United Nations Peacekeeping

Introduction

Peacekeeping is an essential tool for the United Nations in its efforts to uphold international peace and security. Since its original conception as the interposition of neutral, lightly armed troops between opposing national armies, peacekeeping has seen fundamental changes in the innumerable political, economic and humanitarian tasks required of peacekeepers today.

Peacekeeping had not been envisaged at the time of the creation of the UN in 1945 and so was not included in the UN Charter. Rather, it emerged as a pragmatic response to the political restrictions imposed by superpower antagonism during the Cold War which prevented the UN from realising its original collective security ambitions. Nevertheless, peacekeeping still presents the UN's most public face and perhaps best reflects its primary purpose to maintain international peace and security.

Peacekeeping was created to respond to conflicts between states. Former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld famously described peacekeeping as characterising 'Chapter VI ½' of the Charter; that is, lying somewhere between peaceful (Chapter VI) techniques, such as mediation and fact-finding missions, and more robust (Chapter VII) methods, including military intervention. Throughout the Cold War period, these ‘traditional’ peacekeeping operations by and large adhered to strict principles of the consent of the parties to the presence of a UN mission, political impartiality and the non-use of force except in self-defence.

Things changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War, which opened the possibility of UN intervention in internal conflicts. The number, complexity and scope of peacekeeping operations expanded enormously, as their mandates were extended to include elements of peacemaking, peacebuilding and preventive diplomacy, and also peace enforcement authorised under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The new operational environments demanded the involvement of much larger numbers of civilian as well as military personnel and brought much greater risks to peacekeepers, as the consent of the warring parties could no longer be guaranteed

The sheer scale and abruptness of the changes placed massive demands on the UN system, with which it struggled to cope. Some spectacular disasters ensued, severely undermining faith in peacekeeping as a solution to global insecurity and engendering a decline in peacekeeping in the mid-1990s as dramatic as its earlier growth. Finally, these problems prompted moves to reform UN peacekeeping capacity at the end of the 1990s, which also saw an accompanying revival in support for it.

The Cold War Era

During the Cold War era, the escalating dangers facing humankind as a result of accelerating advances in nuclear and other mass destruction weaponry, combined with an increasingly antagonistic relationship between the two nuclear-capable superpowers, demanded greater efforts to seek peaceful solutions to disputes and greater co-operation at the international level. Thus, the driving force behind the development of peacekeeping during this period was the interest of the superpowers in ending proxy wars before they were dragged into direct confrontation.

The sanctity of principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in other states' affairs throughout this era largely confined the UN to intervention in wars between countries. 'Traditional' peacekeeping missions in the Cold War era originally comprised military personnel from a variety of states, under UN command, to help control and maintain peace between warring national armies in support of well-established peace agreements and ceasefires. Correspondingly, the scope of peacekeeping operations was principally confined to preserving a truce while other means were used to address a conflict's underlying issues, as peacekeepers served as buffers interposed between warring parties, acting in a confidence-building capacity as visible deterrents.

The UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO), established in 1948 in response to the Arab-Israeli war, is generally perceived as the first UN peacekeeping operation. However, the First UN Emergency Force (UNEF I), deployed in 1956 in response to the Suez crisis, was the first force-level UN operation specifically characterised as peacekeeping. It also categorised the fundamental principles of consent, impartiality and non-use of force except in self-defence which have remained at the core of all peacekeeping deployments ever since.

The Post-Cold War Era

Expansion

The breakdown of the Cold War in the late 1980s and the accompanying unprecedented accord within the Security Council fostered a quantum leap for UN peacekeeping. This was characterised in a new willingness to breach the previously sacred sovereignty principle and intervene in internal crises. Post-Cold War UN peacekeeping missions tended to deploy where conflict had not ended in victory for a party and where at least some of the warring parties were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation. UN peacekeeping operations thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations, but rather attempted to create them. Peacekeepers' goals extended beyond the simple interposition of a visible buffer between opposing armed forces, to the more complex task of addressing directly conflicts' underlying causes. The related shift in UN peacekeeping was manifested in two key areas: first, complex or multi-functional operations - which relates to the breadth of the new peacekeeping tasks; and, second, the requirement for a robust force posture.

In the first instance, the multidimensional nature of internal conflict - which might involve elements of conflict, disaster and human suffering - demanded a correspondingly complex response comprising military activities, emergency relief and longer-term development. These new and challenging environments required the involvement of significant numbers of not only military but also civilian personnel, as peacekeepers' responsibilities incorporated such tasks as: the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of combatants; electoral support; humanitarian assistance; verification of ceasefire arrangements, buffer zones and foreign troop withdrawals; and preventive deployments.

