Silvia Danielak, "Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Silvia Danielak
Book: Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability (MIT Press, 2026)
Date: May 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. Silvia Danielak’s new book, which investigates the crucial yet underappreciated role of infrastructure in United Nations (UN) peace operations. Rather than focusing solely on military patrols or diplomacy, Danielak provides a compelling analysis of how UN-led construction of roads, camps, energy systems, and more are central to both the success and challenges of peacebuilding. The conversation highlights the historical evolution of infrastructure’s role, the often-political nature of such activities, and the major turning points in the UN’s approach, along with lingering questions about the future of peacekeeping.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Silvia Danielak’s Background and Motivations

[03:17]

• Danielak is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Carter School, positioned at the crossroads of urban geography and peace/conflict studies.
• She was inspired to write the book after repeatedly encountering “infrastructures” in peace operations—such as roads, military bases, and energy systems—typically treated as background or technical matters rather than central to peace.
• Danielak wanted to challenge assumptions that infrastructure is apolitical and belongs solely to engineers, highlighting instead its political and social impacts.

“If we say that infrastructure doesn't matter, it means we don't take seriously infrastructure as a mechanism for change. And if we consider it as always positive, we somewhat preclude the possibility that infrastructure could cause harm or...violence.” — Dr. Danielak [07:03]

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2. Uncovering Hidden Questions & Assumptions

[05:13]

• The book probes questions such as:
  • How and why did the UN become an infrastructure builder, often without fully acknowledging that role?
  • What conceptions of “peace” are embedded in these building practices?
• Danielak applies historical sociology, tracing these dynamics across the entire history of the UN and its missions.

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3. Historical Roots: UN Peacekeeping and Infrastructure

[08:34]

• UN peacekeeping’s infrastructure work dates back to its beginnings, including:
  • The Congo (1960s) and Cyprus missions.
  • Early peacekeepers repaired infrastructure, cleaned airports, and fixed water supplies to “normalize conditions.”
  • The missions were explicitly concerned with community perception and the political signaling of such repairs.

“There was a whole conversation around how...camps could win a camp beautification contest. So there was clearly a concern with the perception of local communities and how infrastructure would be perceived...” — Dr. Danielak [09:14]

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4. The Political–Apolitical Tension in Infrastructure

[10:59]

• Even efforts seemingly geared toward normalization carried implicit political agendas, e.g., supporting the modernization of Cyprus.
• Decisions about where and what to build affected local power relations and shaped the trajectory of national development, despite claims of neutrality by missions.

“Building infrastructure always involves choices about location, about access, about beneficiaries. And these choices...shaped local power relations, even if the missions keep claiming or claimed neutrality.” — Dr. Danielak [11:40]

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5. Post–Cold War Expansion and Complexity

[12:52]

• Post–Cold War peacekeeping missions became more multidimensional, dealing with civil wars and growing mandates around peacebuilding.
• Example: In Cambodia, short timelines required major infrastructure work like de-mining roads to access remote areas for elections.
• As missions extended over decades, infrastructure became instrumental in state-building and delivering humanitarian and security objectives, often blurring traditional boundaries.

“Missions are increasingly blurring the lines between grappling with the nexus of security, humanitarian action, and development...that’s also reflected in infrastructure.” — Dr. Danielak [14:09]

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6. Turning Point: The Haiti Mission (MINUSTAH)

[17:50]

• The Haiti stabilization mission marked a shift:
  • Infrastructure projects became core to stabilization logic, not just auxiliary support.
  • The 2010 cholera outbreak (traced to unsustainable sewage management by peacekeepers) exposed how poorly managed infrastructure could cause significant harm.
  • Public health disasters led to public anger, protests, and reevaluation of risks inherent in peacekeeping infrastructure.

