Evaluating Peacekeeping Missions

A Typology of Success and Failure in International Interventions

Sarah-Myriam Martin- Brûlé

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317268611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Frieden & globale Entwicklung

offers a new perspective on the success of peace missions in intra-state wars

based on extensive comparative field research of 11 peace missions

will be of much interest to students of peacekeeping, civil wars, African politics, security studies and IR

1 Puzzles, concepts and cases

Missions in Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone were all part of an important and lasting post-Cold War peacekeeping trend. Peacekeepers have attempted to support, and in some instances even replace, governments in providing security and, ultimately, restoring the monopoly on the use of force in countries coming out of civil war. While multilateral organizations seek to establish sustainable peace in countries around the world, we still do not fully understand why they succeed or fail at this critical task. State authority deters violence by holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and wielding it so that individuals and groups refrain from engaging in serious conflict. How can we expect outsiders to play this essential role when the state is too weak to do so?

I begin this chapter by addressing two gaps in current peacekeeping literature: the definition of peace operation success and the factors that contribute to this success. The conceptual framework for this book defines success as the accomplishment of the mandate and the (re-)establishment of order. I identify the type of strategy and intervener that most contribute to successful outcomes of these factors. I have selected 11 individual peace operations from Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone to illustrate not only if but how deterrence strategy works, as well as how great powers influence operational success. I also highlight the value of focusing on a hard set of cases, in which there is a precarious peace to keep and in which interveners play an essential role in the path to peace.

Puzzles: gaps in peacekeeping literature

Since 2000, the year of the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (also called the Brahimi report), literature on peacekeeping success has increasingly focused on the sources of both success and failure in operations. In this section, I examine recent questions and conclusions on the multidimensionality of peace operation success, as well as the debates on the threshold for whether a mission has succeeded or failed. I address literature that explains such outcomes, focusing on the key ingredients by which peace operations become successful: the context and timing of the operation, the type of intervener and the type of strategy.

Outcomes

The outcomes of peacekeeping missions remain difficult to conceptualize because of the multiple dimensions of success (Fortna, 2008). Recently, researchers have attempted to identify clearer ways of assessing peace operation performance (Gutner and Thompson, 2010; Lipson, 2010) and of differentiating between types of successes and failures. Gutner and Thompson (2010: 227–248) have suggested an assessment model for the performance of international organizations. Lipson (2010) challenged the intrinsic ambiguity of peace operation assessment and proposed new methods of evaluating effectiveness. Call (2008) assessed and classified the success or failure of peace operations based on security, as well as political and social factors. Bratt (1997) introduced a scale of success, by associating different levels of accomplishment with the terms, success, moderate success and failure. Goertz et al. (2002) identified four main dimensions on which authors concur when assessing success: conflict management vs conflict resolution, short-term outcomes vs long-term outcomes, a fixed point vs an ongoing process and the perspective(s) of belligerents vs perspective(s) of the peacekept (Goertz et al., 2002: 293–295; also cited in Kim, 2004: 39). Given the multiplicity of approaches, it is necessary to classify ways of measuring operational success. Haklin Kim (2004) and Charles Call and Elizabeth Cousens (2008) grouped different approaches, seeking to offer cohesion to our understanding of peace operation success.

Kim (2004) organized approaches to assessing peace operation success into three sets: 1) standard approaches that measure the degree to which the operation achieves the goals mandated by the UN; 2) approaches that take into account other UN activities; and 3) approaches that measure their effects on a conflict. Kim then presented the main weaknesses of each set. Using the mandate to evaluate success is problematic, as mandates are highly political and made strategically ambiguous to both satisfy all Members of the Security Council and keep ‘the capacity to flexibly adapt to changing conditions on the ground’ (Kim, 2004: 39). The assessment of peace operation outcomes risks being more about the clarity of the mandate than about its achievements. The actual accomplishments and opportunities created by the intervention may be left out by such an assessment (Bellamy and Williams, 2004).¹ The second set of approaches measures success relative to the accomplishment of UN goals, failing to address the achievements of a peace operation that fall outside these objectives. The third set is concerned with common aims of UN peacekeeping: cessation of hostilities, conflict containment, political settlement, the limitation of casualties, conflict transformation, etc. There is no agreement on which standard is best for comparing peacekeeping operations by these goals. Kim rightly highlighted that each ‘researcher suggests his or her own criteria for comparison according to theoretical or pragmatic demands’ (Kim, 2004: 42).

