Karin Landgren on 'What I Learned from Ebola'

In 2014, West Africa faced the world’s worst Ebola outbreak. The 25th Ebola outbreak in history, this one killed at least seven times more people than all prior outbreaks combined. Liberia was the hardest hit, with over 4000 deaths, most of them between June and October 2014. For the first time, the United Nations found itself with a peacekeeping operation, UNMIL (United Nations Mission in Liberia), deployed in an environment of widespread deadly hemorrhagic fever. UNMIL remained present and active, despite international panic and incomplete knowledge, as the health crisis threatened to become a security and political crisis for Liberia, and as the country - and aid workers - were threatened with international isolation. Now, the end of Ebola is tantalizingly close. The former head of the UN peacekeeping operation in Liberia reflects on her experience of the Ebola crisis.

Karin Landgren, George Soros Visiting Practitioner Chair, was until 2015 an under-secretary-general of the United Nations and one of only a handful of women leading United Nations peacekeeping missions. Between 2012 and 2015 she led UNMIL, the United Nations Mission in Liberia, as the special representative of the secretary-general. From 2009 she led UNMIN, the UN Mission in Nepal, and from 2011 BNUB, the UN Mission in Burundi.