MINUSMA operations in Mali confirm that peacekeeping missions are increasingly being conducted in complex and asymmetric environments. For Sofia Sebastian, how the UN addresses the dilemmas posed by such missions will have a big impact on which tools it has available to resolve future global security problems.

By Sofia Sebastian for ISN

By Rachel Stohl and Shannon Dick for ISN

Are we doing enough to prevent the use of child soldiers? Rachel Stohl and Shannon Dick have their doubts. While UN resolutions and national legislation are a step in the right direction, they don’t address the little stressed impact that military assistance has on the recruiting of child combatants.

Two years after the dramatic events in Tahrir Square, Egypt is sinking into political turmoil. Felix Imonti also detects a parallel and equally worrying trend – the formation of hardened street armies on both sides of the political divide.

By Felix Imonti

It’s been two years since the Côte d’Ivoire plunged into a brief but bloody civil war. IPI’s Jordan Katz reports on some of the follow-on problems the UN continues to face within the country, particularly when it comes to implementing security sector reforms and other confidence building measures.

By Jordan Katz for World Policy Institute

Omid Bidar on Thursday, 31 January 2013

The huge rise in militancy across Pakistan (pdf) is also creating a number of hazards for aid workers. On New Year’s Day gunmen on motorbikes ambushed and killed six female aid workers and a doctor in Khayber-Pakhtunkhwa province. It marked the latest in a series of attacks on polio vaccination charity workers.

On December 18, five female aid workers were killed as they were administering polio vaccinations. The following day another polio supervisor was killed along with her driver in north-western town of Peshawar.