United Nations Emergency Peace Service
The United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) is being designated as a standing, rapidly deployable UN peacekeeping service to provide effective, prevention-based response to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and natural disasters. Often described as an international “911,” UNEPS could deploy within 48 hours of UN authorization to stabilize a potentially dangerous emergency situation. While a UNEPS deployment is under way, the UN would gain more time to find the necessary resources and personnel needed to organize a more
permanent operation. A timely UNEPS deployment may manage many crises entirely, thus reducing the need for expensive and lengthy peacekeeping operations.
UNEPS would consist of approximately 15,000 civilian, police, and military professionals trained on genocide and conflict prevention. The service would have mobile field headquarters and would act preventively, stopping a conflict before it escalates into a full-scale humanitarian disaster. Because the Service would be individually recruited from citizens worldwide, UNEPS would not be affected by the unwillingness of Member States to deploy portions of their own armed forces in times of crisis. Thus, prolonged delays typical of the current process of force generation for UN Peacekeeping operations would be avoided, and the chance that a conflict would escalate to uncontrollable levels would be significantly reduced.
While most focus on the number of lives that would be saved by this service, it is also instructive to note that the financial benefits of UNEPS would be significant. According to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the international community could have saved nearly $130 billion of the $200 billion it spent on managing conflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention or early intervention rather than post conflict reconstruction.
What Can You Do to Help the UNEPS Initiative?
Although advocating for the creation of a UNEPS is by no means an easy task, building public support behind the initiative is imperative to its success.
If you are a US citizen, contact your legislators about Resolution 213 in the House of Representatives. Suggestions about what the best way to contact your representative can be found on the Citizens for Global Solutions website:
