The United Nations is an embodiment of a continually evolving international order and UN peace operations are the physical manifestation of that order. Though there is no international consensus as to what peace and security mean, the prevailing understanding of these ideas is modeled by what peace operations do and how they do it. So what do current peace operations tell us about how the world understands peace and security? Has the recent global focus on terrorism changed what we think peace and security really means?

Shannon Zimmerman is a peacemaker specializing in understanding how ideas of peace and security interact. She is currently a PhD researcher at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on the intersections of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) and counter-terrorism norms within United Nations peacekeeping missions. She specifically looks at how these norms interact with each other at the field level and their impact on the structure and nature of contemporary peacekeeping missions.

Shannon holds a Masters in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Previously, Shannon worked at the United States Institute of Peace and the North American branch of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Published on Sept. 2, 2016