Salon: U.N. peacekeeping and the next U.S. president

The next U.S. president is going to have a lot of work to do. Or, as my colleague Matt Cordell puts it at U.N. Dispatch, he or she "will have a unique opportunity to create a new global agenda for the United States and right the course of America’s foreign policy."

To that end, Passport and U.N. Dispatch are teaming up to host an online salon discussing one of the thorny topics George W. Bush’s successor will likely confront while in office. Kicking off the discussion will be William J. Durch, editor of Twenty-First-Century Peace Operations and author of "Peace and Stability Operations: Challenges and Opportunities for the Next U.S. Administration," (pdf) a new paper published through the Better World Campaign. He is a senior associate at the Stimson Center, an independent think tank here in Washington.

The following participants will be chiming in:

• David Bosco, contributing writer to FP
• Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution
• Mark Malan of Refugees International
• Eric Reeves, English professor, Sudan researcher, analyst, and blogger

Mark Leon Goldberg of U.N. Dispatch will be moderating the discussion, with some help from me.

Over the next few days, we’ll be dissecting Durch’s ideas and probably introducing a few of our own into the mix. You can follow the action here or over at U.N. Dispatch, or contribute your own thoughts in comments or at OnDayOne.org.