Second, a major challenge to the new complex peacekeeping operations was that peacekeepers were now likely to face armed opposition by criminal mafias, warlords and other 'spoilers' of peace processes. The more robust approach demanded of peacekeeping operations stretched traditional, Cold War concepts of consent, impartiality and the non-use of force and demanded that, where consent for an intervention was problematic involving a potential for violence, missions incorporate an enforcement capacity.

The new unity within the Security Council also brought an accompanying sharp rise in the number of missions authorised, as initial successes for complex operations both raised confidence in peacekeeping as an effective response to global insecurity and also prompted increasingly ambitious mandates. Between 1988 and 1992 thirteen missions were launched, as many as had been undertaken during the previous forty years of the UN’s existence. At the same time, missions' increased complexity also greatly expanded their size. Between 1990 and 1993, the number of military and police serving with UN operations rose from 13,700 to 78,500. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, advances of such magnitude and abruptness did not come without corresponding difficulties.

Collapse

These developments presented huge logistical and other challenges. The ill-prepared, under-resourced and over-bureaucratic UN machinery creaked under the strain. It soon became clear that the post-Cold War enthusiasm for peacekeeping would be short-lived, as many missions ran into severe difficulties. Problems included:

• overstretch of the UN system due to the sudden expansion of its responsibilities;
• significant discrepancies between missions' mandates and resources, as financial support and political will failed to match the complex mandates being authorised by the Security Council; this often translated into inappropriate missions being deployed to situations which they were not equipped to handle, such as in Bosnia and Rwanda;
• the related issue of 'mission creep', which describes the gradual expansion in the tasks assigned to UN operations to the point that those tasks far exceed the original expectations of what the operations had planned for and were equipped to accomplish; and
• doctrinal naivety, as peacekeepers struggled to comprehend the complexity of the use of military enforcement within the more benign atmosphere of a peacekeeping operation.

Difficulties were perhaps embodied most clearly in the collapse of the UN peacekeeping operation in Somalia. Here, the clumsy use of force to defeat local faction leader General Farah Aideed, designated as the enemy, in what was, in practice, a declaration of war by the peacekeepers, led to the very public deaths of 18 US Rangers serving alongside the UN mission in 1993. This incident provoked the ignominious withdrawal of the mission with the Somali war still raging unabated and ultimately initiated a prolonged period of disengagement from UN peacekeeping for the international community, demonstrated emphatically in the lack of response to the Rwanda crisis in 1994. By 1998, the 78,500 military and police personnel serving with UN peacekeeping operations in 1993 had dwindled to around 14,600.

Reform

The crisis of the 1990s prompted some serious analysis of peacekeeping in New York. In 1999, two inquiries were released into the infamous peacekeeping disasters of Rwanda and Srebrenica, exploring the failings of the UN system and its Member States and offering recommendations for reform. The inquiries were thorough, pulling few critical punches, and seminal, acknowledging and analysing many of the shortcomings of the UN system.

A more comprehensive review of UN peacekeeping capacity followed. The Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, released by the UN in August 2000, attempted to formalise the reform process to improve UN peacekeeping capacity. The Brahimi Report (so named after the head of the expert panel that produced it, Lakdhar Brahimi) sought to improve co-operation between Member States and the Secretariat and highlighted the importance of clear and robust mandates for peacekeeping operations with clearly defined tasks and performance.

The lessons of the 1990s implied the need for a clearer and more sophisticated understanding of how and when to apply force within the broader objectives of long-term peacebuilding. The more complex peacekeeping environments indicated that military operations as part of peacekeeping missions needed to be aimed beyond the achievement of a military victory towards the more complex goal of establishing an environment conducive to civilian peacebuilding. In support of these objectives, lessons learned from, in particular, Somalia suggested that military peacekeepers needed broader policy options more muscular than traditional peacekeeping but less destructive than all-out war.

