Multinational peace operations have become an integral part of the workings of international society to the extent that they are now one of the major regulating institutions of international relations.Footnote 1 The media frequently remind us that, in international relations, certain military and civilian actors endeavour to go to the aid of people in distress, such as in Haiti, or are unable to protect the civilian population as, for example, in Syria or in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).Footnote 2 Those members of the armed forces and those civilians are part of multinational peacekeeping operations.Footnote 3 Between 1988 and December 2012, the United Nations (UN) set up fifty-four operations to restore or maintain peace. If account is taken of the fact that in the first forty years of its existence it set up only fifteen such operations, the interest of the academic world and of the general public becomes easy to understand.Footnote 4 On the other hand, media interest in peacekeeping has not been constant.
Attention should nevertheless be drawn to the fact that while such multinational operations are not recent – there were a large number of interposition operations between the two World Wars – they only started to be formalised at the time of the UN operation in Suez in 1956.Footnote 5 It was not until the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was set up between Egypt and Israel in November 1956 that those multinational peace operations became referred to as ‘peacekeeping operations’ (PKOs). As the tasks carried out by the peacekeepers have evolved, the tendency has been to favour the broader term ‘peace operations’ over ‘peacekeeping operations’.Footnote 6 Peacekeeping has now become just one of the aspects of multinational peace operations. The latter can now entail humanitarian assistance, election supervision, the repatriation of refugees, the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, the restoration of the state's ability to maintain security out of respect for the rule of law and human rights, or support for the founding of legitimate and effective governance institutions.Footnote 7 For the sake of simplicity, however, the generic term ‘peacekeeping operations’ will be used in this article to mean all multinational peace operations. Lastly, the increase in the number of operations and in their complexity since the late 1980s has led to the involvement of a considerable number of entities other than the UN and the Blue Helmets. Civilian staff of the UN and of some of its specialised agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and regional organisations have now become fully fledged actors of peacekeeping.Footnote 8
The first thing that is noticeable about UN peacekeeping (and multinational peace operations in general) is the absence of a clear definition from the UN of the concept of peacekeeping.Footnote 9 It was not until the 1992 Agenda for Peace that the UN defined its concept of peacekeeping more precisely.Footnote 10 That belated effort to define its terms can be explained by the improvised nature of the creation of the first peacekeeping operations and by the lack of any reference to peacekeeping in the Charter of the United Nations. While the UN was established in 1945 in order to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’,Footnote 11 its Charter was based on the principle of collective security and on cooperation between the permanent members of the Security Council as a means of avoiding armed conflict. However, the tensions of the Cold War from 1947 onwards were to render inoperable a large part of Chapter VII of the Charter, which deals with actions in the event of threats to peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression. That explains why the UN fell back on less ambitious measurements than collective security, which was to be replaced by peacekeeping operations.Footnote 12 The blocking of the mechanisms proposed in Chapter VII of the Charter, caused by the tensions of the Cold War, resulted in successive Secretaries-General finding innovative solutions to enable the UN to play a role in international security.Footnote 13
Since the first formal interposition mission in Suez in 1956, peacekeeping has been used on many occasions to regulate and contain conflicts. Adopting the terminology of realistic theory in international relations, peacekeeping has made it possible to replace minimally the self-help system of international politics through the provision of selfless and impartial external assistance for the parties to the conflict.Footnote 14 On the basis of that observation, a two-tier definition of UN PKOs can be sketched out at the strategic and tactical levels. At the strategic level, peacekeeping aims first and foremost to regulate and stabilise international society.Footnote 15 To that end, PKOs have been used to maintain or restore the sovereignty of states facing external threats or internal disintegration.Footnote 16 At the tactical level, peacekeeping consists of operations that are set up by the UN, by states, by groups of states (coalitions of the willing) or by regional or sub-regional organisations (alone or in cooperation with the UN) and that are based on the deployment of uniformed staff (soldiers and/or