Peacekeeping and the International System

Norrie MacQueen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134260928
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive, clearly presented and accessible text covering the totality of the peacekeeping experience since the early twentieth century.

This is essential reading for all undergraduates on politics, international relations and contemporary history programmes. It is also an excellent resource for taught postgraduate courses in these subject areas.

The narrative is primarily chronological; key themes such as legality and 'collective security' are traced throughout. The chronology is based on the key periods in the development of peacekeeping, marking stages in the evolution of the concept determined by changes in the nature of the international system over the past six decades.

1 The dimensions of international peacekeeping

Few processes in contemporary international relations have been as imperfectly defined as that of ‘peacekeeping’. This is not primarily the result of intellectual laziness on the part of practitioners and commentators. Virtually everyone has a personal sense of what peacekeeping is — but it is usually perceived as an activity with extremely flexible boundaries. Defining peacekeeping is complicated still further by the frequent use of the term for political purposes. The word peacekeeping has been employed to describe a huge range of military and quasi-military activities, often in an attempt to legitimize undertakings with less than laudable motivations using less than pacific methods. As one author has put it:

scholars try to use definitions and categories with precision, states are under no such professional obligation… The term ‘peacekeeping’ has a very favourable resonance, so that states are glad to use it in their statements and rhetoric in circumstances where, at least superficially, it will look appropriate. It is a way of trying to engender positive feelings, and hence support, for their policies.¹

Russia’s military action in Chechnya, for example, has been described as peacekeeping by those favouring Moscow’s interests, though many others would see it simply as an attempt, using extreme force, to prevent the secession of part of the national territory. The term has been used even more recently to describe the activities of the American-led coalition in Iraq since 2003. Here, too, its use has been fiercely contested by those with fundamentally different views on the motives and activities of the occupying forces. In short, using the description peacekeeping as a way of making respectable any military action, however well or ill-intentioned, has become a feature of international propaganda. More scholarly, less politically motivated observers, of course, have tried to impose narrow limits on what peacekeeping is and what it is not. But the problem with this approach is that these various definitions rarely coincide with each other and often just further confuse the picture.

Interrogating ‘peacekeeping’: characteristics and definitions

One approach towards a working definition of what peacekeeping is — and what it is not — is to subject the term to a process of interrogation. There are a number of key questions around the activity that tend to be answered in different ways depending on different points of political perspective and interest:

• Must peacekeeping be a collective activity — or could one state undertake a ‘peacekeeping operation’?
• Must peacekeeping be undertaken by an established international organization — or can it be an informal activity among any group of participants?
• Must it be ‘international’ in the sense of involving only conflicts between sovereign states — or can it be an internal, ‘intra-state’ activity?
• Can peacekeeping be ‘imposed’ on a situation — or must it always be embraced by all parties to a conflict?
• Can it involve the use of force other than in self-defence or the immediate defence of non-combatants? In other words, can peacekeeping embrace the enforcement of outcomes?

By exploring some of these questions we can perhaps move towards a fuller understanding of the difficulties of definition — if not a definition as such.

Can one state acting alone — or in a dominating position of leadership — be a genuine peacekeeper?

There have been a number of military interventions carried out either by a single state or by a small group of states in which one participant has dominated the coalition. This is a question that has relevance to the situations of Russia in Chechnya and the Americans in Iraq that we have just touched on. But it is perhaps better put in relation to conditions that are less obviously ones of open warfare or police actions within the national territory. Does France’s frequent intervention in crises in its former colonies in Africa constitute peacekeeping? Here, the issue of motive becomes crucial. If France’s concern is simply to stabilize dangerous situations to prevent their escalation — if it is driven by essentially humanitarian motives — then most observers would concede that it is involved in something that could be described as peacekeeping. If, however, France is merely pursuing its national interests and supporting governments friendly to it against challenges that it (France) regards as threatening, then the term peacekeeping is clearly inappropriate. In Chad in the 1980s and in the Central African Republic (CAR) in the 1990s, for example, the French intervened, at least initially, to support regimes it perceived as pro-French. Later, in Côte d’Ivoire, though, the French military intervention was regarded with suspicion and at times with outright hostility by the regime in power. It was not clear even here, however, whether Paris was prepared to confront the Ivorian government in the interest of keeping the peace or in support of an opposition movement that it regarded as more friendly to its own policies in the region. Similar questions about motives surrounded France’s intervention in Rwanda in the end of the genocide there in 1994. Although the action was formally welcomed and legitimized by the United Nations Security Council, France’s so-called ‘Operation Turquoise’ was regarded with deep suspicion by the Tutsi-dominated rebel movement, which was poised to oust the regime of the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda. In the view of the mainly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front, France was merely acting to protect its long-standing clients in the defeated Hutu leadership — a leadership that had orchestrated the genocide and that was now in headlong retreat.

More problematic, perhaps, was the Australian intervention in East Timor in 1999. This was also endorsed by the Security Council (and the operation was later replaced by a fully ‘UN’ one). The Australian force was deployed to end a systematic assault on one section of the territory’s population by another. Pro-Indonesian militias, plainly supported by the Indonesian military in the territory, were seeking to thwart by violence the clearly expressed aspirations of the majority for independence. Here, initially at any rate, there was very little scepticism of Australian motives. Australia was, after all, a major regional power on the Asia-Pacific interface and under the government then in power had shown itself keen to take an activist role in the security of the region. But here, too, as the extent of Australia’s economic interests and aspirations around the marine resources between Timor and its own northern maritime border gradually became clear, doubts were expressed about Canberra’s initial motives (not least by the government of the now independent East Timor itself).

A similar set of considerations might also apply to Britain in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s. Was the British army in Ulster a peacekeeping force? For many observers in Britain and beyond the motives and methods were essentially those of peacekeeping. In this view the British army was ‘interposed’ between two factions in violent confrontation with each other. But the prevailing view in both of the communities in conflict in Ulster was that the British presence was not a peacekeeping one. Each, however, had a very different conception of what it actually was. On the unionist side the British army was seen as acting ‘in aid of the civil power’ by ensuring the British state’s legitimate capacity to maintain law and order within its own territory. On the republican side the British presence was seen quite differently. It was, from this perspective, essentially an occupation force deployed by a foreign power. While peacekeeping dominated by a single state might not therefore be wholly a contradiction in terms, questions of underlying motive and the national interest of the intervening power will usually be raised by one party or another to the conflict in which the intervention is taking place.

Must peacekeeping be an institutional activity?

It is, therefore, difficult to conceive of peacekeeping as a unilateral activity. Yet does multilateralism — intervention by more than one actor — by necessity have to involve an established international organization? In other words, can groups of states acting together in an ad hoc relationship constitute a peacekeeping force? Certainly, various peacekeeping ventures have been formed by ‘coalitions of the willing’, without formal reference to existing international institutions. But the various examples of these suggest that this is an activity that lacks diplomatic self-confidence and that tends to be regarded — not least by those involved — as a kind of second best peacekeeping effort.

Non-institutionally based peacekeeping often comes about after the failure of attempts to establish forces within an organizational framework. For example, following the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, a peacekeeping presence was required to oversee the disengagement of the two countries’ forces in the Sinai desert. Initially, the western states — led by the United States, which had sponsored the peace process — had hoped to extend the mandate of the existing United Nations force in the region — the second United Nations Emergency Force — which had been deployed since the 1973 war. The Soviet Union, however, anxious to remain on good terms with the Arab states that had denounced Egypt’s peace deal with the Israeli enemy, rejected this. With no possibility of Security Council approval, therefore, the west had to act alone. It did so by creating the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), which was composed of units from different western states brought together outside any formal institutional structure. Very similar circumstances led to the creation of multinational forces in Lebanon in the early 1980s when Security Council approval for the extension of the mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon could not be secured. In all of these cases the resulting international missions were widely seen as peacekeeping forces, despite their lack of ‘validation’ by an established international organization.

