Introduction to Peace Enforcement
by Luke Pring
Security and Conflict
Introduction
There is no concrete definition of Peacekeeping as it is not mentioned in the United Nations charter and evolved directly from a deadlock between superpowers in the Security Council. Goulding (1993) defines peacekeeping simply as “a technique which has been developed, mainly by the United Nations, to help control and resolve armed conflicts”. Indeed this technique was adopted as a substitute for collective security in response to stalemate in the Security council. This approach was necessary to prevent the United States and USSR from becoming embroiled in regional conflicts which could lead to direct confrontation or nuclear war. The Cold War put great pressure on the two superpowers especially in the East where they contended for control over regional conflicts making “it difficult for the Security Council to take effective action to resolve them” (1993).
Traditional Peacekeeping and its Evolution
James (1990) traces the origin of the first peacekeeping mission back to the 1920’s and the maintenance of frontiers in the aftermath of the First World War. The United Nations however officially recognises the deployment of unarmed observers to Palestine in June 1948 as the first peacekeeping deployment.. The first armed force was the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) deployed in response to the Suez crisis of 1956. This operation was used not only to mitigate the conflict but to help France and the Britain to save face and climb down from what had been a military success but a political disaster for the old powers. Both these early operations played a key role in successful conflict resolution. In Palestine an Arab-Israeli Armistice was signed and the Suez intervention diffused a potentially explosive situation allowing Britain and France to withdraw without consequence. The technique of peacekeeping was providing a useful tool for mitigating conflict and the demand for peacekeeping services increased in the years following Suez (Goulding 1993).
Peacekeeping developed a number of unique attributes that became the norm for any peace operation expecting to be deployed to a conflict zone.
Peace Enforcement Introduction
In the latter part of the cold war the USSR’s attitude towards peacekeeping underwent a substantial change. Weiss and Kessler state ‘after a long history of indifference or antagonistic stances towards UN peacekeeping, the USSR has now become one of its most vocal supporters’ (1990) This shift brought a about a resurgence of the Security council as the superpowers became less hostile towards each other. This reintegration of the Soviet Union and United states allowed Britain, France and China to expand their influence through Security Council access. Ideological conflict between superpower puppets had been largely replaced by intra state wars in the intervening period. Peacekeeping came to the forefront of the mass media during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s creating an endogenous structure that strengthened both the UN and the Security Council. In response to a renewed co-operation in the Security Council and disappearance of the ideological divide the idea of peace enforcement was developed, a step closer in practice to collective security than peacekeeping. The traditional meaning of peacekeeping has evolved, pushing civilian’s activities to the forefront. The non military component of peacekeeping operations has greatly expanded also with a focus on rule of law, human rights, gender, child protection and elections apparatus. Such a human security based approach is able to tackle intra-state conflict through mandated operations with impartiality based upon the given mandate rather than warring factions, allowing for multidimensional peacekeeping. Such action provides a compromise between the Westphalian idea of collective security based upon the sovereign state and peacekeeping which evolved steadily after deadlock in the Security Council. The well publicised failures of peace keeping in the 1990’s, in particular the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre at Sbrenica provided the emphasis for such a policy change at the United Nations. Boutros Boutros Ghalis 1992 Agenda for Peace first proposed the idea. In response to disasters in Somalia and Rwanda he scaled the ambition back in his 1995 Supplement to an Agenda for Peace. However the evolution of peacekeeping continued to remain an important issue for the United Nations. The Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations of March 2000 (hereafter Brahimi report) offered an in depth analysis of peace operations and made a number of recommendations aimed at change and more proactive uses of force. The 2004 High Level Panel Report on Threats, Challenges and Change (hereafter HLP report) further pushed the idea of collective security and emphasised the importance of regional organisations in dealing with future conflicts. Traditional Peacekeeping developed as an evolutionary response to Security Council stalemate; peace enforcement is an evolutionary move back towards the idea of collective security.
Peace Enforcement is in essence an evolutionary response to a changing geo-political climate. It evolved due to the rising number of intra state conflicts that occurred in the 1990’s and attempts to reflect the reality of the world today. In terms of United Nations action it moves towards the idea of collective security and away from the peacekeeping that developed in response to Security Council stalemate in the Cold War. The aim of maintaining international peace and security has moved towards a more human security based approach. Forcible intervention based on humanitarian issues and sub contracted out to actors with a regional interest outlines the concept of peace enforcement. The U.K government distinguishes peace enforcement as ‘force used coercively to get compliance with agreements, impose a peace or protect civilians from hostilities’ (Pugh, 2009). Thus the impartiality of such an operation is towards the mandate; protecting civilians from hostilities will require use of force against the hostile actors. In contrast traditional peacekeeping is defined by the U.K government as ‘Military forces and police operating with host countries consent to underpin a peace settlement or ceasefire, using force impartially and with severe restrictions’ (Pugh 2009). Such a statement supports the impartiality towards the conflicting parties of traditional cold war peacekeeping.