“Here, infrastructure suddenly emerged not as an opportunity...but really as a risk factor.” — Dr. Danielak [19:25]

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7. Lessons Learned and Policy Changes

[20:58]

• The cholera crisis led to more explicit commitments to sustainability:
  • New missions, like Mali (2013), included environmental clauses in their mandates.
  • This shift brought new environmental management practices, performance indicators, and improved training, reflecting greater awareness of long-term and widespread impacts.

“From that experience, we can see how expectations around sustainability, around environmental management, and local integration expanded. … There was a recognition that we should do no harm. And then...maybe we could do better.” — Dr. Danielak [22:05]

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8. Ongoing Challenges in Implementing Sustainability

[23:26]

• Implementing lessons is uneven:
  • There’s a dichotomy between “inside the fence” (the controllable space of UN camps) and “outside the fence” (local communities), with the latter being much harder to manage.
  • High staff turnover, shifting mandates, lack of planning capacity, and unstable environments make long-term, holistic infrastructure planning extremely difficult.

“I think the biggest challenge right now is that some things are being done, but the action is somewhat unequal...There is a second tension between the quick impact and the long-term infrastructure effect.” — Dr. Danielak [23:37]

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9. The State of UN Peacekeeping Today

[26:45]

• Missions now pay significantly more attention to managing environmental impacts, renewable energy, and waste, but approaches remain inconsistent.
• Questions linger over peacekeeping’s proper mandate: How far should missions go in building infrastructure? What should be left to other actors?

“What is our mandate here? What should peacekeepers be doing? And what perhaps also is not peacekeeping’s role anymore?” — Dr. Danielak [27:58]

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10. Future Directions and Big Takeaways

[28:43]

• Danielak hopes her work helps the UN and others recognize infrastructure as a peacebuilding tool, with all its risks and opportunities.
• She urges treating peacekeeping as a spatial/urban planning actor: thinking about the full lifecycle of infrastructure—planning, maintenance, adaptation, closure, and afterlife (including ruins).

“The full lifecycle of infrastructure is also its maintenance, thinking about its operation, adapting...and how to maintain. How do we get spare parts in the most practical sense? How do we think about the end of an infrastructure project, should it be closed? What do we do about the risk of ruination?” — Dr. Danielak [29:30]

• UN and other organizations need to take infrastructure seriously in terms of social, political, and environmental impacts; more resources for spatial planning are needed.

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Notable Quotes

• On the misconception of infrastructure as apolitical:
  “My hope is to contribute to correcting the misperception or the misconception that infrastructure is exclusively the domain of engineers and that infrastructure is only technical and not political…” — Dr. Danielak [06:31]
• On learning from failure:
  “Infrastructure...can cause harm or some forms of, in the worst case, even violence.” — Dr. Danielak [07:10]
• On sustainability after Haiti:
  “There was a recognition that we should do no harm. And then over the next 10 years, we see how this evolves to say, well, actually we should not only do no harm, but maybe we could do better.” — Dr. Danielak [22:22]
• On peacekeepers as urban planners:
  “Peace operations themselves [should] consider their action and their role as being that of a spatial actor, almost like considering themselves as urban planners.” — Dr. Danielak [28:56]
• On peacekeeping’s future:
  “There is a concrete opportunity to start thinking now and plan now for the afterlives of that peacekeeping infrastructure.” — Dr. Danielak [31:42]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:17] – Dr. Danielak introduces her background and motivation
• [05:13] – Foundational questions and assumptions guiding the research
• [08:34] – Early history: infrastructure in Cyprus and Congo missions
• [10:59] – Political versus apolitical choices in early peacekeeping
• [12:52] – Post–Cold War expansion; Cambodia case
• [17:50] – Turning point: Haiti (MINUSTAH) and its aftermath
• [20:58] – Environmental reforms post-Haiti; Mali mission’s innovations
• [23:26] – Challenges implementing sustainability and learning lessons
• [26:45] – Current state of UN peacekeeping infrastructure work
• [28:43] – Hopes for future approaches and big takeaways
• [32:23] – Danielak’s future research directions