There developed from this the 'peace enforcement' rationale. During the 1990s, a shared understanding of peace enforcement emerged amongst academic and major Western militaries involved in peacekeeping (i.e. France, the UK and the US) which has been demonstrated in several missions including the Australian-led force in East Timor (INTERFET) and NATO's Balkan operations: the Implementation and Stabilisation Forces in Bosnia (IFOR and SFOR); and the Kosovo Force (KFOR). This concept of peace enforcement is aimed at guaranteeing the implementation of a peace agreement or arrangement, including compliance by warring parties with its terms, through the application of incentives and disincentives, including the use of military force. All military activities form part of a comprehensive political and peacebuilding strategy. Any application of military force may be robust but must always remain expedient, designed to induce compliance rather than punish or defeat an enemy, leaving the door open for reconciliation and with an awareness of the consequences of escalation.

Further lessons of the 1990s acknowledged the limitations of UN capacity to mount effective peacekeeping operations. Regarding peace enforcement, for example, experiences suggested that the demands of combat required a practised military alliance and formation, not currently available to the UN. Indeed, the Brahimi Report recognised that enforcement had regularly been entrusted to coalitions of willing States. These shortcomings in UN peacekeeping capacity have formed part of the process of the regionalisation of UN peacekeeping.

Revival

Accompanying the drive for peacekeeping reform at the UN since the late 1990s has come a renewed interest in UN peacekeeping by the international community - albeit more cautiously than at the beginning of the decade. At times sizeable and ambitious UN operations have been launched in Afghanistan, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), East Timor, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Liberia and there has been a corresponding recovery in the number of UN peacekeepers. By 2001, the number of military and police personnel serving with UN peacekeeping missions had risen to 47,800.

Despite this rise, however, Western states - including the Permanent Five (P5) members of the Security Council - have remained reluctant to provide troops for UN peacekeeping operations. As of May 2003, of the 28,424 military personnel deployed with UN missions (excluding unarmed military observers), only 962 (less than 3.4% of total contributions) came from P5 members: China (189); France (209); Russia (115); UK (447); and the US (2).

An additional development in post-Cold War peacekeeping has often seen operations deployed in conflicts where justification for intervention has originated from some reference to international human rights and humanitarian norms, rather than a UN mandate - for instance in Kosovo; or, more recently still, since the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, as part of the 'war on terror' against international terrorism and to confront rogue states which threaten international peace and security by harbouring terrorists - such as in Afghanistan - and developing weapons of mass destruction - such as in Iraq. British foreign policy, for example, has made explicit reference to peacekeeping as an integral part of the 'war on terror' as an antidote to instability and thereby a means to undermine state support or protection for terrorists. Such developments have exacerbated controversy for peacekeepers, especially where UN peacekeeping deployments have followed enforcement interventions of highly questionable legality in terms of the UN Charter - such as in Kosovo and Iraq. The late 1990s and 21st century also revealed a new level of complexity for UN peacekeeping operations, where UN missions in Kosovo and East Timor - and to a lesser extent Afghanistan and Iraq - have assumed responsibilities of transitional administration [See Transitional Administration Brief].

Final Remarks

UN peacekeeping has evolved within broader developments in international politics, notably the impact of the Cold War and the implications of its collapse, as well as, more recently, the 'war on terror'. The limited nature of traditional peacekeeping during the Cold War era has undergone severe tests during the extreme ebbs and flows of the 1990s and today, as peacekeeping has struggled to understand and cope with rapidly changing and expanding operational challenges, in particular key developments in complex peacekeeping and peace enforcement implied by intervention in internal conflicts. UN peacekeeping remains controversial and the subject of heated and on-going debate. Nevertheless, it appears that it will still be the UN's most prominent tool for maintaining international peace and security for the foreseeable future.

The United Nations Association of the UK is a voluntary, membership-based non-governmental organization which campaigns, educates and fundraises to ensure that the UN is used more effectively, efficiently and creatively. The UN and Conflict Programme at UNA-UK aims to develop understanding and support for an enhanced UN role in conflict prevention and resolution. It undertakes policy development and dialogue with the UN Secretariat in New York, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and parliamentarians in the UK, and with non-governmental organisations, the academic community and the media worldwide.

Author: Alex Ramsbotham, Head of Research, editor: Tim Pippard, Research Assistant

This set of briefing papers has been financed by a donation in memory of Joy K B Wynn-Jones and Mary Owen. For a full publication list and more detailed information on the work of the Programme, please contact Alexander Ramsbotham, Head of Research, UN and Conflict Programme, UNA-UK, 3 Whitehall Court, London SW1A 2EL.

Tel: (switchboard) +44 (0)20 7766 3444 (direct line) +44 (0)20 7766 3446 Fax: +44 (0)20 7930 5893 E-mail: aramsbotham@una-uk.org.