police officers), usually with the consent of the parties concerned, with the aim of achieving impartial interposition between the latter in order to prevent, contain, mitigate or put an end to conflicts and possibly to restore peace between the parties. The parties’ consent has been one of the three fundamental principles of traditional peacekeeping (observation and interposition) since the report of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld on the establishment and functioning of UNEF. He mostly refers to the consent of the ‘states parties’, which is not without problems in operations which involve non-state groups that may not agree to the presence of military peacekeepers. The operations in the Congo (ONUC) or in Lebanon (UNIFIL) during the Cold War showed that in such cases, if some non-state groups withdraw their consent to the UN presence, the safety of the Blue Helmets may be at risk.Footnote 17 Since 1956, the two other fundamental principles of peacekeeping have been impartiality and the non-use of force except in self-defence.Footnote 18 We will see that there are major tensions between the strategic and tactical levels and that this tends to lead to inconsistencies in setting up and carrying out PKOs.Footnote 19
This article sets out to present the changes that have occurred in multinational peace operations by focusing particularly on UN PKOs.Footnote 20 While the latter have evolved to the point of becoming an unavoidable institution of international society,Footnote 21 they have remained influenced by the principles drawn up by Secretary-General Hammarskjöld when UNEF was created in November 1956.Footnote 22 Peacekeeping has therefore continued without too many policy changes since 1956 as a result of path dependence while deploying operations that have become increasingly complex.Footnote 23 This explains why, despite the evident limitations in terms of conflict resolution and the existence of institutional alternatives,Footnote 24 UN peacekeeping has remained the preferred tool for the management of international order since the 1950s.Footnote 25 This article nevertheless shows that, starting with the 1960s operations (Congo, Western New Guinea and Cyprus), what could be referred to as the Hammarskjöld paradigm of PKOs has been called into question in the field but not in terms of policy.Footnote 26 Following a return to the basic principles of traditional peacekeeping between 1965 and 1988, the UN – in response to a request made by the members of the Security Council – again began carrying out ambitious operations from 1989 onwards.Footnote 27
In order to show how PKOs have evolved, this article is divided into three parts. The first deals with the years of the Cold War and the tensions between, on the one hand, the basic principles respectful of the traditional peacekeeping devised by Dag Hammarskjöld in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, and on the other, the operational and tactical requirements of certain missions such as the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) between 1960 and 1964. The second part considers the PKOs implemented by the UN and other actors in order to manage the numerous crises of the post-bipolar period. The third and final part presents the present major challenges faced by the UN in the field of peacekeeping.
Peacekeeping during the Cold War: birth and institutionalisation of an improvised practice
UN peacekeeping is an improvisation born of the Cold War and decolonisation. Indeed, it was first and foremost the blocking of the Security Council by the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1947 onwards that prevented the UN from establishing the system of collective security provided for in its Charter. That explains why the UN fell back on less ambitious methods of collective intervention in the late 1940s.Footnote 28 The other factor that prompted the UN to establish measures intended to keep the peace was decolonisation. The aim of the first two official missions by the UN, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) in Palestine and the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, was indeed to respond to the crises following the withdrawal of the British colonial power from Palestine and India. The Suez Crisis of 1956 gave rise to the first official peacekeeping operation.Footnote 29
In 1983, in order to identify the functional growth, political maturing and institutionalisation of UN peacekeeping during the Cold War, Canadian politologist Henry Wiseman divided its development process into four stages: the nascent period between 1946 and 1956; the assertive period from 1956 to 1967; the dormant period from 1967 to 1973; and the resurgent period between 1973 and 1978.Footnote 30 Wiseman could not foresee the rapid increase in the number of operations from the late 1980s onwards, but his four-stage model nonetheless shows that the evolution of multinational operations during the Cold War did not follow a continuous linear pattern. It thus calls into question the relevance of a typology of PKOs in terms of ‘generations’.Footnote 31 That kind of typology implies that the evolution of peacekeeping took place sequentially and progressively;Footnote 32 this was, however, not the case, as Wiseman points out.
