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Shaping the future of UN peace operations: is there a
doctrine in the house?
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Cambridge Review of International Affairs,
Volume 20, Number 1, March 2007
The United Nations and peacebuilding: prospects
and perils in international regime (trans)formation
Shaping the future of UN peace operations: is there
a doctrine in the house?
Salman Ahmed, Paul Keating and Ugo Solinas
United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations
Abstract In the face of an unprecedented surge in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping
activity over the past three years—with now almost 100,000 military, police and civilian
personnel deployed on four continents in 18 operations—there is a need for the UN to
develop a comprehensive doctrine that better defines what modern UN peacekeeping has
become and that covers the full range of civilian peacebuilding activities that are now a
standard feature of Security Council mandates. This paper serves as a primer and proposes
an agenda for debate on such a doctrine. It summarises evolutions in thinking and practice
over the past 15 years. It also highlights key conceptual challenges and political fault lines
to be reconciled in order for a new comprehensive doctrine to enjoy broad support of the
UN’s 192 Member States, while still providing relevant guidance to thousands of
personnel on the front-lines of the effort to help rebuild war-torn states.
Introduction
There has been a steady and major increase in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping
activity since 1999, particularly over the past three years. Almost 100,000 military,
police and civilian personnel, drawn from well over 100 countries, are now
deployed on four continents in 18 peace operations1 managed by the UN
Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). These numbers are likely to go
up considerably in 2007, if the UN assumes greater peacekeeping responsibilities
1
In this article, as in DPKO today, the terms ‘peacekeeping operations’ and ‘peace
operations’ are used interchangeably. The term ‘peacekeeping’ is assumed by many to refer
strictly to the security-related activities undertaken by military personnel. However, most
contemporary peacekeeping operations are mandated to perform civilian peacebuilding
activities as well, such as political mediation and assistance to national reconciliation,
support to electoral efforts, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, police
reform and restructuring, and protection and promotion of human rights. Some operations
managed by DPKO, such as in Kosovo and Afghanistan, do not have military components,
since security functions are being performed by NATO-led forces. The broader term of
‘peace operations’ is perhaps thus more apt, but there is resistance to retiring the term
‘peacekeeping operations’ because of tradition, brand recognition and funding
implications.
ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/07/010011–18 q 2007 Centre of International Studies
DOI: 10.1080/09557570601155278
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12 Salman Ahmed et al
in Darfur, Sudan. New operations may need to be mounted as well, pushing the
annual peacekeeping budget—already at an all time high—over US$6 billion.
In the face of this dramatic surge, attention is understandably focused on
building up the DPKO’s operational capabilities to keep pace with demands.
At the same time, the UN, its Member States and the Secretariat alike must give
equal attention to doctrinal review and development, so as not to repeat the
mistakes of the 1990s, when the quantitative growth in activity far outpaced
qualitative reflection on and adherence to the principles and concepts governing
the instrument’s use.
Fortunately, there is growing recognition today among Member States and
practitioners on the need for the UN to develop a comprehensive doctrine that
better defines what modern UN peacekeeping operations have become and that
covers the full range of civilian, post-conflict peacebuilding activities that are
now a standard feature of Security Council mandates. The DPKO is accordingly
dedicating more resources and attention to doctrinal development today than
it ever has before. Headway is already being made in capturing lessons learned
and translating them into readily accessible intranet-based policy guidance for
hundreds of individual lines of activity.
There is more work to be done in many of the functional areas and even more
reflection and dialogue required on the overarching doctrinal questions, the
answers to which will inform the future direction of UN peace operations. Three
fundamental questions stand out in particular. In which circumstances is it
appropriate or ill-advised to establish a UN peacekeeping operation? When and
how should UN peacekeeping operations be terminated, mindful of past cases
where a relapse into conflict has followed the departure of a UN peace operation?
And how can the UN fashion a doctrine that is sufficiently prescriptive to be of
use, without placing a straightjacket on the dynamism and flexibility that is
required to respond to unique sets of circumstances and challenges?
This paper does not provide definitive answers to these questions. Nor does it
prescribe a new doctrine. Rather, it serves as a primer and proposes an agenda for
a series of informal discussions on doctrine that are intended to occur in 2007
among Member States, the DPKO, external experts, and key partners within and
outside the UN system. The addition of a major new partner to the scene—via
the creation of the Peacebuilding Support Office in the Executive Office of the
Secretary-General to support the work of the new inter-governmental body at the
UN, the Peacebuilding Commission—is particularly welcome.2
The next section takes stock of evolutions in doctrine and practice in UN
peacekeeping, particularly over the past 15 years. The two sections thereafter
highlight key conceptual and political challenges, respectively, that the doctrine
will need to address in order to provide relevant guidance to UN peace operations
personnel on the frontlines of efforts to rebuild war-torn states, while still enjoying
broad support of the UN’s 192 Member States as a whole. The dilemmas and
contradictions described throughout this article, particularly in the third and
fourth sections, illustrate the very challenging nature of the exercise upon which
2
At the 2005 World Summit, Member States agreed to establish the Peacebuilding
Commission as an advisory body to advise on and propose integrated strategies for postconflict peacebuilding and recovery.
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 13
DPKO has just embarked. The article also describes the types of issues that the
newly established Peacebuilding Commission will need to confront.
This paper poses far more questions than it answers. The convergence of
common interests to enhance the effectiveness of future UN peace operations
gives reason to hope that progress will be made in finding answers to them in the
year ahead.
