UN Peace Operations and Asian Security

Mely Cabellero-Anthony, Amitav Acharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134194285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This is an unparallelled analysis of the state of the United Nations peace operations and their impact on Asian security.This new volume examines new strategies being adopted by the UN; including doctrinal shifts in peace operation, and assesses the division of labour between the UN, regional organisation and non-governmental organisations/actors.

Based on selected papers from mostly Asian scholars, the book offers regional perspectives from South, Southeast and Northeast Asia on the changing nature of UN Peace operations and analyses some of the core issues that are of critical relevance to regional security in Asia. In addition it reveals interesting new insights on the new players in the area of peace operations – i.e. China and Japan and considers their projected roles as defined by their respective security concepts. It also delves into issues of possible areas of concern caused by the new activism of these regional powers in peace operations. Finally, the book also revisits the significant lessons learnt from the UN experience in Cambodia and East Timor and examines their impact on future directions of peace operations.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading journal International Peacekeeping.

Collaborative Human Security? The UN and Other Actors in Cambodia

SORPONG PEOU

This essay seeks to advance the concept of collaborative human security with reference to Asia. Collaborative human security is defined here as something done for a common purpose by different actors, aiming to promote the security interests of other individuals or to meet their security needs. The concept differs from that of liberalism, which tends to define cooperation as ‘collaboration for mutual advantage’.¹

The concept of ‘human security’ has come under criticism from scholars of various theoretical persuasions.² According to Roland Paris, for instance, it ‘does not appear to offer a particularly useful framework of analysis for scholars or policymakers’.³ It is extremely difficult for academics to see the concept in an operational light, or for policy-makers to prioritize policy agendas. The critique notes that scholars find it difficult to identify human security actors, driven as they are by a variety of interests and diverse objectives. Because specific measures cannot be analytically isolated, scholars do not know where to concentrate their research efforts. Nevertheless, drawing on insights from the peace studies tradition, particularly neo-Kantian internationalism, the concept can provide a useful framework for analysis if we can answer the following questions: ‘what is being secured and against what?’, ‘what methods are used to achieve human security, and who provides it?’. The first question is certainly easier to answer than the others. It is clear that the referent is not the state, but rather societies, groups and individuals. The second question is more difficult; sources of threat to human security are numerous, from political repression and violations of human rights to hunger, disease, illicit drugs and organized crime. This essay defines human security as freedom from the fear of violent death, political subjugation and want. The essay also seeks to identify human security actors, by examining what the UN, in collaboration with other external actors, sought to achieve in Cambodia. It then assesses the methods used collectively to achieve human security objectives. The appropriate analytical concept is therefore ‘collaborative human security’, since human security is the responsibility of a number of actors: state, interstate and non-state. It may be difficult to assess the collaborative role of human security actors, but it is not impossible to determine whether their activities have made an impact.

In answering the question: ‘to what extent have the UN and other actors contributed to the promotion of human security needs in Cambodia?’, this study examines collaboration among donors involved in both peacekeeping and peace-building. Approximately 15,000 UN peacekeepers were sent to Cambodia to monitor the ceasefire, disarmament and demobilization agreed by the country’s armed factions. Peacebuilding involved the pursuit of criminal justice against surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, international assistance to promote free and fair elections as well as human rights (with the aim of building liberal democracy) and economic reconstruction. The case study indicates that the UN has played a growing role in promoting the personal security of individuals, although its impact varies from method to method. The pursuit of international criminal justice and international peacekeeping especially disarmament as methods for achieving human security appear to be less successful than the political and economic approaches. But the overall success of even the last two methods remained far from ideal.

Collaborative Human Security: A Conceptual Framework

Collaborative human security differs from collective defence and collective security because the referent object for human security is not the state. In collective defence, military security is defined in national terms; the state is the referent object for security and is to be protected by military means.⁴ In collective security (inspired by Immanuel Kant’s idea that the majority of states act collectively to punish any state that committed an act of aggression), the state remains the referent object for security.⁵ In human security studies, however, the individual is the main referent object for security. Because of its ontological emphasis on the human level, human security as the key concept is indebted to several theoretical traditions, which are non-state-centric and humanistic in orientation.⁶ The concept of collaborative human security also differs from both collective defence and collective security, because it broadens the focus of political realism on war, in which ‘security studies is defined as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force’.⁷ In collective defence, states are driven by the fear of military defeat, foreign conquest and subjugation. Collective security is still based on the same kind of fear: states within the international community still live in fear of military defeat, foreign conquest and subjugation, since some are still expected to violate the norm of world peace, even though most states have already renounced wars of conquest.