Evolution of the concept
Resolution 688 in the aftermath of the Gulf War was the first to recognise that a minority group could fall under threat within a nation state. The traditional impartially of peace keeping was eroded with the emphasis placed on the mandate and use of force to protect the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq.
In 1992 Secretary General Boutros Boustros Ghali responded to the first ever UN Security Council heads of sate summit with his Agenda for Peace outlining a future strategy for peace keepers. The aim in dealing with conflict was to intervene, halt fighting, reduce innocent suffering and promote recovery. Introducing a human security element to deal with the underlying causes of the conflict, something peace keeping was unable to achieve. Crigler (1993) states that ‘Internal conflicts like Somalia have historically been off limits to U.N sponsored military forces, except when all parties to the conflict agree to their deployment’. This aim of the Agenda was to change the emphasis and advance the concept of peacekeeping beyond its traditional role of freezing a conflict. The Secretary General proceeded to ‘recommend that the Council consider the utilisation of peace-enforcement units in clearly defined circumstances and with their terms of reference specified in advance’ (Ghali 1992, para 44) The council however did not endorse the recommendation and the failure of peace operations in Somalia and Rwanda led to a retraction of policy in the 1995 Supplement to an Agenda for Peace (Johnston, Tortolani and Gowan 2005, p. 60) The failure to implement the ‘peace enforcement units’ as outlined in an Agenda Peace did not however halt the evolution of peacekeeping towards collective security. The emphasis on the need for new mechanisms and requirement for evolution of peacekeeping to deal with the new geo-political situation permeated the organisation. Johnston, Tortolini and Gowan (2005) argue that had the ideas of the Agenda been translated into policy then a greater strategic flexibility could have been applied throughout the 1990’s. Indeed the ideas were applied and utilised in UN operations post 1999, albeit a few years too late for the 800,000 genocide victims in Rwanda.
Post 1999 the United Nations found itself involved in a number of new missions and facing serious criticism on the global stage for failures in Rwanda and Sbrenica. The deployment of UN peace keeping troops had indeed increased by 500% since 1999 (p.57). Kofi Annan responded to this by commissioning the Brahimi reporting 2000 which not only outlined peace enforcement but attempted to implement its concepts. The traditional peacekeeping concept of impartiality was further eroded with ‘adherence to the principals of the charter and to the objectives of a mandate that is rooted in those charter principals’ (Brahimi Report, para 21) being put forward. Impartiality no longer constituted neutrality and the United Nations had to be prepared to take on ‘spoilers’ who attempted to break such mandates. Evolutionary was the fact that UN operations must be ‘able to pose a credible deterrent threat, in contrast to the symbolic and non threatening presence that characterises traditional peace keeping’ (Brahimi Report, para, 51). The Brahimi report was an important evolutionary step forward as it provided the operational tools needed for a change in doctrine on the ground. But it failed to provide a clear focus on how ‘spoilers’ were going to be tackled in a ‘consistent fashion’ (Johnston, Tortolini and Gowan. 2005, p.64).
The HLP report formed by Kofi Annan in 2003 had a new backdrop of the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq to deal with. The report made a strong case for a move towards collective security
‘In some contexts, opposition to a peace agreement is not tactical but fundamental. We must learn the lesson: peace agreements by governments or rebels that engage in or encourage mass human rights abuses have no value and cannot be implemented, these contexts are not appropriate for consent-based peacekeeping =:rather they must be met with concerted action’ (HLP report, para 222)
The value of such action was highlighted and put forward by the HLP report and promoted the idea of reposnsiblity to protect and action to limit genocide. Importantly the panal highlighted the role of regional organisations as a mechanism for the UN to utilise when dealing with such humanitarian interventions.