Moreover, practice in the field in the 1960s sometimes looked forward to the multifunctional operations that were to become standard from the late 1980s onwards. Several of those missions were carried out in the context of civil war but still respected the three basic principles of traditional peacekeeping – with the exception of ONUC in the Congo, which used force in order to prevent the secession of the province of Katanga. The most representative example of those multifunctional operations during the Cold War is the intervention of the UN in Western New Guinea in 1962–1963, which comprised two operations: the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA), which was mandated to replace the Dutch administration, to govern the territory, to maintain public order, to protect the rights of the people living there and to ensure that public services were provided; and the United Nations Security Force (UNSF), which was mandated not only to protect the civilian staff of UNTEA and to maintain public order but also to supervise the setting up of a police force.Footnote 33
Macroscopic factors, such as the clash between the United States and the Soviet Union or decolonisation, are just one of the facets that enable the development of that improvised practice to be traced. In order to grasp fully how the UN's multinational operations came into being and evolved, it is necessary to consider the role played by certain individual actors that provided evidence of boldness and creativity in a restrictive international political context. More specifically, it is important to analyse the role of the UN Secretaries-General, and particularly that of Dag Hammarskjöld.Footnote 34 Hammarskjöld was the first UN Secretary-General to establish a peacekeeping operation based on the deployment of an interposition force. That first operation took place from November 1956 onwards, following the attack on Egypt by British, French and Israeli forces. Hammarskjöld was able to take advantage of the opening that was presented to him when the UN General Assembly – because the Security Council was paralysed by the British and French vetoes – asked him to set up a military force capable of intervening between the warring parties. The General Assembly's request that the Secretary-General present a proposal for an emergency force represented a very substantial delegation of powers, and Hammarskjöld made the most of it. He quickly proposed using certain members of UNTSO to command the new force, which, moreover, was to be composed of soldiers from states that were non-permanent members of the Security Council. That informal principle was to last throughout the Cold War with only two exceptions: the presence of a British contingent in Cyprus from 1964 and of a French contingent in Lebanon in 1978.
It should be pointed out that several military operations had been discussed in Hammarskjöld's circles before deciding on the more lightly armed interposition force. It should also be noted that the Secretary-General was initially very sceptical about the feasibility of an operation of that kind because he could not see where the troops were to come from or how or where they could be deployed in the field. It was the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, Lester Pearson, who managed to convince Hammarskjöld and Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the UN, of the feasibility of that option.Footnote 35 And it was the General Assembly which, by accepting Hammarskjöld's recommendations and integrating them into Resolution 1000 of 5 November 1956, approved the establishment of UNEF, which was to be the model for establishing the basic principles of peacekeeping as we know it today.Footnote 36
By establishing an interposition force within a matter of days and with the help of only three or four people, Hammarskjöld succeeded in creating an activity that was to experience major developments, as UNEF was only the first in a long series of PKOs. Moreover, in a report on UNEF dated 9 October 1958, the Secretary-General laid the foundations – the principles – for future UN missions, while at the same time drawing attention to the gaps that the Secretariat would have to overcome in order to manage PKOs effectively.Footnote 37 The three principles – or the ‘holy trinity’Footnote 38 – on which traditional peacekeeping policy is founded are the consent of the member state party to the conflict,Footnote 39 impartialityFootnote 40 and the non-use of force except in self-defence.Footnote 41 Those principles constituted the policy base of UNEF and, with the exception of ONUC in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, which served to impose a political solution by using force coercively in order to stop the secession of Katanga, peacekeeping operations during the Cold War all complied with the principles established by that first multinational interposition operation.
Following the success of UNEF in Egypt, the UN organised four short-term operations: the United Nations Observation Group in Lebanon from June to December 1958; the UNSF/UNTEA from October 1962 to April 1963; the United Nations Yemen Observation Mission from July 1963 to September 1964; and ONUC from July 1960 to June 1964.
