National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for inviting me to offer testimony to the committee. It's an honour to be here with you again and to discuss this very important topic. As you may know, I am a political geographer and my expertise is in post-war reconstruction. I teach at th

National Defence committee  Great. I will just continue on and I will describe what I mean. We need to understand where peacekeeping fits in the spectrum of operations. There is something that we use in peace and conflict studies called the "conflict bump". In effect, it is a graph that shows the escalatio

National Defence committee  There's been a shift in international community priorities. It was time for the western allies to begin to mentor and train the emergent peacekeeping nations, the countries that wanted to commit their soldiers into the system and to be part of the global commons. What we have see

National Defence committee  I avoid the word “decay”, because....

National Defence committee  Possibly. There was a shift in intentionality. Canada did see its role as a mentor and to stand up other peacekeeping training centres and centres of excellence around the world, and as you're fully aware, the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre duplicated itself over a hundred times in

National Defence committee  Good. I'll give you an example. We would go down to the PKSOI at the U.S. Army War College, which is their equivalent of our Pearson centre. We would host a seminar where we would have a few international participants. We would have maybe U.S. joint command at the table. We wou

National Defence committee  Yes, and there's proof. I really appreciated listening to the previous testimony. Your questions about measures of effectiveness are spot on. How do we measure whether or not our training is working? How do we measure whether or not one of those international seminars were worki

National Defence committee  I was on maternity leave when it closed, so I can't answer the question specifically.

National Defence committee  I've written a report on this, which I'd be happy to share with the committee. In fact, it might be worthwhile.... While I was at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, we went through many different transformations, but the purpose of the centre never changed. Where it was located wa

National Defence committee  At that time, it definitely was in the Ottawa area. Now with regard to what I would do, if there were a place for a centre of excellence, Canada would be a wonderful host for a place like that. There is little—

National Defence committee  I can probably best answer the question by broadening our perspective on what we think peacekeeping is. Traditionally, peacekeepers were not allowed to use offensive operations. There was use of force in defence only. The remit changes when we move from a chapter VI—to a chapter

National Defence committee  From a social science research perspective, it's the long-term sustainability of the peace. Peace can be defined both as negative peace and positive peace, if we go back to Johan Galtung's academic perspective. I want us to take that in stride because in peace and conflict studie

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  Are you speaking from the perspective of Canada or asking if the UN mission should shut down?

National Defence committee  The U.S. has gone through a process called “live exercise training”. About four years ago, they began deploying on missions around the world that they hadn't typically been part of—HADR operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations—in order to train up their