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Conclusion

Dr. Danielak’s work reframes UN peace operations by spotlighting infrastructure as a central component of peacebuilding—with its attendant political, social, and environmental implications. She advocates for a shift in mindset, urging peace actors to approach their spatial and infrastructural footprint with more awareness, planning for their full lifecycle and impact. The episode is a rich resource for understanding the often-invisible mechanisms shaping Peace itself, well beyond diplomacy or armed patrols.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Sylvia Daniellek about her book titled Peace How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability, published by MIT Press in 2026. Now this book takes us into, as the title suggests, UN Peace operations, which of course is something that a lot of research devotes itself to, but maybe not quite in the way we're going to be talking about, which is, of course, what makes it so interesting. We're obviously going to be discussing politics, but also technology, also expertise, many kinds of expertise. Peace operations, of course, but also some other elements of peace that maybe aren't always part of the conversation. So I don't want to give away too much more at this point because I think our conversation will be quite intriguing. So, Sylvia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Thanks for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and telling us why you decided to write this book?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Absolutely. So I'm Sovia Danielak and I'm an assistant professor at George Mason University at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. I'm trained in urban planning. And so I consider this work and my work in general, really at the intersection of urban geography and peace and conflict studies. I wrote Peace Infrastructures because I kept encountering them infrastructures, the roads, the military bases, energy systems within peace operations. Yet they seem to be treated as background rather than as being central to peace. Now, I should say that during my PhD I had already engaged with the growing scholarship on the spatiality of conflict. And so I became more and more interested in understanding the spatiality of peacebuilding. And so as I was looking at these gigantic super camps that were built at the time in places like Mali, I thought that perhaps peacekeeping operations seemed to be the most massive manifestation of that spatiality of peacebuilding. And so I was really curious to understand how peace is built not only through diplomacy and security, but through material systems that shape everyday life in places that experience conflict.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And that's obviously a big intriguing question, but when one starts a project, we might all begin with a question like that, you know, a big one. But of course, as one investigates, we end up with like questions amidst that sort of, underneath that it's sort of the project always develops. So can you tell us more about kind of the questions underneath that big one and the ways in which asking these kinds of questions about infrastructure exposes assumptions that we may not otherwise notice about these sorts of questions of time, space, peace?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah. So the book asks really basically what happens when institutions, they are meant to manage conflict also become long term builders? And more specifically within that, how did the UN and UN peace operations become infrastructure builders? And often without fully acknowledging that role. And then secondly, I'm asking what Ideas of peace are embedded in these building practices and in the things that the missions build. I developed these questions through an approach that is informed by historical sociology. So that means I'm tracing projects, infrastructural interventions, practices and ideas across time and space. So, so I'm looking at the entire history of the United Nations. I'm looking at different missions in different places around the globe. And I'm trying to understand and first of all, notice the recurring practices, ideas, and also tensions that sometimes get resolved and sometimes persist throughout that history and across space. Well, my hopes, in terms of the assumptions, there are a couple. First of all, of course, you know, so many people do imagine peacekeeping as the military patrols, the mediation, civilian protection, perhaps even state building. But there is another part of the story, and that's the building. So I really want to center that part. My hope is to contribute to correcting the misperception or the misconception that infrastructure is exclusively the domain of engineers and that infrastructure is only technical and not political. I think what I've seen in communications by the UN is that infrastructure either is often downplayed as something that doesn't quite matter, or if it is focused on it, is presented as a positive byproduct. You can always positive byproduct. And for me, these ideas are somewhat problematic. Right. If we, if we say that infrastructure doesn't matter, it means we don't take seriously infrastructure as a mechanism for change. And if we consider it as always positive, we somewhat preclude the possibility that infrastructure could cause harm or some forms of, in the worst case, even violence. Right. So we want to look at infrastructure more fully and really consider it, all its opportunities and possible risks, to make sure we take it seriously and that it matters. And so in this book, I connect the study of pre separations to interesting theories in social sciences and in humanities that have already dealt with infrastructure in this more complex way. And so when we bring this together, what emerges is a really more complex picture of the functions of infrastructure and its centrality in peace operations.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, so that gives us a whole bunch of things to keep in mind through this discussion. And as you mentioned, you're asking these questions in terms of UN history, kind of the whole of UN history. So how far back do we go in the history of UN peacekeeping to see infrastructural elements as being part of the mission?