Hammarskjöld was aware of the risks that would be incurred by the UN if it were to find itself involved in managing the crisis in the Congo, which was a typical early 1960s decolonisation crisis. He was also aware of the numerous dangers inherent in the situation in that central African country. After having weighed the pros and cons, and aware of the difficulties that lay ahead, the Secretary-General proceeded to set up ONUC. Despite the complexity of the situation, he had to establish ONUC with the help of just one permanent special peacekeeping adviser and without any permanent team to help him in its management of the PKOs. When ONUC was created, in the summer of 1960, the Secretariat still had no management capacities.Footnote 42 Another problem was that the Congo had none of the advantages of the geopolitical environment of UNEF. The latter was operating in the Sinai, a fairly isolated, virtually uninhabited area, and its aim was to separate the forces of two countries at war. ONUC, however, had to try to restore peace to a country that was the size of a subcontinent, was torn by inter-ethnic conflicts and was arousing the interest of foreign powers.
One of the positive points was that the UN intervened at the request of the new Congolese government. Hammarskjöld's objective was to help the new authorities to make the post-colonial transition. As the situation had degenerated into rioting, mutiny and a declaration of independence by the wealthy province of Katanga,Footnote 43 the ONUC forces were gradually drawn into a spirale infernale that led to the use of force against the Katanga secessionists from February 1961 onwards.Footnote 44 After Hammarskjöld's death in an aircraft accident in September 1961,Footnote 45 ONUC's mandate was revised to enable the UN troops to use mass force against the Katanga secessionists and the European mercenaries supporting them.Footnote 46 After four difficult years, the ONUC forces were able to withdraw from the Congo with mixed results since, although the operation enabled the Congo to remain united by stabilising the internal situation, the episodic crises affecting the country between 1965 and 1997 and the return of the Blue Helmets to the DRC in 1999 show that the impact of the operation had only scratched the surface.Footnote 47
On the political and strategic level, ONUC made it possible to update one of the paradoxes of peacekeeping operations. On the one hand, the member states asked the UN to intervene in order to avoid the involvement of the major powers in the armed conflicts or to prevent those conflicts from spreading throughout the region. On the other, they were reluctant to delegate too much authority to the UN for fear of seeing it become genuinely influential in international relations. With ONUC, some major powers disapproved of the UN becoming too independent because that might have had a negative impact on their sovereignty.Footnote 48 The use of force was costly for the UN and for the Congolese people, and the so-called risks to the sovereignty of the states caused by heavily armed UN troops had the effect of reducing peacekeeping practice to far less ambitious interposition or observation missions until the late 1980s, when the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) was set up for the transition period in Namibia.
The intervention in the Congo therefore had no lasting impact on peacekeeping ‘policy’ but, in terms of counter-examples that were not to be imitated, it did affect operational peacekeeping practice during the Cold War and PKO funding. It was the financial problems created by ONUC that forced the UN to review its methods of funding its operations.Footnote 49 ONUC did not favour the development of a stronger form of peacekeeping (quite the opposite) or prompt the UN to intervene in internal state affairs.Footnote 50 After the Congo, the UN deployed its soldiers in Cyprus in March 1964 and sent a few observers to the Dominican Republic, as well as India and Pakistan in 1965, before ending its operations. It took another war between Israel and its neighbours before the UN launched the peacekeeping machinery again with the establishment of the second United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF II) from 1973 to 1979 between Egypt and Israel, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force from 1974 on the Golan Heights, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) from 1978. Those missions all adhered to the Hammarskjöld peacekeeping paradigm as they fully upheld the three basic principles of his approach (consent of the state party, impartiality and the non-usage of force for purposes other than self-defence).Footnote 51
Multinational operations after the Cold War: between expansion and withdrawal
The late 1980s were a special moment for the UN and its military peacekeepers. First, two new UN observation missions were set up in 1988: the United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan in May and the United Nations Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) in August. Then, on 29 September 1988, all Blue Helmets who had served between 1948 and December 1988 were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize collectively in Oslo. Finally, in his speech at the 43rd Session of the UN General Assembly on 7 December 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev announced a reduction in the size of the Soviet armed forces and the withdrawal of several military units deployed in Eastern Europe. He also expressed the wish to see the UN playing a more important role in the international regulation of armed conflicts. One year later, the Berlin Wall had fallen.