Evolutions in doctrine and practice in UN peacekeeping
The UN Charter does not even mention the word ‘peacekeeping’, which was first
introduced in 1948 as a pragmatic UN innovation to support collective security in
the Cold War era. Almost sixty years later there is still no single document entitled
‘doctrine for UN peace operations’. While lessons have indeed been learned and
applied in practice, a comprehensive doctrine remains elusive, for reasons that are
explained throughout this and subsequent sections. Thus, the de facto doctrine
guiding UN peace operations must be inferred from the evolutions in the Security
Council mandates assigned to them. As this section illustrates, those mandates
have been informed by changes in the global order, major reports and proposals
emanating from the perceived successes and failures of past operations, and the ad
hoc responses fashioned to meet unexpected new demands.
Containment: the Cold War years
The 15 peacekeeping operations established between 1947 and 1989 were, with
notable exceptions such as in the Congo in the early 1960s, designed to provide an
international third-party presence to monitor and verify previously warring
states’ compliance with cease-fire agreements and to alert the Security Council to
developments on the ground that could threaten to undermine a fragile peace. The
actions of the unarmed or lightly armed UN military peacekeepers were guided
with considerable success by a trio of core doctrinal principles inferred from
Chapter VI of the Charter itself: consent of the warring parties for UN
involvement, impartiality in dealing with them, and the non-use of force except in
self-defence.3 This Cold War model of UN peacekeeping was essentially one of
containment, where peacekeepers provided a buffer between the parties, thereby
creating a more conducive environment for negotiations led by others to seek an
enduring political resolution of the conflicts.
Windows of opportunity: the post-Cold-War honeymoon
The second evolutionary phase in UN peacekeeping was ushered in with the end
of the Cold War in 1989. Several of the civil wars in Latin America and Africa,
which had been fuelled by the East– West rivalry, were suddenly ripe for
conclusion. Additionally, the Permanent Five members of the Security Council
were now ready to reach agreement among themselves on a far more active and
central role for the UN in the management and resolution of internal conflicts.
3
See Secretary-General of the UN (1956) on the plan for an emergency international UN
force requested in the resolution adopted by the General Assembly.
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14 Salman Ahmed et al
Recognising the tectonic shift in patterns of conflict brought about by the end
of the Cold War, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali took a lead role in
helping to redefine and articulate the UN’s contribution to the maintenance of
international peace and security.
Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace identified ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’,
along with preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping, as one of
the instruments available to the international community for managing violent
conflicts. Peacebuilding was defined as ‘action to identify and support structures
which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into
conflict’ (Secretary-General of the UN 1992, 6). In order to be truly successful, the
Agenda argued, ‘peacemaking and peacekeeping operations must come to include
comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which will tend to
consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among
people’ (Secretary-General of the UN 1992, 16).
An Agenda for Peace was closely followed by An Agenda for Development, which
noted that ‘most peoples strive to achieve their development against a
background of past, present or threatened conflict’ and identified peace as a
‘fundamental dimension of development’ (Secretary-General of the UN 1994, 5).
In this regard, peacebuilding was presented as a means of offering countries
emerging from conflict a chance to establish new social, political and judicial
institutions that could give impetus to development. At the same time, while
making the case for a more conflict-sensitive approach to development in waraffected countries, an Agenda for Development also emphasised the need for
peacebuilding efforts to address the underlying economic, social, cultural and
humanitarian causes of conflict (Secretary-General of the UN 1994, 6).
Operationally, an enormous amount was accomplished by UN peacekeeping in
the early stages of the post-Cold-War period. In more than a dozen situations
throughout the 1990s, fragile peace processes were bolstered by the security presence
provided by UN Blue Helmets. United Nations peacekeeping was achieving positive
results. Missions were actually even brought to a close once key provisions of the
peace agreements they were invited to help implement had been completed.
The newly invigorated international system yearned for ‘success stories’ in the
waning days of the post-Cold-War honeymoon period. It soon began to emerge,
however, that in many instances success was being proclaimed prematurely and
that the absence of conflict during a peacekeeping deployment was not the same
as a self-sustaining peace process. By pegging success to the holding of elections,
the international community had made the error of assuming that elections
and democracy meant the same thing. Time and again the crucial questions were
being ignored. Had the underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian
causes of conflict been addressed? Was a real political process and were political
systems in place that could sustain the transformation of conflict objectives into
non-violent domestic politics? Would the new political, social and judicial
institutions crucial for development continue in the wake of a peace operation’s
departure? What metrics would be used to gauge progress? Pause for doctrinal
reflection was warranted at that stage before launching the peacekeeping
instrument into the breech but the time was not there for it, and the post-ColdWar demands on the international community, and the UN in particular,
continued to mount.
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 15
Conflation of peacekeeping and war-fighting in the mid-1990s
Facing mounting public pressure to address humanitarian catastrophes in
Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, the Security Council despatched UN
peacekeeping operations into conflicts whose roots no longer lay solely in the
Cold War, where the existence of the state itself was being challenged by those
with arms, where there was no peace to keep, no consent of all key belligerents,
and where studious impartiality in the face of aggression risked resembling
appeasement. The instrument that had been successfully engaged in a particular
set of circumstances could and should not have been assumed to be applicable in a
totally different context. The results should have been predictable.
Early successes in Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia and Mozambique all
too easily faded in the shadow of the high-profile failures of international
peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda (where the
operation deployed on the basis of an actual peace to keep, but was woefully illequipped and ill-prepared to respond when the peace collapsed and genocide
ensued). This led some to assume that the UN should not be in the business of
peacekeeping at all and that regional organisations such as the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO) were better suited to the task. Amid intense criticism,
the battered UN peacekeeping system was judged by many to be a failed
enterprise. International interest in a UN at the forefront of international peace
and security efforts waned quickly.
The 1995 Supplement to the Agenda for Peace, in recoil from these battering
experiences, criticised the blurring of the distinction between peacekeeping and
peace enforcement and rejected the assumption that one could successfully
transition to the other, in situ. The document doctrinally reasserted the importance
of consent, impartiality and the non-use of force except in self-defence as the
fundamental principles of UN peacekeeping, which had been departed from in
Somalia and Bosnia, where UN peacekeepers were deployed to impose a peace
on recalcitrant belligerents intent on pursuing their military objectives. Although
no concerted effort was made in the Supplement to expand on the concept of
peacebuilding, it did note that peacebuilding was ‘as valuable in preventing
conflict as in healing the wounds after conflict has occurred’ (Secretary-General
of the UN 1995, 12). Also in 1995, DPKO issued a set of General Guidelines for
United Nations Peacekeeping Operations as a training publication, which outlined
principles, lessons and approaches to what is now called ‘traditional’ peacekeeping. This document, although an important articulation of a UN approach
to peacekeeping, did not range into the difficult and muddied waters of how to
handle ‘wider peacekeeping’ functions or the line between peacekeeping and
peace enforcement. This was to be the last foray into doctrine development in UN
peacekeeping for over half a decade as the prominence of and international
interest in UN peace operations waned.
Compartmentalisation: the ‘regionalisation’ of peacekeeping
By 1996, as political efforts to build up regional institutions were already
intensifying, attention turned to replacing UN peacekeeping with regional
organisations and ad hoc coalitions, mandated by the Security Council, which were
assumed to be better equipped and politically prepared to use force to deal
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16 Salman Ahmed et al
decisively with potential ‘spoilers’ and stabilise a fragile peace. These entities
came to be seen as the instruments of choice for ‘heavy lifting’ in international
peace operations. In the mid-late 1990s, although the first national doctrines
for peacekeeping and for ‘operations other than war’ started to emerge, still
no appetite for a UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding doctrine was exhibited,
and the notion that peacekeeping was a low-end task in the military spectrum of
activity continued to prevail in most military doctrine circles.
The need for urgent international response to crises in Kosovo, East Timor,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone in 1999 revealed,
however, that no regional organisation or ad hoc coalition could be called upon
to respond to all instances. In some cases, no organisation other than the UN
was politically acceptable to the belligerents. In others, the UN was the only
organisation with the mandate, willingness and ability to mount or improvise an
appropriate multidisciplinary response to security and peacebuilding challenges.
Moreover, UN peacekeeping came with a ready, widely accepted and quite
sustainable cost-sharing formula through assessed financial contributions. And,
in a world where many Western nations were downsizing their militaries, dependence was growing on others with large forces, such as India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh, for whom the UN was and remains the preferred mechanism through
which to conduct peacekeeping.
Thus, UN peacekeeping edged back to the fore, but once again without
the benefit of a doctrine to guide it in the performance of new complex
responsibilities. In 1999 and 2000, alongside the military observers and troop
contingents, thousands of UN civilian personnel—many in new roles as
transitional administrators—were recruited from across the globe against hastily
sketched terms of reference. The transitional administrations in Kosovo and East
Timor faced challenges and responsibilities unique among UN peace operations.
In addition to performing key state functions such as enforcing the law,
establishing customs services and regulations and operating public utilities, they
were also required to promote human rights and facilitate reconciliation in places
where grievances ran deep. However, as staff poured into Pristina, Dili and
Freetown and fanned out across the outlying provinces, it became all too clear that
there was no guiding vision for these efforts beyond that being fashioned on the
ground as reactions to daily events.
Conflict transformation: the Brahimi report
In the new context of resurgent UN operations, the August 2000 report of the
High-Level Panel on UN Peace Operations, chaired by former Algerian foreign
minister Lakhdar Brahimi, provided an opportunity for a first major foray since
1995 into some aspects of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding doctrine.
In many ways, the Secretary-General’s report on the fall of Srebrenica
(Secretary-General of the UN 1999b) and the report of the Independent Inquiry
into the actions of the UN during the Rwandan genocide (Secretary-General of
the UN 1999a) helped pave the way for the Brahimi report by promoting the
notion of institutional self-criticism. These reports demonstrated that to truly
understand what had happened and where the failures lay, each part of the UN
System, the Member States, the UN Secretariat, the men and women in field
operations and the countries in question themselves all had a share of responsi-
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 17
bility in the success or failure of UN peacekeeping operations. As a result, the
reports also served to open the door to a more frank discussion on the limitations
of UN field operations and options to improve them. The Brahimi report took this
discussion forward.
As a start, the Brahimi report challenged the loose usage of the prefix ‘postconflict’ generally applied to peacebuilding:
It should have come as no surprise to anyone that some of the missions of the past
decade would be particularly hard to accomplish: they tended to deploy where
conflict had not resulted in victory for any side, where a military stalemate or
international pressure or both had brought fighting to a halt but at least some of the
parties to the conflict were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation.
United Nations operations thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried
to create them. (Panel on UN Peace Operations 2000, viii)
With respect to the employment of military personnel, the report echoed
sentiments by the membership that the guiding principles of consent, impartiality
and the use of force only in self-defence had stood the test of time. Reflecting on
both the successes and failures of the past decade, however, the Panel suggested
that these bedrock principles needed to be interpreted more liberally. The lack of
consent from ‘spoilers’ outside the peace process should not preclude the UN
peacekeeping operations from deploying. Impartiality and non-use of force must
not be construed restrictively so as to enable such belligerents to hijack the will of
the majority seeking peace. Rather, the report argued, the UN should be prepared
to ‘confront the lingering forces of war and violence’. This would entail equipping
the operations at the outset with more robust operational capabilities to defend
not only mission personnel but the mission mandate and civilians under
imminent threat as well. The operations would need to be given robust rules of
engagement that would ‘not force UN contingents to cede the initiative to their
attackers’. If adequate numbers of troops and other enablers were not forthcoming
to do the job, then the operation should not go forward (Panel on UN Peace
Operations 2000, ix).
In the peacebuilding arena, the report called for a doctrinal shift in the use of
civilian police and related rule of law elements in peace operations to emphasise
‘a team approach in upholding the rule of law and respect for human rights and
helping communities coming out of conflict to achieve national reconciliation’.
The report also urged better integration of elections activities into a broader
strategy for the support of governance institutions, so as to diminish the focus on
elections as an end state (Panel on UN Peace Operations 2000, ix – x).
The report contended that neither DPKO nor any other part of the UN system
was equipped or mandated to deliver these peacebuilding and broader
development objectives on its own. It thus called for better coordination and
integration of effort between DPKO and the wider UN system at the headquarters
level in the planning, deployment and support of multidimensional missions.
It further proposed structural integration of UN peace operations and the ‘UN
Country Team’ of humanitarian and development agencies at the field level.
The push towards ‘integrated missions’ implied that one of the purposes of
UN peace operations was to help advance good governance and development
agendas, and that these agendas also needed to be harnessed in support of
peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities. This thinking was underpinned by
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18 Salman Ahmed et al
additional recommendations calling for more flexibility in the use of mission
budgets and assets to support the ‘peace dividend’ and reconstruction activity
such as ‘quick impact projects’ and to provide seed money for reintegration of
former combatants into civilian life.
These doctrinal recommendations were certainly highlights of a report
that otherwise focused the majority of its attention on measures to enhance
operational efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, consultations with Member
States during the research and drafting phase had revealed that the Panel would
already be pushing the edge of the envelope with the few doctrinal points it had
made. Just the use of the term ‘peace operations’ in the Panel’s title, or mention of
the word ‘doctrine’, prompted several delegations to question the intent and
appropriateness of the exercise. They warned that polemical debate on doctrinal
issues could undermine widespread support to stop treating UN peacekeeping
as a temporary aberration and readiness to invest in its operational capacities
accordingly.
The Panel took these political realities into account, as did the Secretary-General
in his 4 October 2000 implementation plan, by not pushing for a more ambitious,
comprehensive or revolutionary doctrine for future UN peace operations.
Member States achieved consensus on the majority of the operational
recommendations, including those ultimately entailing hundreds of millions of
dollars of additional investment. The General Assembly’s Special Committee on
Peacekeeping Operations did not explicitly endorse the doctrinal recommendations
in full, nor did it reject any of them either (Special Committee on Peacekeeping
Operations 2000). The Security Council, on the other hand, welcomed the doctrinal
recommendations in principle, and agreed to consider their application on a case-bycase basis.
The recommended shift to ‘integrated missions’ was welcomed, but not
without reservation. Agencies, Funds and Programmes welcomed a greater say
in the planning of UN peacekeeping operations but balked at the prospect
of taking direction from them. Humanitarian agencies and non-governmental
organisations questioned, in particular, whether integrated missions would
expose life-saving emergency assistance to politicisation and violate humanitarian neutrality. There was little dispute among Member States on the need for
better coordination between the different parts of the UN system working in
post-conflict settings. But Member States concurrently expressed hesitation
about the potential blurring of the distinction between the organisation’s peace
and security activities and its humanitarian and development activities.
Developing countries, in particular, raised concerns that these arrangements
could lead to key development questions being taken up by the Security
Council, rather than in the General Assembly and the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC), where developing countries were better represented. They
also cautioned against resources for development being diverted to politicosecurity activities. To the contrary, key financial contributors voiced unease at
the prospects of the floodgates being opened to the use of assessed contributions
to sustain development activities.
The political and bureaucratic agreement to enter the age of ‘integrated
missions’ was, in retrospect, as fragile as the very peace processes these operations
would be despatched to protect. True, if not for the choice to approach the exercise
pragmatically rather than dogmatically, progression into this area might not have
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 19
been possible at all. But it came at the expense of ushering forth yet another cycle
of surge in activity without the benefit of a doctrine endorsed by Member States to
underpin it.
Closing missions: no exit without strategy
The Secretary-General attempted to advance the cause of doctrinal development
through his April 2001 report to the Security Council entitled ‘No exit without
strategy: Security Council decision-making and the close or transition of UN
Peacekeeping Operations’. That report did not receive nearly as much attention as
the Brahimi report even though it addressed more directly and comprehensively
the end state that UN peacekeeping operations should seek to achieve. Reflecting
on the lessons of the previous decade, this report underlined three key objectives
‘whose fulfilment has often brought about successful comprehensive peacebuilding’:
(a) Consolidating internal and external security: This involves the deployment of
peacekeepers and/or military observers to ensure security or negotiate
access in order to promote security sector reform, including the creation of a
neutral police force broadly representative of the community; disarmament,
demobilization and reintegration; judicial and penal reform; and mine
clearance and capacity-building for mine action.
(b) Strengthening political institutions and good governance: This requires the
creation or strengthening of national democratic institutions, political parties
and other participatory mechanisms, including the media; capacity-building
for government and civil society; technical assistance in human rights; civic
education and training; electoral assistance, including the development of
electoral law, a code of conduct, and electoral councils; and support for the
fight against corruption.
(c) Promoting economic and social rehabilitation and transformation: This involves
fostering conditions for resumed economic and social development;
sustainable return and reintegration of displaced persons and refugees;
confidence-building measures conducive to national reconciliation; stimulation of maximum involvement of civil society, especially women, and of
national non-governmental organizations; attention to the needs of youth,
especially young men; providing social services (health education, water and
sanitation); providing sustainable sources of livelihood to demobilized
soldiers and returning refugees and displaced persons; job creation,
microcredit schemes and the promotion of income-generating activities;
reconstructing roads, bridges and railways to provide access to wardevastated areas for resettlement and agricultural production; and psychosocial trauma counselling for war-affected groups. (Secretary-General of the
UN 2001, 19)
The Security Council welcomed the report as an important contribution to
their deliberations on the subject, while neither endorsing nor rejecting these three
objectives. It did, however, undertake ‘to include, as appropriate, peace-building
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20 Salman Ahmed et al
elements in a mission’s mandate to support the transition from peacekeeping to
post-conflict peace-building’ (Security Council President 2001, 1). The Council
also recognised that a major criterion for deciding on the scaling-down or
withdrawal of a peacekeeping operation should be the ‘successful completion of
its mandate, resulting in the establishment of a requisite political and security
environment conducive to durable peace and/or a follow-on peace building
process’ (President of the UN Security Council 2001, 2).
Creeping towards institution-building: the post-Brahimi years
Between 2001 and 2004, the UN Secretariat did not attempt to engage Member
States on a broad doctrinal debate on peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Dialogue
mainly focused on the implementation of the Brahimi report’s recommendations
related to strengthening DPKO and the organisation’s rapid deployment
capacities.
However, proposals on several different areas of focus in different fora, when
aggregated, represent an extension of the argument advanced in the Brahimi
Report about avoiding an overly elections-centric approach to peacebuilding. In
its interaction with the legislative bodies on several occasions, DPKO emphasised
the importance of deepening the organisation’s capacity to strengthen rule of
law institutions, ensure deeper and more lasting reform of the security sector,
achieve a more integrated approach across the UN system in the disarmament,
demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, and recognise the
linkages between all of these activities.
In 2004, the Secretary-General issued his report on the rule of law and
transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies, taking stock of existing
UN practices, experience and expertise and putting forward a series of
recommendations both for the Council and for the UN system as a whole
(Secretary-General of the UN 2004). In a presidential statement issued later that
year, the Security Council asked the Secretariat to provide a report with proposals
about the implementation of the Secretary-General’s recommendations regarding
the UN system, with particular emphasis on those measures that could be
implemented rapidly. It also expressed its intention to consider the matter of
justice and the rule of law in conflict and post-conflict societies within six months
(President of the UN Security Council 2004).
Coherence and strategy: the Peacebuilding Commission
In its report prepared for consideration in advance of the 2005 World Summit,
the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
provided a lucid account of various factors that fuel civil wars, the dangers to
regional and international stability civil wars present and the contribution the UN
makes to diminishing their numbers.
This report added its voice to the debate on UN peacekeeping and
peacebuilding by largely reaffirming the basic vision expressed in the Brahimi
Report, but making a plea to Member States to do better in resourcing operations
since the total global supply of available peacekeepers was ‘running dangerously
low’ (High Level Panel on Threats, Challenge and Change 2004, 6). The HighLevel Panel also made a number of specific recommendations to enhance
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 21
operational capacity. It recognised at the same time that a growing number of
actors would be required to deliver this increasingly ambitious mandate. This
gave rise to its recommendation to establish a ‘Peacebuilding Commission’, which
would bring to the same table Security Council members, donor nations, troop
contributing countries, the Bretton Woods Institutions and the UN system to
identify the strategies and resources required to achieve a self-sustainable peace in
countries emerging from war.
In his 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, the Secretary-General embraced the
vast majority of the High-Level Panel’s recommendations and called for a
‘strengthening of tools to deliver the military and civilian support needed to
prevent and end wars as well as to build a sustainable peace’ (Secretary-General
of the UN 2005). Although the report proposed the creation of a Peacebuilding
Commission to bridge the ‘gaping hole’ in the UN’s institutional machinery, it
paid relatively little attention to the doctrinal foundations of modern UN peace
operations and the extent to which they had gradually been used by the Security
Council to fill parts of this peacebuilding void.
From the issuance of the Agenda for Peace in 1992 to In Larger Freedom in 2005,
UN secretaries-general have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to
advance the debate on doctrine for UN peacekeeping. Their proposals, even
though not constituting a comprehensive doctrine for peacekeeping, in toto, have
decidedly influenced the mandate and means most recently assigned to the latest
generation of peacekeeping operations.
The operations established or expanded in the past five years, in such places
as Sierra Leone, the DRC, Liberia, Burundi, Haiti and Timor-Leste, have been
‘integrated’ and have been assigned mandates that go well beyond the
‘traditional’ military functions of cease-fire monitoring and observation, securing
lines of communication and freedom of movement and providing a secure
environment for elections to take place. They are charged with protection of
civilians under imminent threat of physical violence and have, in most cases, been
provided with rules of engagement that allow for combat operations to be
conducted against potential ‘spoilers’. They have been assigned an increasingly
broad range of civilian, post-conflict peacebuilding tasks such as support to the reestablishment of rule of law and security structures; the extension of state
authority and the rehabilitation of local administration; the promotion of human
rights; gender mainstreaming; the protection of children associated with armed
conflict; and support to the provision of humanitarian assistance.
The application of this new, de facto doctrine, representing an amalgamation
of lessons learned over the previous decade, has produced a measure of stability
that Liberia has not known for years and has enabled Africa’s first
democratically elected female president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, to peacefully
assume office. It has enabled the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC) to keep
major urban centres in the east from being overrun by armed militias and to
assist the country to hold its first democratic elections in decades. Likewise, it
has helped Haiti to be in a position to form a government that now enjoys
internal and external legitimacy, and enable most of the country, with the
exception of the capital itself, to enjoy relative calm. It has allowed peacekeeping
operations in Sierra Leone and Burundi to come to a close and give way to
smaller civilian follow-on presences.
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22 Salman Ahmed et al
Conceptual challenges and contradictions that remain
The very positive developments noted above deserve to be taken into account
when developing a doctrine for the future. Notwithstanding this, it would be
premature to base a comprehensive doctrine for future operations entirely on
their mandates. It remains to be seen if any of the aforementioned countries
have attained a self-sustaining peace. Any number of issues, if not more fully
addressed, could revive the grievances that contributed to the violence in the first
place. These issues include poor relations with neighbouring countries; lack
of functioning administrative, rule of law and security structures operating
throughout the territory, consistent with international humanitarian law and
human rights standards; insufficient checks and balances on the executive branch;
lack of national commitment to the resolution of outstanding national reconciliation and transitional justice proceses; inadequate systems for revenue
collection, fiscal accountability, and management of natural resources; stalled land
reform; a long list of pending legal, economic and other reforms required to create
a more conducive environment for investment and growth; and still rampant
unemployment in general, particularly among disenfranchised youth who might
easily be mobilised to violence.
These tasks should not be expected to be completed in a matter of a few years.
The UN system, the Bretton Woods institutions and regional organisations
collectively have yet to develop expertise in all areas, with a clear division of labour.
Even if and when they do, it would be unrealistic to expect all of these challenges
to be addressed within a war-torn society in less than a decade or two. Yet, surely,
it is not reasonable to expect Member States to continue to contribute troops
and funding for large peace operations over the course of decades. In any event,
it is hardly likely that host governments and populations will or should consent
to operations on their soil for an indefinite period into the future. Once a
democratically elected government has been installed (if not earlier), it will
invariably and understandably expect to exercise its sovereign rights and
responsibilities immediately. This will include calling for intrusive foreign
presences to hasten their pace of departure.
So, it is clear that one to two years is probably far too short a time to
responsibly deploy and then subsequently wind down an operation; on the other
hand, one to two decades is by no means a viable option either. Beyond that, an
acceptable time-frame to complete a realistic set of benchmarks to make a peace
process self-sustaining has yet to be credibly identified.
The case of Timor-Leste illustrates that such a set of benchmarks remains
illusive. Until recently, Timor-Leste was considered one of the ‘success stories’
of UN peacekeeping. In 1999, the territory was literally smouldering in ashes
following the departure of Indonesian forces. By May 2002, thanks to intensive
international engagement and actual UN transitional administration of the
territory, a newly independent state at peace with itself and its neighbours, and
with a democratically elected government at the helm, had joined the UN as
its 191st Member State. Peacekeepers departed, leaving behind a much smaller
follow-on presence. Sadly, in June 2006, political conflict erupted between
competing Timorese factions within the government and tore apart the country’s
fledgling security institutions. The government nearly collapsed as a result,
threatening to unravel hard-won progress by the Timorese over the preceding
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 23
seven years. The country came dangerously close to entering into civil conflict,
prompting the injection of Australian, Portuguese, Malaysian and New Zealand
forces to stabilise the situation, and high-level political mediation by the UN to
help the Timorese pull bank from the brink. By the end of August, rather than
bringing the UN’s peace and security presence to a complete close, as all had
hoped, the Security Council instead found itself having to authorise the
deployment of a new peacekeeping mission in Timor-Leste.4
One theory to explain Timor-Leste’s near relapse to conflict is that the peace
operation was simply wound down too early. The same argument is made with
respect to Haiti, which saw the return of UN peacekeepers a decade after they had
‘successfully’ departed in the mid-1990s. While that may very well be the case, a
dispassionate analysis of alternative explanations is warranted. For example,
some contend that the tasks and time-frames allotted to these operations were
indeed sufficient, but inadequate performance accounted for incomplete progress.
Others could argue that the mission staff performed outstandingly, but they were
not given adequate resources to do the job. Moreover, they could claim that UN
agencies, regional organisations, neighbouring countries, bilateral donors, nongovernmental organisations and Security Council members all failed to do their
part. This line of argumentation could also be totally off the mark because it
attributes far too great a sense of agency to international actors. Surely the will
and attitudes of the leaders and populations of the conflict-afflicted countries
themselves are a decisive factor.
Of course, a combination of all the above naturally comes into play and
each situation will be different. On this, most would agree in the abstract. Yet,
depending on whom you ask today, you are likely to get different answers to the
questions begged by setbacks in Timor-Leste or Haiti, amongst other cases. The
maxim of ‘where you sit dictates where you stand’ certainly applies. Members of
the Security Council, key troop or financial contributors, mission personnel on the
front lines, staff at UN headquarters or the very beneficiaries of these operations
whose future lives depend on them each view past successes and failures through
their own distinct lenses.
Until the reasons for the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of the past are more widely
debated and understood among all key stakeholders in UN peacekeeping, it
would be premature to transform the mandates of the newest operations into a
doctrine for the future. Furthermore, it has to be understood that few cases
can be considered unqualified successes or failures. On one end of the spectrum,
there are cases such as Namibia, El Salvador, Eastern Slavonia (Croatia) and
Mozambique, which have been enjoying stability and development for over a
decade since UN peacekeepers departed. On the other end of the spectrum are the
tragedies encountered in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia where the deployment of
UN peacekeepers proved wholly unsuited to the type of international response
required to halt widespread unrest, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The vast
majority of cases, however, do not fall on either extreme end of the spectrum, but
somewhere in between: a fragile peace continues to hold thanks in good part to
4
In its Resolution 1704 of 25 August 2006, the Security Council authorised the
establishment of the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT),
comprising a civilian component, a small military liaison capacity and over 1,600 UN
civilian police.