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Well, we go to the very beginnings, the very beginnings of UN peacekeeping, just when the UN was founded and in the very beginning, the first missions that I look at are two interventions in civil war that I think sometimes have been a bit forgotten in this Cold war history of peacekeeping, which are the interventions in the Congo in the 1960s, early 1960s, and Cyprus. And in both those missions, peacekeepers were involved in a lot of infrastructural things. So cleaning up airports, cleaning up water supply, fixing infrastructure whenever something broke down. Right. So the peacekeepers in Unfissip, they accompanied workers to fix power lines. They came to a village to help fix the water supply when it broke down. So that was a lot of this, kind of just the peacekeeper being the helper, the one that comes and fixes things to help make sure that the life can run more normally again. But I've also found that there were some interesting other aspects of how infrastructure mattered really early on. So, for example, within the archives I was able to see, to follow how there was a whole conversation around how we could win or different peacekeeping camps could win a camp beautification contest. So there was clearly a concern with the perception of local communities and how infrastructure would be perceived by local communities. Another thing that mattered early on was road, the quality of roads and a lot of road accidents involving peacekeepers in Cyprus. And so over time, really unfairsip oversaw construction works, they conducted engineering surveys to make sure that transportation infrastructure were for civilian, not for military purposes. So there was a lot of work early on that took place under this umbrella of normalizing conditions in Cyprus. But there were some kind of political elements in there already at the time, I'd say.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to kind of not have anything political involved in these sorts of decisions. So interesting to see kind of just how early this is happening. Can you tell us more then about what that sort of tension is between political and apolitical in these early days?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah, so peacekeepers facilitated access to infrastructure and they assisted with infrastructure development like developing the road systems or supporting the national housing strategy. And that was often done to monitor its use, as I just mentioned before, to make sure that these infrastructure developments that happened were for peaceful purposes and not to advance military strategy and engage in more conflict. But they were also part of a longer term project to modernize Cyprus. That's the case that I'm mostly focusing on. The idea was to develop a modern nation state with the idea that modernizing Cyprus would help, and this project of modernity would help to. To make sure that Cyprus would develop peacefully. So the ideas of modernity come up a lot in these early years of the mission. So there's already a Political project in this, in this very language of how infrastructure was somewhat rationalized. More practically, building infrastructure always involves choices about location, about access, about beneficiaries. And these choices that were made together with or by peacekeeping operations, they shaped local power relations, even if the missions keep claiming or claimed neutrality.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Of course, that's always really interesting to kind of see what's actually happening and what's being said and seeing when those things are a little bit, as you're explaining, they're kind of disconnected. And of course, that's not just true with the Cyprus mission. So how did this sort of involvement in infrastructure by UN peacekeeping missions continue not just through the Cold War, but also after the Cold War?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah, so I think there's been a lot of scholarship, of course, on kind of this expansion of peacekeeping after the end of the Cold War. And so missions have become more complex, they've become more multidimensional in response to the growing involvement in civil wars that happened after the end of the Cold War. And also the peace building came up as a word. So there was also a recognition that maybe missions need to be more, you know, need to do more. More things and different things. And this, of course, had. This was translated, of course, in the types of infrastructure work that took place. Right. I should say that at least initially, some of the missions in the 1990s were very short with very ambitious goals. Right. Like setting up elections in Cambodia within a year or two. Right. And so these very ambitious goals required infrastructure in order to achieve those goals. For the example of Cambodia that I write about in this book, Cambodia was set to have elections, but it required roads that are free of landmines to actually get the ballots into the remote parts of the country. So there was a lot of pressure, not only politically to achieve those political and peacebuilding goals, but also to make sure that the infrastructure exists to actually achieve those goals. And of course, more generally, of course, the background is that Cambodia and other countries at the time had been devastated from years of brutal civil war. So there was a lot of pressure and a lot of importance given to infrastructure in those moments. So that's the early years after the Cold War, more long term. So 10 to 20 and plus years on, we see, of course, that missions are increasingly blurring the lines between grappling with the nexus of security, humanitarian action, and development. Right. And so there's some of these political shifts that we see, like the capstone doctrine on robust peacekeeping. And then much More later, the UN's new way of working, of bringing humanitarian development nexus Together, all these, these political shifts and movements, they are also reflected in infrastructure, Right? So infrastructure, for example, was used to protect peacekeepers much better. We think of the securitization of camps. That's also an infrastructural move. Right. And at the same time, of course, expanding the projects in communities, public works, the support of state services. Right. State and nation building through infrastructure. All these changes and these multiple purposes of infrastructure that happened after the end of the Cold War.