In other situations groups of states have overstated the role of institutions in their military interventions in their attempts to bestow international respectability on them. In 1998, for example, the various recognized neighbours of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who had intervened to prop up the beleaguered regime of President Laurent Kabila, claimed to be acting as a Southern African Development Community (SADC) operation. Although the states intervening in the conflict were all members of the SADC, the Community had given them no mandate to send forces and it was questionable whether its constitution would have permitted it to do so. In a similar situation around the same time further north and west in Africa, Senegal and Guinea-Conakry tried after the event to have their intervention in the civil conflict in their neighbour Guinea-Bissau legitimized as an action by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

As with the unilateral interventions we discussed previously, collective but non-institutional ones might not necessarily differ in intentions and operational objectives from formal organizational ones. But motives will always be more closely examined in these circumstances, and the general acceptance of the ventures as genuine peacekeeping will be harder to achieve.

Can peacekeeping only take place in conflicts between states?

Another key question about the nature of ‘true’ peacekeeping — one of the most important in any attempt to define it as a political activity — relates to the terms of the conflicts it engages with. In its first manifestations in the United Nations, and indeed earlier, in the inter-war years, peacekeeping was strictly an inter-state activity. It had to do with the management of stressed or fractured relations between sovereign states in the international system. The United Nations Emergency Force sent to Suez in 1956 (which is often misleadingly described as the first peacekeeping operation) was interposed between Egypt and the states that had attacked it (Britain, France and Israel) following its nationalization of the Suez Canal. After Suez the essential principles of peacekeeping employed there were seen to apply as well to previous UN undertakings that had not, at the time they were established, been given the name peacekeeping. The military observer missions set up to oversee ceasefires in Palestine between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and then in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, were now recognized as peacekeeping operations too. These ventures were concerned with the management of international relations in a very direct way. So, too, as we have suggested, were the various ‘plebiscite operations’ undertaken by the post-war allies and by the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s, when the finer points of the new postwar map of Europe were being settled.

But the next major peacekeeping operation after Suez, that in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, presented a much more complex picture in terms of its international purposes. And it was a picture that would now become more typical of the peacekeeping experience than the relative simplicities of the 1920s to the 1950s. Although the UN’s role in the Congo appeared at the beginning to be concerned with a conflict between two sovereign state members of the international system (the former colonial power, Belgium, and the newly independent Republic of Congo) it very soon developed into an immensely complex arena of competing ethnic and regional interests that were internal to the Congo itself. Later, the UN operation in Cyprus — which began almost simultaneously with the end of the Congo intervention in 1964 — was likewise primarily a conflict of intra-state ethnicity.

By the time the peacekeeping ‘project’ moved beyond the cold war at the beginning of the 1990s, ‘straightforward’ inter-state peacekeeping had become almost a nostalgic memory. The large operation in Cambodia that began in 1992 was designed to reconstruct the Cambodian state itself. Simultaneously, operations throughout the African continent — in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and then, completing the circle, the Congo once again — were designed primarily to engage with the problem of failing or even, in extremis, ‘collapsed’ states rather than with international confrontations between states. Similar problems faced UN peacekeepers in Central America and the Caribbean and, in an especially complex way, in the former Yugoslavia. Post-cold war peacekeeping, therefore, appeared to confirm that the pure model of interposition between states in conflict, which had been dominant in interventions up to the 1960s, was becoming the exception rather than the rule. Peacekeeping had become predominantly an intra-state rather than an inter-state activity.

But while a simple count of United Nations operations points to peacekeeping having become mainly concerned with internal conflicts, it would be misleading to assume that its purpose was solely the management of domestic crises. The issue was not as simple as this arithmetic might suggest. The conflicts that have given rise to peacekeeping operations have all, without exception, had a significant inter-state/international dimension as well, however intra-state/domestic they might first appear. Peacekeeping in the Congo in the early 1960s had to deal with a tangle of internal problems, but its larger purpose concerned the process of decolonization in Africa, which was building momentum at that time, and how the transformation it was bringing to the international system could be absorbed without creating serious international instabilities. Similarly, the large and varied operations in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s may have seemed to be directed at problems of ethnic and regional conflict within states in crisis. But in reality each had a distinct external dimension that, arguably, was the overriding motive for intervention by peacekeeping forces. The conflicts in Angola and Mozambique threatened the stability of the entire southern African region at a time of great change following the end of the cold war and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. The bloody disintegration of the DRC in the late 1990s was, above all, a regional crisis for the whole of central Africa rather than a domestic crisis for the DRC. Similarly, the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone were seen from the peacekeepers’ perspective as interconnected and capable of infecting the larger west African region. Chaos in Cambodia at the end of the cold war threatened to undermine the security and burgeoning prosperity of the south-east Asian region as a whole. And, in Europe, Bosnia was as central — both geographically and politically — to the stability of the entire continent at the end of the twentieth century as it had been at the beginning when the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in a Sarajevo street helped trigger the First World War. In short, whatever the apparent local bases of conflicts that have led to peacekeeping interventions, the response of the international system in undertaking these interventions has been as much about ‘systemic self-preservation’ as it has been about concern with violence within states.