Regional Organisations: Applying Peace Enforcement Doctrine
Regional organisations will increasingly become an important actor in carrying out peace enforcement missions. Kofi Annan (1997) stated ‘co-operation with regional organisations will be intensified and regional organisations will increasingly become partners of the United Nations in all activities related to the maintenance of peace and security’ The UN has shown support for the increasing power of the European Union and aims to encourage a similar project in the African Union. NATO for example flexed its military power in its intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and allowed the U.S to intervene in a multilateral format. Such action seemed unlikely after Presidential doctrine 25 opposed US troops being used under direct UN control following the disaster in Somalia in 1992. But the sub contracting out of peace missions to regional actors has allowed the United States to act as a partner to the UN. Since 1999 a number of peace enforcement missions have been carried out by regional organisations such as NATO, ECOWAS and the OSCE (Johnston, Tortolani and Gowan 2005. P.57) Furthermore the authors argue that there has been an increase in peace missions carried out by ‘coalitions of the willing’ and individual states. Such as the Australian intervention in East Timor, the French mission in Cote d’Ivoire and the U.S Coalition involved in Afghanistan and Iraq (p.57). The danger of such regional outfits taking an important role in peace keeping is that their interests will come before that of the humanitarian mission. The United Nations must be decisive and clearly mandate and set the doctrine for such intervention by regional actors.
The next evolution. Repsonsibiltiy to protect and Human Security
The concept of responsibility to protect and human security are important focuses for the future evolution of peace operations. International legitimisation provides a strong basis to intervene and introduce collective norms on human rights violators and spoilers of the peace.
Bibliography
Boutros Boutros Ghali. An Agenda for Peace: a report to the United Nations Security Council. New York:United Nations June 17 1992.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Supplement to an Agenda for Peace. 3rd January 1995.
Crigler, Frank. The Peace Enforcement Dilemma. JFQ forum 1993.
Goulding, Marrack. The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping. International Affairs Vol.69. No.3 1993. Blackwell Publishing.
James, Alan. Peacekeeping in International Politics. London. Macmillan for International Institute for Strategic Studies. 1990
Johnston, Ian. Benjamin Cary Totolani and Richard Gowan : The Evolution of Peacekeeping: Unfinished Business. Center of International Co-operation. New york University. 2005
Paliamentary Hearing at the United Nations: From Disarmanent to Lasting Peace-Defining the Palimentary Role. The Challenges of Peacekeeping in the 21st Century. UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. New York. October 2004.
Pugh, Michael. Peace Operations. Security Studies An Introduction edited by Paul Williams. Routledge; New York 2009
United Nations General Assembly. High Level Panal on Threats, Challaneges and Change. 2003
Introduction
There is no concrete definition of Peacekeeping as it is not mentioned in the United Nations charter and evolved directly from a deadlock between superpowers in the Security Council. Goulding (1993) defines peacekeeping simply as “a technique which has been developed, mainly by the United Nations, to help control and resolve armed conflicts”. Indeed this technique was adopted as a substitute for collective security in response to stalemate in the Security council. This approach was necessary to prevent the United States and USSR from becoming embroiled in regional conflicts which could lead to direct confrontation or nuclear war. The Cold War put great pressure on the two superpowers especially in the East where they contended for control over regional conflicts making “it difficult for the Security Council to take effective action to resolve them” (1993).
Traditional Peacekeeping and its Evolution
James (1990) traces the origin of the first peacekeeping mission back to the 1920’s and the maintenance of frontiers in the aftermath of the First World War. The United Nations however officially recognises the deployment of unarmed observers to Palestine in June 1948 as the first peacekeeping deployment.. The first armed force was the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) deployed in response to the Suez crisis of 1956. This operation was used not only to mitigate the conflict but to help France and the Britain to save face and climb down from what had been a military success but a political disaster for the old powers. Both these early operations played a key role in successful conflict resolution. In Palestine an Arab-Israeli Armistice was signed and the Suez intervention diffused a potentially explosive situation allowing Britain and France to withdraw without consequence. The technique of peacekeeping was providing a useful tool for mitigating conflict and the demand for peacekeeping services increased in the years following Suez (Goulding 1993).
Peacekeeping developed a number of unique attributes that became the norm for any peace operation expecting to be deployed to a conflict zone.