That series of events gave rise to euphoria with regard to the possibilities of the UN. In 1989, three new missions were organised: the United Nations Angola Verification Mission I in January, the United Nations Transition Assistance Group to cover the transition period in Namibia (UNTAG) in April and the United Nations Observer Group in Central America in November. The operation in Namibia triggered new UN multifunctional missions,Footnote 52 which increased in number from 1991 onwards and became peacebuilding operations. For the first time since the Congo, the UN took up a mission with a complex political mandate, and it met with considerable success. The mission in Namibia is, moreover, considered one of the rare successes of UN operations or as the first such success.Footnote 53
That success fostered the impression that the UN had the necessary capacities to fulfil the complex missions entrusted to it by the Security Council. Following a lull in 1990, five new missions were created in 1991, four in 1992 and six in 1993. In a period of five years, between 1988 and the end of 1993, the UN mounted twenty peacekeeping operations, whereas it had only set up thirteen between 1948 and 1988. Some of those operations, such as the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia and the United Nations Operations in Somalia (UNOSOM I and II), were to have unequalled scope (even by comparison with ONUC). Those missions extended from simple interposition (as in the case of UNIIMOG in 1988) to enforcement operations mandated by the UN Security Council in Resolutions 770 (1992) for the former Yugoslavia and 794 (1992) for Somalia. Those two resolutions authorised UN troops, in support of humanitarian organisations, to use ‘all measures necessary’ to deliver humanitarian aid to the people.Footnote 54 The multifunctional operations of the 2000s, such as those in Liberia, the DRC, Sierra Leone and Timor, were to see a growth in disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration operationsFootnote 55 and security sector reform operations targeting, for example, the police and the army.Footnote 56
In the wake of the success of the intervention by the international coalition against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the US president George H. W. Bush proclaimed the dawning of a new world order.Footnote 57 That concept involved three major principles: (1) the refusal to tolerate aggressive use of military force; (2) the promotion of collective security; and (3) cooperation between the major powers of international society.Footnote 58 What lay behind that US vision of a new world order was the UN, invigorated by the end of the Cold War. This optimism with regard to the UN was to lead to the meeting at the Security Council summit on 31 January 1992, when the members of the Security Council asked the newly appointed Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, to prepare a document making it possible to reinforce the peacekeeping capacities of the UN.Footnote 59 That document, An Agenda for Peace, was published on 17 June 1992.
At the conceptual level, two passages in the Agenda for Peace broke with the ‘traditional’ concept of peacekeeping as developed by Dag Hammarskjöld. There is first of all the famous ‘hitherto’ concerning the consent of the parties to the deployment of the mission: ‘Peace-keeping is the deployment of a United Nations presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned.’Footnote 60 The Agenda for Peace seemed to recognise implicitly that it was now going to be possible to deploy some forces without the consent of the host state. That definition of peacekeeping therefore makes it possible to question the most important principle governing its practice: respect for the sovereignty of states. The second passage from the Agenda for Peace which presented an innovation compared to ‘traditional’ peacekeeping is found in paragraphs 43 and 44. The first of those paragraphs held that use of force by the UN was essential to the organisation's credibility when peaceful means of settlement had failed.Footnote 61 That proposal also undermined one of the three fundamental principles of peacekeeping: the non-use of force except in self-defence. Parallel to that willingness to make more frequent use of force, Boutros-Ghali, in paragraph 44, wished to see the establishment of peace enforcement units capable of imposing by force the decisions of the Security Council when the tasks intended to restore or maintain a ceasefire exceeded the capacities of the UN peacekeeping forces.Footnote 62
In his Supplement to An Agenda for Peace published in January 1995, the Secretary-General adopted a very different tone and underscored the particular difficulties for peacekeeping practice posed by internal conflicts and the new tasks that that type of conflict had imposed on the Blue Helmets. In contrast to his position in the first version of An Agenda for Peace, in his Supplement Boutros-Ghali stressed the importance of upholding the three central principles of peacekeeping in order to ensure the success of the missions. The Secretary-General also clearly emphasised the difference between peacekeeping and peace enforcement and insisted on recalling that force was not to be used to speed up the settlement of conflict. As recalled in the Supplement:
Conflicts the United Nations is asked to resolve usually have deep roots and have defied the peacemaking efforts of others. Their resolution requires patient diplomacy and the establishment of a political process that permits, over a period of time, the building of confidence and negotiated solutions to long-standing differences. … It is necessary to resist the temptation to use military power to speed them up.Footnote 63
This turnaround on the part of Boutros Boutros-Ghali is easy to understand. When An Agenda for Peace was written in the spring of 1992, the UN had just mounted its heaviest operations since the early 1960s, in Cambodia and in the former Yugoslavia. The Secretary-General therefore lacked the broader view to evaluate the real possibilities open to the UN in the new geopolitical environment. Nearly three years later, with the publication of the Supplement, Boutros-Ghali took account of the UN's traumatic experiences in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.
That explains the return to the basic principles of PKOs, the extremely subdued enthusiasm and the relative, temporary withdrawal on the part of the UN. From nearly 69,000 uniformed staff members deployed throughout the world in August 1995, UN forces fell to 12,000 in April 1999.Footnote 64 The Supplement to An Agenda for Peace gave the impression that it was sounding the death knell for major multifunctional operations by the UN and was temporarily placing the organisation's operations, for the second time, on standby.
What are the key current and future issues for multinational operations?
The UN's withdrawal from conflict management in the second half of the 1990s was to be short-lived, as on 10 June 1999, the Security Council authorised the Secretary-General to establish an international civilian presence in Kosovo in the form of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, to set up the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) on 22 October, to deploy the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor on 25 October, and to deploy the United Nations Organisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) on 30 November. The year 1999 therefore represents a strong comeback to the international scene by the UN and a new period of resurgence for peacekeeping.Footnote 65 That resurgence by the UN showed, on the one hand, that the institutional alternatives (regional organisations, coalitions, unilateral interventions) did not have the same legitimacy as UN operations,Footnote 66 which explains why the latter were involved alongside regional organisations or states intervening in certain conflicts; and, on the other hand, that peacekeeping had become an unavoidable institution in international relations.Footnote 67
The new period of PKO resurgence from 1999 onwards nonetheless did not prevent the UN from trying to understand and correct the most serious dysfunctions of previous years. To avoid the recurrence of events such as the genocide in Rwanda or the mass slaughter in Srebrenica, Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided on 7 March 2000 to establish a high-level group mandated to undertake an in-depth study of UN peace and security activities. The group, headed by Lakhdar Brahimi, published its report on 21 August 2000.Footnote 68 One of the objectives of the report was to promote better integration of the missions by delegating their control to Special Representatives.
The objective of that integration was to confer greater coherence on multifunctional missions by improving coordination between the different actors working in the field.Footnote 69 Complex peacebuilding operations generally have three pillars: (1) a diplomatic and political pillar; (2) a military pillar (Blue Helmets); and (3) a humanitarian pillar.Footnote 70 However, only the UN is found in each of the three pillars simultaneously through the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (political pillar), peacekeeping soldiers (military pillar) and specialised agencies such as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Programme and the United Nations Development Programme (humanitarian pillar). It is therefore important to improve the coordination of relations between the different UN actors and others, which may be NGOs or regional organisations.
Although the situation has evolved (as seen in some African missions in the 2000s), integration continues to present problems, particularly with regard to institutional peculiarities or bureaucratic rivalries between the agencies deployed in peacebuilding missions.Footnote 71 As most UN agencies and the Secretariat bodies have a strong tradition of autonomy, they are very attached to their prerogatives and their mandates and are opposed to overly strong ‘integration’ under the control of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General. Despite the publication of the Brahimi Report, that factor continues to restrict the coherence of operations by integration. Moreover, some NGOs consider that they should not be assimilated into the UN forces as that could affect their image as neutral and impartial actors, an image which is essential to their freedom of action and movement in the field.Footnote 72
The coherence by integration of the complex multinational peacebuilding missions is not the only important issue that has to be dealt with by the UN. Given the complexity of the tasks carried out in such operations, the soldiers deployed must have been given training that enables them to fulfil their missions appropriately. The second period of resurgence in the history of UN peacekeeping is characterised by a twofold dynamism: the deployment of a record number of uniformed personnel and the long-term disengagement of developed countries from those operations. Thus, developed states, which are still wary of deploying their soldiers in missions that are of no great interest to them, finance the operations without taking part in them directly. That practice is tending to create two types of peacekeeping: one for the ‘rich’, where developed countries do not hesitate to deploy well-trained troops with substantial resources (the Balkans, Afghanistan after 11 September 2001), and one for the poor, where the UN has to be content with deploying troops that have varying degrees of training and are often badly equipped.Footnote 73 A comparison between Afghanistan and the DRC is illuminating. In 2010, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states had sent more than 100,000 well-trained and well-equipped soldiers to Afghanistan, whereas the UN operation in the DRC had difficulty deploying 20,000 soldiers in a territory three times the size of Afghanistan.Footnote 74 One of the UN's challenges is to attract the traditional donor states (Canada, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries) back to PKOs.
The problem of sexual abuse in ‘robust’ peacekeeping operations is another major issue concerning multinational operations in the 2000s, as it is related to the more general problem of the accountability of peacekeeping agencies. The problem was identified back in the early 1990s in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Mozambique and Haiti. Those complex missions prompted the involvement of a very large number of civilian and military personnel, from almost every country in the world. A report published jointly in 2001 by the UNHCR and the NGO Save the Children drew particular attention to the fact that sexual abuse and exploitation were frequent in multinational humanitarian operations and that such abuse was perpetrated both by peacekeepers and by civilian humanitarian workers.Footnote 75
The persistent impunity for sexual abuse committed by members of PKOs is a result, inter alia, of the complexity of their composition and of the UN's lack of authority over its member states. Recent multifunctional operations have included as many as five categories of personnel: Blue Helmets (generally in the majority and deployed in contingents), civilian police officers, civilian personnel, UN volunteers and military observers. The policy documents and the codes of conduct drawn up by the UN in the 2000s apply only to some categories of personnel and not to others.Footnote 76
The main problem for the UN in instituting a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse and exploitation is that it cannot force the states contributing personnel to punish those of its nationals who engage in practices of that kind. Despite the development of a UN policy arsenal intended to put an end to deviant or criminal sexual behaviour, the UN is still dependent on its member states to provide troops. If some major contributors refuse to take more radical measures against individuals responsible for abuses, there is little that the UN can do. This explains why the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation is now one of the key issues on the UN agenda, and why serious efforts seem to have been made to try to put an end to such practices.Footnote 77 It remains to be seen whether the member states will agree to cooperate with the UN on this subject.