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24 Salman Ahmed et al
the presence of UN peace operations and their partners, but the prospects of a
return to conflict remain reasonably high were they to depart.
Expectations also have to be calibrated according to the degree of difficulty
these various cases present. Of course, there is no such thing as an ‘easy’ case, but
experience would suggest that situations characterised by competition over
control of the state are likely to be ‘easier’ than those where the unitary nature of
the state itself is in question, as in Georgia or Sudan. Similarly, regional influences
are a key factor in determining the likelihood of a peace process’s success.
Afghanistan, therefore, must be assumed to have manifold more challenges to
confront than Haiti, for example. Equally, a country with a population of 60
million and rich in natural resources, such as the DRC, is probably going to have
to contend with a very different set of challenges than one that is significantly less
populous and prosperous, such as Burundi. Moreover, a country that once
enjoyed decades of stability and prosperity, such as Côte d’Ivoire, or has highly
developed central state capacities, such as Sudan, will have very different
expectations of the role to be played by a UN peace operation from a country that
has only recently come into being, such as Timor-Leste.
It is simply unreasonable to expect that the same strategy and level of
resources, if applied indiscriminately, will have the same effect. The UN could
choose to pursue the same general approach in all instances—namely to help the
state exercise its sovereignty more effectively, particularly in terms of being able to
cope with conflict without it having to be expressed through violence—but must
then accept that the resources or time required to achieve that result will vary
considerably from place to place. Indeed, ‘no size fits all’ (Ahmed 2005).
Political constraints to overcome
The conceptual challenges highlighted in the previous section are joined by a
series of politically divisive issues that must be reconciled before arriving at a
doctrine that enjoys broad membership support while still providing practical and
relevant guidance to personnel on the ground. Five issues, in particular, are worth
highlighting.
First, fault lines persist within the membership on the degree to which the
UN’s most intrusive tool—peace operations—can and should be used as a
vehicle of the Security Council to effect political change and provide the
environment for economic and social change within its Member States in the
interests of international peace and security. On the one hand, it is self-evident
that a certain degree of change must be assisted by outsiders because the status
quo ante bellum led to war. It is hard to see how the peacekeeping investment will
yield the desired results without having a reasonably transformative agenda. On
the other hand, the depth of antipathy to foreign-imposed solutions, especially
in those parts of the developing world still struggling with the legacy of past
colonial rule, cannot be overstated. Efforts designed to help establish a ‘capable
state’ can easily be interpreted or portrayed as intended to create a ‘client state’
or imposing a culturally inappropriate model of statehood as the UN discovered
in Timor-Leste. There, the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor
(UNTAET) came under heavy criticism from the Timorese political elite for
failing to give them a greater say in the running of that territory’s affairs. How
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 25
does one strike the right balance between making a decisive impact without
becoming unwelcome, being asked to leave or, worse, being driven out?
Second, while the easiest way to avoid charges of a neo-colonialist agenda is to
support and be seen to be supporting a nationally driven and locally owned
agenda in an impartial manner, this is far easier said than done. Ideally, a national
peacebuilding agenda and the assistance required from the UN and broader
international community in its implementation would be spelled out clearly in the
peace agreements giving rise to the peace operation’s establishment in the first
place. However, not all interventions are initiated on the basis of comprehensive
peace agreements that specifically address all the underlying causes of the conflict
(if the causes are even well understood).5 Nor do the leaders who enter into the
agreements necessarily represent the interests and aspirations of the population
as a whole. The fact that these leaders are almost always men further raises the
question whether the distinct perspectives and concerns of the over 50 per cent
female population are ever adequately addressed.
How does a UN peace operation promote national ownership in a meaningful
way without undermining its ability to demonstrate change for the better in a
reasonable time frame? When different political and factional leaders and groups
and/or the general population have differing agendas, how does one determine
whose agenda to fall in behind? Should the quest for consensus be allowed to
confer veto power on political actors whose positions might be primarily
motivated by a thirst for personal power or enrichment, rather than representing
the will of the populations whom they claim to lead?
Answers to these questions in the abstract will not necessarily hold in practice
when the interests and associations of Member States in specific situations
diverge. This explains why one of the most important yet challenging roles to be
played by UN peace operations in post-conflict settings is in helping to facilitate a
genuine national and international consensus around a common agenda for peace
and development.
Third, views diverge among Security Council members, troop contributors
and host countries on the virtues and limits of the use of force by peacekeepers
to counter threats to a fragile peace process. There is little dispute that UN
peacekeeping operations are not the right instrument to forcefully invade a
territory against the will and consent of the recognised authorities or major parties
to the conflict. Such enforcement action, as authorised by the Security Council, is
far more appropriately handled by those alliances and ad hoc coalitions designed
to wage war. However, the distinction between war-fighting and ‘robust’
peacekeeping is not always so clear-cut and a doctrine governing the latter has yet
to be fully articulated.
Virtually all Member States agree that peacekeepers must be mandated and
equipped to prevent armed criminal gangs from endangering their lives, bringing
down a peace process or terrorising civilian populations. But, with the potential
for ‘collateral damage’ running very high, is the use of military firepower the best
5
The recently established Mediation Support Unit in the Department of Political Affairs
has been making impressive headway in assembling an online database of peace
agreements and the lessons learned about their strengths and weaknesses during
implementation. This Unit’s work could significantly contribute to the development of
doctrine for UN peace operations.
