PrintLessons Learned
Oral History Project
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Oral Histories: Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan
October 2011
In 2009, USIP was invited to participate in a U.S. government interagency effort to capture and institutionalize lessons learned and best practices from the U.S. experience with PRTs. From 2009-2011, USIP interviewed 200 returning government, military, and NGO representatives who had served in PRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oral Histories: U.S. Special Envoys
August 2011
While the U.S. government has long employed special envoys for occasional diplomatic missions, the Obama administration’s 24 special envoys represent an unprecedented expansion of this mechanism. This report explores the role of U.S. special envoys based on interviews with nine current and three former U.S. special envoys.
Oral Histories: Iraq Provincial Reconstruction Teams
February 2009
The Iraq PRT program has highlighted the challenges that the U.S. government faces in conducting operations in conflicted environments. The Iraq PRT Project collected insights and lessons learned from government, military, and non-governmental officials. Interviews were conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training under a contract with the Institute of Peace.
Lessons learned is a process that derives knowledge from experience to be applied to current and future projects to avoid the repetition of past failures and mishaps. The ultimate goal is to turn perceived deficiencies and recognized best practices into lessons learned in order to improve effectiveness. Lessons learned systems are motivated by the need to preserve knowledge and convert individual experience into general knowledge so that those who encounter a similar context or condition may benefit from applying a lesson learned.
USIP’s Lessons Learned efforts are designed to collect, analyze, and distribute lessons learned from U.S. government officials, military officers, contractors, and representatives of international and non-governmental organizations who have served in peace and stability operations. USIP has conducted studies of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the peace process in Sudan. Transcripts of interviews from these studies are made available to the public (see the “Resources and Tools” section). These transcripts and our published reports contribute to U.S. capacity to conduct effective peace and stability operations.