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[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And of course, as you're talking about these sorts of changes, right. The implication of what you're saying is that kind of things are shifting with each mission. You know, a little bit of change here. Oh, and then a little bit over there. And we know that happens with UN peacekeeping missions that like each of them sort of is shifting things around a little bit. But of course we do also have sort of key turning point type missions for various aspects of analyzing UN peacekeeping. When we're looking at these questions then of infrastructure and kind of the way in which it is and isn't political or is political, but maybe isn't being talked about that way. You talk about the mission in Haiti as being a dramatic turning point in this case. So can we talk about why that was?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah, so the stabilization mission in Haiti in Minusta was authorized in 2004, strictly speaking, there were actually two turning points here. So first of all, Minister explicitly embraced the urban. It was focusing on urban violence, and it framed urban violence as an international security threat. So it engaged a lot in urban warfare and kind of, you know, reducing and trying to somewhat limit the power of urban gangs that were shaking Haiti at the time. And then also secondly, to somewhat offset this urban warfare aspect, it was doing a lot of. Minister was doing a lot of infrastructure projects, labor intensive projects to keep people involved and keep them away from the gangs and somewhat bringing them into the public works of big cities like Port au Prince. So here, infrastructure, and that's like the first turning point is that infrastructure was no longer in support, but it was really part of the mission's stabilization logic. But I think the more dramatic turning point, perhaps that you were probably referring to is the cholera outbreak that happened after the 2010 earthquake, when more peacekeepers were brought into Haiti. And so this cholera outbreak was traced back to one of the peacekeeping camps that was hosting newly arriving peacekeepers and that was built next to a river and its sewage system. So the sewage from the peacekeeping camp leaked into the river. Now, unknowingly, the peacekeepers were carrying the cholera bacteria, and that led to the cholera epidemic that Haiti has been troubled by for a long time now. So here, infrastructure suddenly emerged not as an opportunity, as a tool to make things better, but really as a risk factor. And so what happened with MINUSTA is really a totally new understanding of infrastructure and a new understanding of risk. So risk can emanate from peacekeeping infrastructure. It can affect, first of all, public health and also more long term, the political goals of a mission. Right. So after the cholera outbreak, Haiti was experiencing more violent, more popular protest, a lot of frustration with the mission and with the un So a lot of things had changed, and they could be traced back to this idea of faulty infrastructure in its origin.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And this, as you said, had lots of implications for that particular mission and of course, was something that other missions at the time and since then have very much paid attention to as well. So how has that changed other peacekeeping missions who are sort of watching along?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah, so, I mean, when we think of peacekeeping, it's always the missions, but it's also what happens at headquarters. So in New York, and there's a lot of people also in New York, of course, that work for peacekeeping. After this cholera outbreak and after the UN was working through its own responsibility, it was a long way to assuming responsibility and reckoning with that's environmental impact that became so obvious. But it did infuse the idea that peace operations could and should think about their wider impact. So from, from that experience, we can see how expectations around sustainability around environmental management and local integration expanded very practically, what happened in 2013. So, three years after a new mission, Minusma, was authorized for Mali, and it was the first mission that included from the outset a environmental clause in its mandate. Now, so the mission and the peacekeepers in Mali were supposed to take care of its environmental impact and make sure to reduce any harm. So that clause in the Security Council resolution needed to be translated, of course, into action on the ground. So what we see then is a growing concern with and more effort in the area of environmental management. So think of key performance indicators and environmental monitoring. Also, training was improved on environmental issues. So we really see how ideas and ambitions when it comes to the wider impact of missions change. Very early on, I think there was a recognition that we should do no harm. And then over the next 10 years, we see how this evolves to say, well, actually we should not only do no harm, but maybe we could do better.