Even at a time when the federal government is illustrating its foreign policy activity with the support of tanks, ammunition assistance and training offers for Ukrainian soldiers, there are other figures on foreign policy activities.

For example, the crowd of almost 200 German task forces who are active in around 40 international peacekeeping missions - from Africa to Iraq to Ukraine.

They embody the civilian component of Germany's commitment to contain international conflicts and are led by a headquarters that celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding on Thursday.

Johannes Leithauser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The "Center for International Peace Operations" (ZIF) was founded during the time of the red-green coalition and, according to the will of the then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, was intended to act as a conscious counter-model to the "war on terror" waged by Washington at the time.

At that time, German foreign policy found it easy to use its own innovative methods to set itself apart from the military-interventionist actions of other Western countries.

Within two decades, the center has developed from a political showcase institution into a central coordinator of Germany's civilian foreign policy influence.

More than 80 employees look after a pool of 1,400 experienced specialists who can be mobilized for all types of operations, as election observers in OSCE missions, helpers for justice in African UN operations or as civil security advisors in EU mandates.

While in other Western countries the foreign ministries are mostly responsible for recruiting, training and supervising civilian stabilization forces, the German variant of the ZIF has role models and comrades-in-arms, especially in the Scandinavian countries.

The head of the coordination office, Almut Wieland-Karimi, reports that initially there was often a search for “political scientists with English language skills”, but today the center is recruiting “French-speaking lawyers who advise fragile states on new legislation, or data analysts for drone recordings or Russian-speaking ones Observers supporting the work of the International Criminal Court on possible war crimes in Ukraine".

They include, for example, the Hamburg public prosecutor Sabine Arnold, who is currently on the road for the UN in South Sudan, where she travels the country with mobile special courts in which traditional tribal law and Western criminal law are combined in order to generate greater trust among the population in state institutions.

The judge at the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic, Volker Nerlich, is also one of them.

He is actually at home at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Many years ago, Nerlich was sent to Cambodia in a similar position. Now he is supposed to use his work to strengthen the population's trust in state institutions in the African country.

In recent years, the ZIF has been particularly busy with the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine;

many German observers were placed there via the center and made its work possible.

The mission was the only transparent source along the dividing line between separatists and Ukrainian soldiers, documenting thousands of Minsk violations from 2014 until the evacuation in February this year.