Of course, this is not to say that genuine international altruism and humanitarian concern were not important factors in the deployment of peacekeepers. The hitherto unquestioned concept of sovereignty as the organizing principle of international relationships has undergone significant change since the cold war. This has been driven by a number of factors. First, the end of cold war rivalry has reduced the use of sovereignty as a defence against political interference by ‘the other side’. Criticism of state behaviour within its own territory and concern with the domestic conflicts that this can generate could no longer be dismissed as anti-western or anti-Soviet posturing by the opposing camp. Evident abuses could be denounced without automatic claims of ulterior motives on the part of those doing the denouncing. The liberal conscience was thus liberated. Second — and simultaneously — the passage of time since the decolonization of the European empires in the global south had reduced the colonial guilt complex that had sometimes muted criticism of newly independent states and their shortcomings. The sensitivity of new states about their newly won sovereignty no longer conferred the same immunity to foreign censure. Finally, technology, in the form of instantaneous and continuous news flows, created the social and political phenomenon that has been called the ‘CNN effect’. Governments in states with the diplomatic power and the military capability to intervene in foreign conflicts (which were usually also the states with widest access to this type of news delivery) came under increasing pressure from public opinion to act. This has been offered as an explanation for the American intervention in Somalia in 1992. Images of mass starvation, which could, it seemed, be ended with the application of a very little western power, set the interventionist agenda. Paradoxically, of course, it is likely that a year or two later images of the death and humiliation of western peacekeepers were responsible for the end of the intervention in Somalia and had a knock-on effect on responses to other crises. This general weakening of sovereign independence as the organizing principle of the international system brings us to another of our key questions.

Can peacekeeping be imposed on a situation — or must it be accepted by all parties to a conflict?

This question goes to the heart of contemporary international relations and the basis on which they are conducted. The increasingly conditional status of sovereign independence has led to claims that we have entered a ‘post-Westphalian’ phase in international relations. The Treaty of Westphalia, which came at the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe in 1648, laid down the central importance of state sovereignty in international relations. The long destructive war, which had been fought across much of continental Europe, had in part been a conflict between the old politics of feudalism and the new politics of the nation state. Westphalia asserted the victory of the latter, placing the power of the territorial state above all other actors. In doing so, it created a ‘system’ of states whose relations were, in principle, based on mutual respect for the sovereign equality of each. Henceforward neither religion nor ancient dynastic claims was to take precedence over the sovereign power of states. States, in other words, were the fundamental building blocks of the emerging system. As the twentieth century drew to a close this characterization of international relations came under challenge. The ‘post-Westphalian’ argument...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 The dimensions of international peacekeeping
• 2 Peacekeeping before the UN: the inter-war years
• 3 Collective security revived: the formation of the United Nations
• 4 Peacekeeping resumed: from Palestine and Kashmir to Suez
• 5 Peacekeeping as immunization: regional crises in the cold war
• 6 Peacekeeping and détente: the Middle East in the 1970s
• 7 New horizons: peacekeeping and the end of the cold war
• 8 The break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union: peacekeeping and the end of the multinational state
• 9 Africa I: decolonization and contested legitimacy
• 10 Africa II: peacekeeping in stateless terrain
• 11 Peacekeeping and the international system in the twenty-first century: looking back to look forward
• Maps
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index