Peace Enforcement Introduction
In the latter part of the cold war the USSR’s attitude towards peacekeeping underwent a substantial change. Weiss and Kessler state ‘after a long history of indifference or antagonistic stances towards UN peacekeeping, the USSR has now become one of its most vocal supporters’ (1990) This shift brought a about a resurgence of the Security council as the superpowers became less hostile towards each other. This reintegration of the Soviet Union and United states allowed Britain, France and China to expand their influence through Security Council access. Ideological conflict between superpower puppets had been largely replaced by intra state wars in the intervening period. Peacekeeping came to the forefront of the mass media during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s creating an endogenous structure that strengthened both the UN and the Security Council. In response to a renewed co-operation in the Security Council and disappearance of the ideological divide the idea of peace enforcement was developed, a step closer in practice to collective security than peacekeeping. The traditional meaning of peacekeeping has evolved, pushing civilian’s activities to the forefront. The non military component of peacekeeping operations has greatly expanded also with a focus on rule of law, human rights, gender, child protection and elections apparatus. Such a human security based approach is able to tackle intra-state conflict through mandated operations with impartiality based upon the given mandate rather than warring factions, allowing for multidimensional peacekeeping. Such action provides a compromise between the Westphalian idea of collective security based upon the sovereign state and peacekeeping which evolved steadily after deadlock in the Security Council. The well publicised failures of peace keeping in the 1990’s, in particular the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre at Sbrenica provided the emphasis for such a policy change at the United Nations. Boutros Boutros Ghalis 1992 Agenda for Peace first proposed the idea. In response to disasters in Somalia and Rwanda he scaled the ambition back in his 1995 Supplement to an Agenda for Peace. However the evolution of peacekeeping continued to remain an important issue for the United Nations. The Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations of March 2000 (hereafter Brahimi report) offered an in depth analysis of peace operations and made a number of recommendations aimed at change and more proactive uses of force. The 2004 High Level Panel Report on Threats, Challenges and Change (hereafter HLP report) further pushed the idea of collective security and emphasised the importance of regional organisations in dealing with future conflicts. Traditional Peacekeeping developed as an evolutionary response to Security Council stalemate; peace enforcement is an evolutionary move back towards the idea of collective security.
Peace Enforcement is in essence an evolutionary response to a changing geo-political climate. It evolved due to the rising number of intra state conflicts that occurred in the 1990’s and attempts to reflect the reality of the world today. In terms of United Nations action it moves towards the idea of collective security and away from the peacekeeping that developed in response to Security Council stalemate in the Cold War. The aim of maintaining international peace and security has moved towards a more human security based approach. Forcible intervention based on humanitarian issues and sub contracted out to actors with a regional interest outlines the concept of peace enforcement. The U.K government distinguishes peace enforcement as ‘force used coercively to get compliance with agreements, impose a peace or protect civilians from hostilities’ (Pugh, 2009). Thus the impartiality of such an operation is towards the mandate; protecting civilians from hostilities will require use of force against the hostile actors. In contrast traditional peacekeeping is defined by the U.K government as ‘Military forces and police operating with host countries consent to underpin a peace settlement or ceasefire, using force impartially and with severe restrictions’ (Pugh 2009). Such a statement supports the impartiality towards the conflicting parties of traditional cold war peacekeeping.
Evolution of the concept
Resolution 688 in the aftermath of the Gulf War was the first to recognise that a minority group could fall under threat within a nation state. The traditional impartially of peace keeping was eroded with the emphasis placed on the mandate and use of force to protect the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq.
In 1992 Secretary General Boutros Boustros Ghali responded to the first ever UN Security Council heads of sate summit with his Agenda for Peace outlining a future strategy for peace keepers. The aim in dealing with conflict was to intervene, halt fighting, reduce innocent suffering and promote recovery. Introducing a human security element to deal with the underlying causes of the conflict, something peace keeping was unable to achieve. Crigler (1993) states that ‘Internal conflicts like Somalia have historically been off limits to U.N sponsored military forces, except when all parties to the conflict agree to their deployment’. This aim of the Agenda was to change the emphasis and advance the concept of peacekeeping beyond its traditional role of freezing a conflict. The Secretary General proceeded to ‘recommend that the Council consider the utilisation of peace-enforcement units in clearly defined circumstances and with their terms of reference specified in advance’ (Ghali 1992, para 44) The council however did not endorse the recommendation and the failure of peace operations in Somalia and Rwanda led to a retraction of policy in the 1995 Supplement to an Agenda for Peace (Johnston, Tortolani and Gowan 2005, p. 60) The failure to implement the ‘peace enforcement units’ as outlined in an Agenda Peace did not however halt the evolution of peacekeeping towards collective security. The emphasis on the need for new mechanisms and requirement for evolution of peacekeeping to deal with the new geo-political situation permeated the organisation. Johnston, Tortolini and Gowan (2005) argue that had the ideas of the Agenda been translated into policy then a greater strategic flexibility could have been applied throughout the 1990’s. Indeed the ideas were applied and utilised in UN operations post 1999, albeit a few years too late for the 800,000 genocide victims in Rwanda.