Call and Cousens (2008) suggested a way to classify different standards used in assessing peace operation success as minimalist, maximalist, and moderate. By the maximalist standard,² a peace operation is successful when it has resolved the ‘root causes’ of conflict (Call and Cousens, 2008: 6). They identify three main problems with this standard: 1) focusing on root causes such as poverty and ethnic tensions offers but ‘a simplistic understanding of why specific conflicts occur’ (Call and Couses, 2008: 7) (for example, poor countries do not necessarily fall into civil wars); 2) root causes cannot be solved by interveners, who are meant to act on a short-term horizon and whose goal is to restore local ownership of authority; 3) this standard does not take into account the difference in the difficulty of the settings. Cases vary in difficulty and cannot all be compared by the same criteria. Call and Cousens deplored that this standard ‘fails to differentiate among very different types and degrees of failure or acknowledge the value of more modest goals, let alone capture a sense of meaningful difference among specific contexts’ (Call and Cousens, 2008: 7). The minimalist standard deems a peace operation successful in the absence of renewed warfare. Yet this threshold does not take into account the conditions of the state in the absence of war (i.e. can a peace operation succeed even the state remains failed?), nor does it set a time frame for how long warfare must be absent in order to qualify a peace operation as a success (Call and Cousens, 2008). Finally, Call and Cousens (2008) called for a moderate standard, which refers to an absence of warfare plus ‘decent governance’. According to this criterion, a peace operation is successful by factoring in the quality of the governance (Call and Cousens, 2008: 7). Yet this moderate standard does not take into account, at all, the mandate of the peace operation.

The challenge remains to find a balance between keeping the mandate as the sole reference point and excluding it entirely for the assessment of a peace operation’s outcome. Highlighting this problem, Lise Morjé Howard (2008) proposed a definition of peacekeeping success based on the accomplishment of the mandate and the institutional capacity of the state after the peacekeepers’ withdrawal (Howard, 2008: 7). Howard stressed the importance of considering these two criteria together. She also suggested thresholds to qualify the outcomes of peace operations as successes, mixed successes or failures. Her definition significantly contributed to clarifying the definition of peace operation success. What is missing, however, is a hierarchy between the two criteria. An operation can succeed in one dimension while failing at another. How can we define success when all the different dimensions of success of peace operations are not compatible?

When there is no one definition of success, the success of a peace operation is hard to assess. There is a strong need to define success, in spite of the various distinctions between different types of peace operations and the means by which they are waged. A threshold must clearly delineate a failed peace operation from a successful one. Intermediate outcome categories between success and failure will refine our understanding and classification of scenarios in which different dimensions of success are not compatible. The multidimensionality of peacekeeping assessment informs the need to provide a clearer methodological framework for apprehending peace operation success.

Initial setting: context and timing

To explain the success of peace operations, Jakobsen, (1996), Gilligan and Stedman (2003), de Jonge Oudraat (1996) and Zartman (2001) focused on the context in which an operation takes place and/or the timing of the operation. Fortna (2008) and Gilligan and Stedman (2003) inquired whether peacekeepers are more likely to pick easy cases (Fortna, 2008: 24–33). These easier contexts would then be an explanatory variable for the success of peace operations. But Fortna (2008) robustly challenged this point of view, of peacekeepers choosing the easy cases over the hard ones. She concluded that peacekeeping operations in fact tend to focus on the hard cases, where peacekeepers have not necessarily been requested and peace is deemed most difficult to keep (Fortna, 2008: 45). These insights point toward the importance of analysing the difficulty of the context in which peace operations take place, and more specifically the extent to which the ‘human’ and ‘geographical’ terrain on which they are waged affects the success or failure of missions.

