The following request from an Australian Researcher has been passed on to the ROA from NARPO. If anyone can help please contact the researcher direct.

UN Peacebuilding Compared Project

Kate Macfarlane is a researcher from the Australian National University in Canberra, working on a project called Peacebuilding Compared, which is a comparative study of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding in 50 of the most important conflicts. This includes East Timor, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Sudan to name a few.

As part of their research she is heading to the UK at the end of September to interview military and police personnel, as well as civilian experts and others who have been involved in peacekeeping operations. If the MDP Retired Police Officers Association has members who have been on UN peacekeeping operations, she would like to know if anyone is interested in speaking with her

Below is a project information sheet which has a link to their website http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au

The United Nations is putting foreign troops and police into peacekeeping operations more than in the past. So are other organizations like the African Union. What works in peacekeeping? What are the kinds of interventions that create wars and make things worse for the people? How can international peacebuilding and international law contribute to justice and human development after armed conflict? These are the questions our research team will seek to answer in the Peacebuilding Compared Project.

We will search for those answers by talking to people involved in at least 50 armed conflicts, including: peacekeepers, UN officials, country leaders, their judges, journalists, diplomats, police, humanitarian workers, bankers, public officials and ordinary people who have suffered from war. You are one of those people. We want to learn from your experience and your insights. Our research team will undertake to tell the story from all sides of the suffering fairly and well in a book many will read.

What you say will be confidential unless you tell us you want to be identified as the source of that information. Then a copy of your quote can be sent to you to correct if we get anything wrong.

We are not interested in finding out anything of current political or military strategic significance. If you tell us anything like that it will not be written down. We are simply interested in learning lessons from the past, the lessons your personal experience can teach the world.

When we have a draft of what we have written about the successes and failures of peacebuilding in each country, it will be put it up on our website. We would like to hear from you with any comments or criticisms you have and we will take your views into account in revising the draft.

Please visit the website at http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au/ and learn a lot more about the methods we are following in the project, the ideas we are exploring, the countries involved, and about our backgrounds. Thank-you for your help.

If you have concerns about the way we have done our research, please inform:

The Secretary, Human Research Ethics Committee
Australian National University ACT 0200
Tel: +61 2 6125 7945; Fax: +61 2 6125 4807
Email: Human.Ethics.Officer@anu.edu.au

John Braithwaite     -     John.Braithwaite@anu.edu.au
Kate Macfarlanae     -     Kate.Macfarlane@anu.edu.au
Hilary Charlesworth     -     RegNet, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, RSPAS
Valerie Braithwaite     -     Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Australia