Post 1999 the United Nations found itself involved in a number of new missions and facing serious criticism on the global stage for failures in Rwanda and Sbrenica. The deployment of UN peace keeping troops had indeed increased by 500% since 1999 (p.57). Kofi Annan responded to this by commissioning the Brahimi reporting 2000 which not only outlined peace enforcement but attempted to implement its concepts. The traditional peacekeeping concept of impartiality was further eroded with ‘adherence to the principals of the charter and to the objectives of a mandate that is rooted in those charter principals’ (Brahimi Report, para 21) being put forward. Impartiality no longer constituted neutrality and the United Nations had to be prepared to take on ‘spoilers’ who attempted to break such mandates. Evolutionary was the fact that UN operations must be ‘able to pose a credible deterrent threat, in contrast to the symbolic and non threatening presence that characterises traditional peace keeping’ (Brahimi Report, para, 51). The Brahimi report was an important evolutionary step forward as it provided the operational tools needed for a change in doctrine on the ground. But it failed to provide a clear focus on how ‘spoilers’ were going to be tackled in a ‘consistent fashion’ (Johnston, Tortolini and Gowan. 2005, p.64).
The HLP report formed by Kofi Annan in 2003 had a new backdrop of the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq to deal with. The report made a strong case for a move towards collective security
‘In some contexts, opposition to a peace agreement is not tactical but fundamental. We must learn the lesson: peace agreements by governments or rebels that engage in or encourage mass human rights abuses have no value and cannot be implemented, these contexts are not appropriate for consent-based peacekeeping =:rather they must be met with concerted action’ (HLP report, para 222)
The value of such action was highlighted and put forward by the HLP report and promoted the idea of reposnsiblity to protect and action to limit genocide. Importantly the panal highlighted the role of regional organisations as a mechanism for the UN to utilise when dealing with such humanitarian interventions.
Regional Organisations: Applying Peace Enforcement Doctrine
Regional organisations will increasingly become an important actor in carrying out peace enforcement missions. Kofi Annan (1997) stated ‘co-operation with regional organisations will be intensified and regional organisations will increasingly become partners of the United Nations in all activities related to the maintenance of peace and security’ The UN has shown support for the increasing power of the European Union and aims to encourage a similar project in the African Union. NATO for example flexed its military power in its intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and allowed the U.S to intervene in a multilateral format. Such action seemed unlikely after Presidential doctrine 25 opposed US troops being used under direct UN control following the disaster in Somalia in 1992. But the sub contracting out of peace missions to regional actors has allowed the United States to act as a partner to the UN. Since 1999 a number of peace enforcement missions have been carried out by regional organisations such as NATO, ECOWAS and the OSCE (Johnston, Tortolani and Gowan 2005. P.57) Furthermore the authors argue that there has been an increase in peace missions carried out by ‘coalitions of the willing’ and individual states. Such as the Australian intervention in East Timor, the French mission in Cote d’Ivoire and the U.S Coalition involved in Afghanistan and Iraq (p.57). The danger of such regional outfits taking an important role in peace keeping is that their interests will come before that of the humanitarian mission. The United Nations must be decisive and clearly mandate and set the doctrine for such intervention by regional actors.
The next evolution. Repsonsibiltiy to protect and Human Security
The concept of responsibility to protect and human security are important focuses for the future evolution of peace operations. International legitimisation provides a strong basis to intervene and introduce collective norms on human rights violators and spoilers of the peace.
Bibliography
Boutros Boutros Ghali. An Agenda for Peace: a report to the United Nations Security Council. New York:United Nations June 17 1992.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Supplement to an Agenda for Peace. 3rd January 1995.
Crigler, Frank. The Peace Enforcement Dilemma. JFQ forum 1993.
Goulding, Marrack. The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping. International Affairs Vol.69. No.3 1993. Blackwell Publishing.
James, Alan. Peacekeeping in International Politics. London. Macmillan for International Institute for Strategic Studies. 1990
Johnston, Ian. Benjamin Cary Totolani and Richard Gowan : The Evolution of Peacekeeping: Unfinished Business. Center of International Co-operation. New york University. 2005
Paliamentary Hearing at the United Nations: From Disarmanent to Lasting Peace-Defining the Palimentary Role. The Challenges of Peacekeeping in the 21st Century. UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. New York. October 2004.
Pugh, Michael. Peace Operations. Security Studies An Introduction edited by Paul Williams. Routledge; New York 2009
United Nations General Assembly. High Level Panal on Threats, Challaneges and Change. 2003