Collaborative human security still relies on the logic of fear, but turns analytical attention away from military conquest or aggression as the ultimate form of threat by locating sources of threat to security across and within the national boundaries. Proponents of human security do not argue that military sources of threat are not important at all. But they seek to broaden the focus to include the fear of violent death, political subjugation and want. The fear of violent death and political subjugation includes the slaughter of civilians, civil conflict and state-sanctioned aggression.⁸ Individuals are free when they are not subject to the politico-military control of other states or dictatorship as well as various other sources of threat to their personal survival and rights. From a classical liberal perspective, political and civil rights are most fundamental to human freedom/ security. ‘Freedom from the fear’ of want is more of a socio-economic nature and has its intellectual roots in liberalism and includes the fears of poverty, unemployment, hunger, crime and environmental degradation.

Proponents of human security thus define fear in humanistic, rather than statist, terms and seek to reduce such fear by promoting freedom for human beings, not the freedom of sovereign states from military aggression, defeat and subjugation. Although the human security indicators are difficult to measure, freedom from living below a poverty line should serve as a key pointer for assessing the degree to which the fear of want (including survivable levels of per capita income, equitable access to health care and sufficient food consumption) was effectively reduced. Life expectancy in non-violent situations, however, should be the overall measure of fear reduction.

The methods for achieving human security also differ from those advocated by realists. Proponents of human security see military means to achieve national security as often working against human security. As the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty put it, the traditional narrow conception of security ‘diverts enormous amounts of national wealth and human resources into armaments and armed forces’. Meanwhile, ‘countries fail to protect their citizens from chronic insecurities of hunger, disease, inadequate shelter, crime, unemployment, social conflict and environmental hazard’.⁹

This does not mean that proponents of human security reject all military means. Two military methods for promoting human security are humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping.¹⁰ Humanitarian intervention has a cosmopolitan emphasis on the need to end widespread starvation (Somalia in 1992), to restore democracy (Haiti in 1994), to end civil war (Bosnia in 1995) or to stop ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Kosovo in 1999).¹¹ Traditionally, it has been treated as the international community’s ‘right to intervene’ in situations where human beings suffer from violent conflict, civil disorder and repression. The International Commission on Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty redefines the concept by introducing the term ‘the responsibility to protect’. The international community has the responsibility to intervene in violent situations, where there is either ‘large-scale loss of life’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’. Intra-state UN peacekeeping can also promote human security in helping to control and resolve conflicts between hostile domestic parties.¹² Peacebuilding promotes human security through specific methods designed to prevent conflict from recurring. According to John Cockell, it ‘is a sustained process of preventing internal threats to human security from causing protracted, violent conflict’.¹³ There are at least three methods: legal, political and economic. The first emphasizes justice issues; for instance, efforts have been made to build an international criminal justice system, viewed as a way to build peace through justice.¹⁴ The second is of a political nature, primarily because of its emphasis on democratic institution building to promote liberal democracy based on free and fair elections and human rights.¹⁵ The third relies on socio-economic development.¹⁶ Together these methods provide the basis for market democracy building aimed at promoting freedom from the fear of violent death, subjugation and want.

