Cultural Intelligence: Its Potential for Military Leadership Development

In the current world scenario, we witness more military forces involved in peace support (PSOs) and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations and less in conventional warfare. The United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN DPKO) website indicates that the post-Cold War decades have seen a big jump in the number of such operations worldwide. Of the 60 operations authorised since 1948, the 1990s saw 35 of these. According to the UN DPKO, eight of the top twenty troop contributing nations are African while five are from the Indian subcontinent. Of the total number of personnel involved in peacekeeping operations today, some 10% are local civilians while another 5% are international civilians working in international organizations (IOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other governmental agencies (ODAs). It is becoming clear that military leaders and soldiers deployed in peace support operations (PSOs) will increasingly be required to work with other national cultures and non-military organizations. Modern military forces have been transforming and re-organising to adopt new roles in a wide spectrum of operations involving both conventional warfighting operations and operations other than war