From Liberal Peace to stabilization: The future of multilateral peace operations.

 As the world is entering a phase of heightened geopolitical tensions, with open military conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the UN-led multilateral peacekeeping regime is more contested than ever, amid a wider crisis affecting UN finances and legitimacy. At the same time, it remains widely appreciated for its central role and historical record in managing a number of protracted violent conflicts. The liberal approach which had guided most multilateral peace operations since the early 1990s has lost much of its appeal, and two trends have thus shaped UN peace operations throughout the last decade: a growing concern with stabilization, and a growing number of regional organizations involved in such operations. While we observe a trend towards unilateral interventionism, UN policymakers seem divided between those who want to save peacekeeping through a pragmatic approach, orchestrating the activities of different actors with different mandates and rationales, and those which defend the broader idea of multilateral peacebuilding integrating a variety of military and non-military instruments.

Over the last three decades, a system of international peacekeeping has emerged, centred around the United Nations (UN) as the global institution mandated to secure international peace and security. UN peace operations were contested from the beginning, for their apparent narrow focus on securing a more limited or “negative” peace, for the bureaucratic, top-down and cost-intensive procedures, and for the selectivity in addressing violent conflicts around the globe. As the world is now entering a phase of heightened geopolitical tensions, with open military conflicts even in those parts of the world which had benefitted from a long absence of war and related mass killings, we might better appreciate the efforts and merits of the loose multilateral peacekeeping regime which has been established since the early 1990s, and which is now questioned, amidst a larger crisis affecting UN finances and legitimacy. The peacekeeping model has relied not only on the UN but a variety of regional security arrangements to establish peacekeeping missions in their respective regions. Discourses about the decline of the rule-based multilateral order do not refer only to open violations of international law (such as military attacks on the territory of sovereign states) but also to the relevance of international institutions for preventing violent conflicts and for managing those which have erupted in line with some core normative principles and as a joint task for the international community. The crisis of multilateralism is also a crisis of multilateral peace operations. Unfortunately, the decrease of major UN multidimensional peace operations has been accompanied by an increase in violent conflicts worldwide during the 2010s [see Figure 1]. The demand for multilateral peace operations is thus greater than ever. Therefore, the chapter will make a case for a continued and sustained support for international peacekeeping. The future of multilateral peace operations might thus consist in a better coordinated division of labour between global and regional actors as well as in a stronger appreciation of a variety of non-military instruments of peace operations. The rise of UN peacekeeping started in the 1990s, and the chapter will reconstruct key developments before discussing two major trends which have characterized the last decade, peace operations with the main goal of stabilization, as well as a regionalization of such operations. We will then conclude by sketching three different scenarios for future peace operations.