Not always a happy ending: The organizational challenges of deploying and reintegrating civilian police peacekeepers (a Canadian perspective) Benot Dupont & Samuel Tanner1 University of Montreal, International Centre for Comparative Criminology Unlike most contributions on civilian police peace operations (also known as CIVPOL), this paper does not focus on the impact these missions have on the post-conflict societies where they are conducted (Gregory 1996, Sysmanidis 1997, Oakley et al. 1998, Murray 2003) –or their lack thereof. Nor will it conclude on a list of suggestions for improvements that could make police contingents more effective at peace building (Call & Barnett 2000, Bayley 2001, Latham 2001, Perito 2004). We will also leave the psychological impact on police peacekeepers of participating to missions whose outcomes are ambiguous to others (Drodge & Roy-Cyr 2003). Instead, we have chosen to explore another facet of the CIVPOL story: the selection and preparation process of police officers that temporarily leave their job in stable societies to undertake often challenging tasks in post-conflict environments (Chappell & Evans 1998), and the subsequent overall failure of contributing organizations to fully take advantage of the skills and experience their returning officers have acquired in the process. In this perspective, we conceptualize civilian police peacekeeping missions through a much broader temporal and organizational window than the one defined by its purely operational component, which usually falls under the responsibility of the UN. Instead, we envisage CIVPOL operations as a continuum made up of three phases. The first phase consists in the mobilization of public – and sometimes private – organizations in contributing countries to provide suitable police officers to the UN. The second phase involves the deployment and management by the UN of CIVPOL contingents in receiving countries. Finally, the last phase, which in our opinion has not attracted enough interest so far, relates to the reintegration of police peacekeepers by their main employer. The emphasis placed on the operational phase can certainly be explained by the numerous specific challenges associated with the promotion and maintenance of the rule of law in post conflict settings (Holm & Eide 2000). However, we believe that the initial and the final stages are crucial elements that need to be incorporated into the overall assessment of CIVPOL operations, from a sustainability point of view. The mobilization stage determines to a large extend the quality of the police officers who are made available to CIVPOL missions, while the reintegration phase provides an opportunity for contributing organizations to benefit from the experience and skills gained by their officers. It is also closely monitored by returning officers' colleagues who are considering volunteering for future CIVPOL operations, in order to determine the level of support the organization is providing and the impact such deployments have on career paths. Agreeing to contribute police officers to CIVPOL operations represents a

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