On 28 September 2024 Richard Caplan, Professor of International Relations from the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, delivered a presentation to Warwick District United Nations Association entitled

A Case for the UN Transitional Authority for Gaza?

Professor Caplan’s principal research interests are concerned with international organisations and conflict management, with a particular focus on post-conflict peace- and state-building. He has been a Specialist-Advisor to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in the UK House of Commons, a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Editor of World Policy Journal, and Deputy Director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR). He has served as a consultant to the UN Peace Building Support Office and as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragile States. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, Central European University, Sciences Po, European University Institute, and the University of Konstanz. He is the Senior Member of Oxford University’s United Nations Association.

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He is Principal Investigator of “After Exit”, the ESRC-funded research programme investigating conditions on the ground in countries that have hosted large-scale UN peacekeeping operations. He was also Co-Investigator of the Oxford Martin School-funded programme on ‘Transboundary Resource Management’, which explored the scope for cross-border co-operation on natural resource management in the eastern Nile River Basin and Israel, Palestine and Jordan, where growing pressures on water and energy threaten regional destabilisation.

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International transitional administration (ITA) refers to the temporary assumption of responsibility of the principal governance functions of a state or territory by an international organization often led by the United Nations.

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Transitional authority is temporary governance arrangements put in place to manage transitions from violent conflict and increasingly social crisis. It focuses on the period during which a state’s constitution and institutions are held in abeyance during a transition, especially in the context of an armed conflict, or a threat to international peace and security.

The UN has experience and past history of involvement in Cambodia in the early 1990s, East Timor, Kosovo, Namibia, Haiti and other areas of the globe.