Regarding the question of who provides security, realist perspectives contend that it is the state that provides for its citizens. Clearly, however, states may not always protect their citizens, and some may even use violence against them. But the real problem is not states as such, but rather types of states. In Barry Buzan’s view, only ‘strong states’, defined in terms of internal stability and cohesion, are capable of providing their citizens with the security they need.¹⁷ It should be stressed that proponents of human security do not argue that states are unimportant. States thus have the primary responsibility to protect their own citizens and to promote human security in partnership with other actors,¹⁸ but they add that when states fail to protect their own people, outside actors must step in. Proponents of human security thus recognize the contribution of international organizations, such as the UN and its specialized agencies,¹⁹ regional organizations, and other non-state actors. For example, in peacebuilding, non-state actors include NGOs, business, media, scientific, professional and educational communities. Those that have their foundations within the new social movements ‘represent values and aspirations associated with peoples rather than with states’, including non-violent conflict resolution, the promotion of human rights, sustainable development, and social and economic justice.²⁰ Furthermore, collaborative human security seeks to balance state aggression against people through a system of checks and balances and the preponderant power of the international community, whereby actors go beyond their own self-interest or even mutual interest to act in the best interest of others. Collaboration depends on their ideological consensus on humanistic values, the presence of their shared commitment to human security, and action taken for a common purpose.

In sum, collaborative human security is a normative and empirical commitment to scholarship and humanity based on the understanding that the individual, not the state, is the main unit of analysis, that security means freedom from the fear of violent death, political subjugation and want (not simply the fear of foreign aggression or military defeat or subjugation), and that state, interstate and non-state actors are capable of taking collaborative action to promote this type of security. The following sections assess the impact of actors collaborating to promote human security in Cambodia.

Cambodia: Who Provides Security and How?

Cambodia provides a suitable case for testing the concept of collaborative human security. The country has a long history of armed conflict, political repression and poverty. Following the end of the Khmer Empire in 1431, it became subject to invasion and domination by several foreign powers, including Thailand, Vietnam, Spain (late sixteenth century) and France (1863–1953).²¹ From the time it gained its independence in 1953 to the end of the 1960s, it was under Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s paternalistic authoritarian rule. During 1970–78, Cambodians under the Khmer Republican and the Khmer Rouge regimes suffered from internal repression and crimes against humanity. The sources of threat to personal security were numerous. Physical violence during the civil war from 1970 to 1974 resulted in deaths estimated at somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000. Many thousands of ethnic Vietnamese were massacred and some 120,000 Vietnamese fled in fear to Vietnam. About two million Cambodians became internally displaced refugees, seeking refuge in the cities because of the war and bombing. Under the Khmer Rouge regime, between one and three million Cambodians are said to have died from brutality by Khmer Rouge soldiers and cadres, starvation, forced labour and lack of medical care.²² In 1978, Vietnam invaded and established a tight grip of socialist authoritarian rule.²³ The situation improved in the 1980s, but was nowhere near to a decent degree of human security. Many Cambodians still fell victim to landmines, which killed between 200 and 300 per month. In the early 1990s, Cambodia was estimated to have between 22,000 and 30,000 amputees. Throughout the 1980s, its people were still dying in the ongoing civil war, deprived of their political rights and civil liberties.²⁴ Freedom from fear of want was also limited. Basic human needs were not met. The high rates of morbidity and mortality were caused partly by an uncertain food supply. Hunger and malnutrition were common. Life expectancy improved only slightly, to about 49 years during 1982–93.²⁵

Only in the early 1990s was Cambodia brought into the global fold of post-Cold War states making democratic transitions when four warring factions–the State of Cambodia (SOC), the Khmer Rouge (officially known as Democratic Kampuchea or DK), the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), and the royalist party known as FUNCINPEC–signed the Paris Agreements on 23 October 1991 and agreed to turn their battlefield into a ballot box.²⁶ From analysis of the objectives of the agreements, it becomes clear that the signatories sought not only to defend the sovereignty of Cambodia as a state within the UN system, but also to promote the personal security of its people. The agreements did not negate the principle of state sovereignty, but in addition referred to ‘people’ as sovereign. The concept of popular sovereignty was thus fundamental to the agreements, which reaffirmed ‘the inalienable rights of States freely to determine their own pol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: UN Peace Operations and Asian Security
• Current Trends in UN Peacekeeping: A Perspective from Asia
• A Regional Perspective of UN Peace Operations in Southeast Asia
• NGOs in Conflict Management in Southeast Asia
• Japan’s Policy towards UN Peacekeeping Operations
• China’s Changing Attitude to UN Peacekeeping
• Collaborative Human Security? The UN and Other Actors in Cambodia
• The United Nations and East Timor: From Self-Determination to State-Building
• Conclusion: Asian Norms and Practices in UN Peace Operations
• Digest
• Documentation