seconding states and the UNPD due to a sense that SPTs are directed too top-down without buy-in from MS. While the contextual specificity of the SPTs has its strengths, there is also inconsistency in their composition, plan, and modalities as well as a perceived disconnect from the broader efforts of the missions. In terms of end results, the report finds that too much focus is on "quick wins" that may not lead to long-term development of capacities within the host state, and that there are still few monitoring and evaluation frameworks or knowledge management systems in place.

In light of these challenges, the author proposes a broad variety of concrete policy changes. For the UNPD Secretariat, these include: clarify administrative roles internally, strengthen MS coordination, develop mechanisms for earmarked funding, simplify monitoring and evaluation requirements, and establish a knowledge management system for organisational learning. For missions, these include: maximise limited resources for sustainable outcomes, focus on training-of-trainers approaches, and refurbish local police training facilities. And for MS: ensure mission mandates and budgets enable the use of SPTs, provide high-quality personnel and adequate funding, and commission a system-wide evaluation of SPTs. Many more specific recommendations can be found at the end of the report. 

 Reference: Hunt, C. T. (2024). Specialized Police Teams in UN Peace Operations: A Survey of Progress and Challenge. International Peace Institute.