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And that's obviously a great goal. But simply stating that as a goal doesn't make the sort of practicalities of learning those sorts of lessons easy, or especially not if they're going to be lasting. So what are some of the challenges that different missions have found in kind of trying to implement those learnings?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think it is one thing to say it and to recognize it's important, but to translating this into action is challenging, especially because we. I think when we talk about it this way, we forget that the places where peacekeeping operations intervene are some of the most complicated places to do that type of work. They're unstable. There's a lot of rapid change happening, counterparts may change, a lot of violence ongoing. So it's a major challenge to think about and be concerned about sustainability and translate this into action. I think the biggest challenge right now is that some things are being done, but the action is somewhat unequal. There's a big distinction between what's happening inside the fence and outside the fence. And what I mean by that, that's the language of the un, is to say that within peacekeeping camps, we have a lot of control and there's a lot of environmental monitoring and improvement that can take place. Right. Because that's a space that we can control now what's happening outside the fence. So within the communities, local communities, it's much harder to have that same ambition or these same indicators, the same practices working there. As well. Right. Again, that's an environment that is fundamentally unsafe and unstable and experiences violent conflict. So there's already a tension and I think a challenge between these different spaces that peacekeeping sits in. There is a second tension between the quick impact and the long term infrastructure effect. Thinking about the long term impact and the legacy of infrastructure, these different times or temporal dimensions really make it difficult to engage with infrastructure fully. There's a high staff turnover in missions. Missions also have a very short mandate and those conditions limit institutional memory. They limit thinking more long term about projects and about infrastructure. They limit the capacity to take time to plan. So more broadly, I'd say missions lack often the clear authority and the resources for planning infrastructure, including its maintenance, its operation and perhaps even the closing of infrastructure projects. Right. And so learning often stays ad hoc and doesn't quite come, doesn't become systematic the way we might like to see it. So really I think it's also a question of resources. I think that becomes clear. Right. Including time, what is required is to think of how to evaluate infrastructure in this long term, the long lifespan of infrastructure. And I think that's really challenging for the UN to take this long term view.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that is really difficult to do. So what does that mean then for the state of UN peacekeeping today in terms of how they're thinking about engaging in infrastructure and how they're approaching these sorts of projects?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Missions do engage today with the environmental impact much more than ever before. They do think of how to use resources like how much water should a peacekeeper be allowed to consume? How do we do waste management or recycling? There's consideration around renewable energy. Where do we source our energy from? How can we move away from the heavy use of generators, emissions? So there's a lot of, I think really good work that's happening. In addition, of course, also thinking about climate risks and sustainability, that's increasingly part of planning. But there's, I think for now there's still like these two directions of action. Right. The one is like the internal focus. So what are we doing for the camps? Because they still. That's a large footprint that peacekeeping has. But also externally, for what infrastructure projects do we do for local populations? What's their utility? How can we think about them in the long term? Can we do quick impact projects? Should we do something that's more complicated, that has dual use, so both serving peacekeepers and local communities? Can we think of co benefits? Can we think of a long term transition of infrastructure to local usage? So I think there's a lot of Things that people within the UN are thinking about and trying to figure out how to do it. But this approach remains inconsistent. And I think there's still also a question more generally, like what is our mandate here? What should peacekeepers be doing? And what perhaps also is not peacekeeping's role anymore and what should be left to others? So I think there are still some really hard questions that need more thinking.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And what would you like to see in terms of the future of UN peacekeeping and these questions about infrastructure?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