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26 Salman Ahmed et al
way to counter armed gangs when deployed in urban centres? This is a dilemma
that the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is still struggling to come
to terms with. How does one differentiate between criminal gangs and armed
militias with a political agenda and a political constituency, a problem that
MONUC has faced in seeking to deal with the uncontrolled armed groups that
continue to prey on the local population in the Eastern part of the DRC? When
does reaching political accommodation with them rather than trying to defeat
them through forceful means make for wise policy, or, conversely, when does
it drift into weakness and appeasement? These doctrinal dilemmas are not unique
to UN peacekeeping, but confront national armies and regional organisations
as well.
Conceptual differences on the use of force are compounded by political
realities. Over 100 countries contribute troops to UN peacekeeping operations.
Their national military doctrines vary considerably. They have diverse fighting
capabilities, battle experience, domestic civil –military relations, and historical
and cultural ties to the people of the host country. Accordingly, their respective
attitudes towards incurring or inflicting casualties vary and fluctuate over time
and across missions.
Fourth, Member States, particularly those within the Security Council, could
be reluctant to have their freedom of action restricted by the articulation of hard
and fast rules making clear where it does not make sense to deploy a UN peace
operation, if the consequence could be no international response at all. At present,
there is no organisation other than the UN that has the wide-ranging mandate
and/or capacity to concurrently mount several different multidisciplinary and
genuinely multinational peace operations in any part of world. By the same token,
major political, personnel and financial contributors to peace processes could be
reluctant to sign up to rigid preconditions to be met before any UN peace
operation is drawn down or terminated; their ability to sustain domestic support
for multi-year investments in any particular operation can vary considerably,
depending on the degree to which their national interests are at stake.
And fifth, notwithstanding the previous point, the UN cannot go everywhere
and do everything. In fact, it remains to be seen that the organisation can take on
any additional new operations beyond what is currently on its plate or being
planned, without adverse consequences somewhere. High-level political attention in relevant capitals, which is so crucial to overcoming impasse in peace
processes, is difficult to marshal on so many different fronts simultaneously.
The supply of qualified and well-trained troops, police and civilian specialists is
finite. As the numbers of personnel grow it becomes all the more difficult to
assure quality and discipline, as the appearance of an unacceptably large number
of allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by peacekeepers in the
DRC and elsewhere revealed. It is also not an incidental point that DPKO consists
of a total of approximately 700 civilian, military and police personnel, all ranks
included, with which it supports 100,000 personnel, leads 18 operations in four
continents and logistically supports an additional 13 other UN field offices led
by the Department of Political Affairs. It should be self-evident that it can only
do so much. Views diverge within the membership on whether a limit should be
placed on the totality of UN peacekeeping activity or if a massive investment
should be made to equip and strengthen DPKO to take on an even greater
case-load.
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Shaping the future of UN peace operations 27
Many different interests would be served if the net level of peacekeeping
activity could be reduced gradually over the next few years. Unfortunately,
momentum is heading in the other direction with the expectations of expanded
deployments to Sudan (Darfur), Lebanon and Timor-Leste.
It would be ideal to be able to at least offset these increases by reductions
elsewhere. But can the UN afford to apply artificial bases to the significant
downsizing or withdrawal of other operations, when a precipitous decline in
presence risks unravelling hard-won but not yet self-sustaining progress?
Conclusion
The list of questions still to be answered is, indeed, quite long. The development of
a comprehensive doctrine for UN peace operations will take time and require the
full engagement and support of the UN membership and DPKO’s key partners
within and outside the UN system. In particular, DPKO will be looking to the
newly established Peacebuilding Commission and Peacebuilding Support Office
to help clarify the UN’s broader objectives in post-conflict settings. One of the
main challenges for the Peacebuilding Commission will be to find ways of
drawing down the current case-load of UN peace operations without
precipitating a relapse to conflict. If it were able to do so in even just one or two
cases initially, it would make a very important contribution. This objective could
be achieved by mobilising appropriate resources and attention required to hasten
progress in existing missions, by obviating the need for return to places from
which peacekeepers have recently withdrawn or by bringing clarity to the
doctrine that should guide long-term UN peacebuilding efforts within and
outside peacekeeping contexts.
Collectively, the UN system has a rich body of experience upon which to
draw in trying to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of
conflict and the remedies to prevent its resumption. The record of the past five
years clearly indicates that the UN has been learning from its mistakes and is,
at the very least, in a position to determine what does not work. These lessons
must at last be learnt by wiring them back into the doctrine that underpins
decision-making in Member State capitals, at UN headquarters and in the
field. And then sufficient investment must be made in keeping these lessons
updated.
Whether or not this opportunity is squandered will, to a large extent, depend
on the ability of all concerned to confront critically and dispassionately the many
conceptual challenges that remain with openness towards informed scholarship
on the subject. It will also require the organisation’s membership to reach a
degree of consensus on the complex and often divisive issues outlined in this
article. These issues, in turn, reflect the underlying tension between the
principles upon which the current international system is founded and the
emerging norms and standards that pose a challenge to existing notions of
international order.
Although the development of a doctrine for UN peace operations cannot be
divorced from the wider questions shaping the debate on the future of the
international system, it need not be held hostage to it either. The future of war-torn
societies and the credibility of the UN as a whole are at stake. The majority of the
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28 Salman Ahmed et al
UN’s members have a common interest in the improved effectiveness of the peace
operations to which many of them contribute personnel and financial resources.
There is ample incentive for all concerned, therefore, to rise to the challenge of
developing a new doctrine that reflects a shared vision for the future of modernday peace operations.
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