It is well known that the speed, impact and extent of humanitarian emergencies - many of them militarised - has broadened the compass as well as increased the number of United Nations peacekeeping missions. As 'peace support operations' and 'humanitarian intervention' and other variants of 'traditional' peacekeeping arise, practitioners and analysts alike have struggled to keep pace, conceptually as well as operationally. This book is a long-overdue assessment of the role of the UN specialized Agencies in peacekeeping operations. Special emphasis is given to that most vexed category, 'complex emergencies', involving entrapped or victimized civilian populations and a plethora of UN, national military and NGO actors. Considerations of UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF, WHO and UNDP address issues including their operational remits; their reporting structures and functional independence within peacekeeping operations striving for coherence and unity of effort; co-operation and co-ordination between the agencies themselves and with other actors in the field; operational and resource constraints; and future prospects.
Further chapters examine the role of DHA and assessments of the efficacy of the specialised agencies as well as reform issues. While based on the full range of recent history, the contributions to this volume are forward-looking and policy-oriented, bringing a hard-edged practicality to complex and hitherto under-examined issues.