I would hope that the book helps changing the understanding of infrastructure in the context of conflict and in the context of peacebuilding efforts, so that infrastructure is treated explicitly as a peace building tool with its benefits and opportunities, but also with its risks. And then secondly, I would also hope that peace operations themselves consider their action and their role as being that of a spatial actor, almost like considering themselves as urban planners. This means that peacekeeping would develop a more comprehensive understanding of its spatial footprint and its spatial engagement. And it connects to this idea I mentioned earlier to say that infrastructure is not only about the building. Very often I think the UN's ideas is that the infrastructure project ends with the ribbon cutting opening ceremony. But what I would like to see is that there is. That's just the beginning, right? The full lifecycle of infrastructure is also its maintenance, thinking about its operation, thinking about adapting infrastructure to changing use, thinking about how to fix it and how to maintain. How do we get spare parts in the most practical sense? And how do we think about the end of an infrastructure project, should it be closed? What do we do about the risk of ruination, the risk of ruins? So I think these questions can be addressed when you consider yourself to be a spatial actor and an urban planning actor, and to make sure that you take seriously your own infrastructure footprint. Now, I think these are the more practical or the more direct questions that I hope this book addresses or promotes conversation around. I think there's a bigger question that I myself and probably, probably everybody else asks these days. Where is the UN headed? More broadly, where is peacekeeping headed? And then, of course, what position will infrastructure take in those peace operations in the future? One part of me looks at the scale of current destruction and thinks that there's absolutely a role for reconstruction and infrastructure within that. And I would also hope that even if other actors outside the UN take on those peacekeeping roles, that they too will develop that infrastructural understanding. At the same time, there are still a few missions ongoing today that will require closing at some point. And so there is a concrete opportunity to start thinking now and plan now for the afterlives of that peacekeeping infrastructure. So the big takeaway really is to think that to take infrastructure seriously and especially its life cycle, to give time and resources to the spatial planning as a social political endeavor and as part of peacebuilding.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And as you said, those are questions very relevant to the un, but also really to any sort of organization or entity that is thinking about what is it doing in space in terms of helping people. So really great way, I think, to end our discussion about the book, what might you be asking on now that it's off your desk? Anything related or not you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Well, I will certainly keep working on and thinking about infrastructure in the context of conflict and peacebuilding from this book. I think my interest that Manchester somewhat turn to the World Bank, I think it comes up a little bit in the book of how the World bank suddenly came in at the same time with peacekeeping operations to do joint assessments and how the World bank became more and more involved in conflict zones. So I thought that's an infrastructure actor. And I am very interested to see that growing engagement at the same intersection. So that's certainly one interest of mine. And then I think the other part that I'm still very much interested is somewhat what appears towards the end of the book is this growing engagement by the UN around climate action. And so from there I'm starting to research now climate action conflicts, especially climate adaptation and mitigation infrastructure projects, to better understand what kind of conflicts those infrastructure projects provoke and also understanding better the conditions under which those projects can contribute to building social cohesion. So I think I'll be going in two different directions at the same time, but both somewhat, I think, at least in part, motivated by peace infrastructures and certainly both interesting.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So best of luck with those different directions. And of course, while you are pursuing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Peace How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability, published by MIT Press in 2026. Sylvia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Sylvia Daniellek]

Thank you, Miranda, thank you for listening

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