The term ‘human terrain’ refers to the different characteristics of the population: its divisions, links and networks. The types of belligerents are also considered and whether or not they can be clearly identified as belligerents (rather than having dual roles as both civilians and militia members, which is referred to as being ‘sobel-like’, i.e. soldiers by day and rebels by night) (Feldman and Ben Arrous, 2013–2014). With the multiplication of failed states and the new challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a new wave of literature on psychological operations (PSYOP) and counterinsurgency operations (COIN), which has highlighted the importance of taking into account the type of human terrain in which a peace operation is being waged.³

Peters (2000) referred to the concept of ‘human architecture’, arguing that the success of a military intervention (within or outside of a peace mission) requires getting information on who lives where and what they do.⁴ Increasingly, interveners are asked to create human terrain maps as part of their daily routine in the field, so as to gain a better understanding of the social context of their intervention (Marr et al., 2008). Because actors must constantly adapt to the war context by learning and evolving, Kilcullen (2009, 2006a) stressed the importance of peacekeepers understanding that the war produces new actors with new and changing interests. Most importantly, interveners become part of that adaptive context, of what he qualifies as an ecosystem: ‘it is a dynamic, living system that changes in response to our actions and requires continuous balancing between competing requirements’ (Kilcullen, 2006a: 3). This ecosystem creates particular challenges for achieving control, with control not understood as ‘forcing order’ upon the actors but rather as establishing contact and then collaborating upon a shared set of objectives (Kilcullen, 2006a), which is a precondition for peace operations to succeed.

Major war theorists, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, have underlined the importance of geographic environment in the planning of a military intervention, since information about the terrain can greatly influence commander tactics and strategies (Eggenberger, 1967; Spink, 1996; Rose and Pareyn, 1998; Mitchell, 1991). There is an abundant literature on war and terrain, and more specifically on the strategic challenges associated with various types of geophysical settings (Clausewitz, 1976; Gray, 1999). But there has been little direct discussion about the ways that a peace operation can be executed depending on terrain. Reference to terrain have been largely embedded in discussions on the difficulty of intervention context, and have mostly focused on specific case studies. For example, Stedman (1992) used the case of Kosovo (Stedman, 1992). Fearon and Laitin (2003) explained how the terrain hampered/facilitated insurgencies, etc. More recently, McLauchlin has addressed how the terrain affects desertion (McLauchlin, 2014). The geography must be taken into account when discussing the conditions of interventions and the measures to be taken to maximize the success of an operation.⁵ Knowledge of the terrain is necessary to better address the challenges of the setting in which the intervention takes place.

The timing of an intervention has also been identified as a crucial component in the success of peace operations in terms of ‘ripeness’. Authors disagree as to whether ripeness is an inherent point of evolution in a conflict, or if it is a condition that must be fostered by interveners. For Zartman and Touval (2001), and Crocker et al. (2004), the success of a peace operation was more a function of factors intrinsic to the conflict rather than of third party involvement. While the concept of ripeness is useful in conceptualizing the best timing for an intervention, it is not immediately clear when this moment is attained, nor whether the peace operation will succeed as a result of intervening at the ‘ripe moment’. For Crocker et al. (2005) and Van der Lijn (2009), the moment of ripeness is created by the interaction between the intervener and the peacekept (local population). Ripeness is a fostered condition rather than an inherent one. The main conditions for parties to comply with – and thereby to contribute to the success of a peace operation – lay in the peacekept’s perception that such intervention is sustained, committed and credible (Pouligny, 2006).⁶

The pace of deployment is of utmost importance once the parties have agreed to launch a peacekeeping operation. According to the Brahimi report (UN, 2000), belligerents formed their first impressions of the peace operation and decided whether or not they found it credible in the first 12 weeks following a peace agreement or a ceasefire.⁷

Literature on the timing of an intervention as a determining condition for the success of a peace operation is useful for highlighting the essential role of the peacekept. Yet it does not directly address how the intervention’s timing changes the context, or how it offers a different appeal to the rationales of actors and thereby influences their choices.

Types of interveners

A main set of questions and conclusions in recent peacekeeping literature locates the conditions for success with the intervener. In the context of intra-state wars, the legitimate monopoly on force may be seen to rest in the hands of outside actors. The resulting questions are twofold: to what extent are foreigners better equipped to overtake the monopoly of force? And, what are the advantages of having outside interveners take this role, what are the limits of their effective action in this regard and what are the associated short- and long-term trade-offs to their intervention?

Types of interveners vary from international/regional collective interveners and regional/international great powers. ‘Collective interveners’ refer to international/regional organizations deployed in countries at war. ‘International great powers’ refers to permanent Members of the UN Security Council (UNSC). ‘Regional great powers’ refers to those states that have a clear superiority in their military capacity compared to other countries in the region. To simplify, in this book, international and regional great powers are grouped together under the term ‘great power’.

Regional collective interveners are often deemed more appropriate because of their...