The Practice of Constitutional Development

Vincent Ostrom's Quest to Understand Human Affairs

The deployment of civilian police in UN peacekeeping operations represents a significant commitment for many police organisations, especially in decentralised political systems such as Canada where municipal and provincial police services are involved. While these missions attract large numbers of highly motivated officers, their selection, deployment and return are fraught with organisational challenges that are underestimated or ignored by the contributing agencies. In this paper, we will examine these challenges as they are experienced and resolved by three large Canadian police organisations, through a number of qualitative interviews conducted with former police peacekeepers and their managers. We argue in this paper that the deployment and reintegration stages of a police peacekeeping mission should be included in the assessment of its success, and that unless contributing police organisations find ways to improve the experience of their returning officers, the sustainability of UN police peacekeeping deployments could become problematic.