The other important issue for the future of multinational peace operations concerns the conditions governing the use of force. Since the establishment of the first multinational interposition force by the UN in Suez in 1956, the use of force by military peacekeepers has been a focus of concern and a source of controversy. The operations in which UN troops have used force beyond self-defence – in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, in Somalia between 1993 and 1995, in Sierra Leone in 2001 and in the DRC from 2005 onwards – have all been traumatic experiences for the UN.Footnote 78 Despite this trauma, the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and in Srebrenica in 1995 had the effect of prompting the new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to adopt a voluntarist stance with regard to humanitarian interventions from 1999 onwards so as to promote the development of a kind of peacekeeping that would use force in order to protect populations at risk rather than for political ends.Footnote 79
At the UN, reactions to the proactive attitude of Kofi Annan were mixed. Many developing countries feared an increase in interference by developed countries in their internal affairs in the name of civilian protection. In August 2000, the panel set up by Kofi Annan and headed by Lakhdar Brahimi published a report in which it was recalled that UN troops must be able to use force to enforce respect for their mandate.Footnote 80 Finally, the Brahimi Report maintained that UN forces should be able to use force to prevent atrocities against civilian populations. While that recommendation in the Brahimi Report enabled a response to be made to the criticisms of the PKOs since the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia, it nonetheless ran up against two major obstacles: the fears of the developing countries referred to above with regard to interference in their internal affairs, and the lack of willingness among most of the troop-contributing countries to risk the lives of their soldiers deployed in UN operations.Footnote 81
More realism would have to be applied with regard to the possibilities for UN operations. The heads of state or governments that deploy soldiers in those multinational operations are primarily influenced by what Max Weber called the ‘ethics of responsibility’ and which concerns the outcomes of their decisions.Footnote 82 Weber contrasted two types of ethics: the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. According to Weber, the mature political decision-maker cannot always rely on his moral preferences. In other words, regardless of his convictions concerning people in danger, his function requires him to take account of the lives of his citizens serving as UN soldiers. This explains the reluctance by states providing soldiers for PKOs to see them using force against actors committing atrocities. Is this a narrow, selfish vision based on the defence of nothing more than national interest? It is difficult to give a categorical answer to that question. One thing is certain: the members of the Security Council – who authorise PKOs – should take account of that international reality before deciding to set up new, very ambitious missions. In some cases, other actors (single states, coalitions of states, regional organisations) are better equipped to deal with the demands of complex multinational operations. Regional organisations and single states or coalitions of states have simpler and more effective command capacities and operational structures than UN multinational forces.
Conclusion
Multinational peacekeeping or peacebuilding operations have evolved impressively since they were first established by the UN in 1956. Their evolution was first institutional, with the establishment of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in 1992 and associated structures for managing operations that set out to respond to the expansion of their functions in the field.Footnote 83 Since starting out as a simple interposition force in Suez in 1956, the UN missions have become veritable multifunctional operations, as was the case in Namibia in 1989–1990, in Cambodia in 1992–1993 and in Haiti from 1993. Nonetheless, those multinational UN missions are not a panacea. They were developed to counter the impossibility of establishing a system of collective security as provided for in Chapter VII of the Charter. UN peace operations in the 2000s are more complex than those of the Cold War period, but they are still marked by the limitations inherent in their creation.
Without the authorisation of the Security Council, the UN cannot impose peace by force. The Secretariat has neither the legitimacy nor the resources to set up PKOs. The Blue Helmets only manage with difficulty to use force to protect people whom they are supposed to protect.Footnote 84 There are many different reasons for this, but suffice it to say that these troops are usually both few in number and poorly armed compared to the soldiers or militias that they face. Moreover, the governments deploying soldiers in such operations are reluctant to allow them to put their lives at risk for the sake of defending the mandate of the mission. This is why, when the mandate of an operation includes an enforcement facet, the UN and its members need to resort to using actors other than the Blue Helmets. Some states, alliances or regional organisations are generally better equipped to use force. From the 1990s onwards, the UN has also demonstrated its capacity to work in cooperation with alliances or regional organisations. A division of labour was established between the UN and NATO in the Balkans and in Afghanistan, and between the African Union and European Union in Africa.
However, despite its shortcomings and its limitations, the UN is still an actor privileged by the international society when peace operations are needed. The example of Mali at the start of 2013 serves as a reminder. That shows that, for the moment, the UN is still the key conflict management organisation in international society. Rather than seeking impossible solutions to its limitations, it would be better to recognise them and come to terms with them. The member states of the UN could thus entrust it with tasks appropriate to it and ask other actors for assistance in cases that exceed its capacities, even if it means deploying Blue Helmets once the situation has stabilised. In that way, the credibility of the UN would cease to be threatened by operations which place it in difficulties.
