The United Nations as a central actor in multilateral peacekeeping.

 

While multilateral peace operations have been authorized by a variety of international organizations, the UN peace operations remain at the centre of all major political, conceptual, and normative debates about international peacekeeping. Since their inception in the late 1940s, UN peace operations have evolved in response to novel global political dynamics and changing conflict constellations. Initially focused on monitoring ceasefires and maintaining peace between warring states (peacekeeping), during the last three decades the role of UN peace operations has expanded to include a much broader array of functions aimed at supporting sustainable peace across the entire conflict cycle, including in the midst of active armed conflicts. Until the end of 2024, the UN had deployed over 120 peace operations in more than 50 countries.

Since the 1950s, UN peacekeeping has been guided by the three key principles of impartiality, consent, and the non-use of force. As a core norm of peacekeeping, impartiality prescribed that UN officials should be unbiased when making decisions and particularly so in implementing their mandate. The main parties to a conflict should consent to peacekeeping, and UN peace missions should not use force, except in self-defence (and in defence of the mandate). Between 1948 and the end of 1980s, these principles were upheld, but few peacekeeping operations were newly established [see Figure 2]. UN missions need to be authorized by the UN Security Council, and during the Cold War the two super-powers, United States and the (then) Soviet Union, used their veto to block any UN involvement in dealing with violent conflicts and peace settlements in areas of strategic interest to them, so that a range of major conflicts could not be handled through UN peace missions. Nevertheless, in 1988, UN peacekeepers were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The end of the Cold War offered a window of opportunity for making the UN a more substantial and encompassing peace actor. The idea of attributing the UN a more prominent role in international efforts to manage violent conflicts did no longer face principled opposition within the UN Security Council. The demise of the global bipolar system also provoked a range of violent conflicts in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa and Asia over the control of state power and resource flows. International peace and stability seemed now to be less threatened by interstate war than by intra-state conflicts and civil wars. In this context, the Agenda for Peace tabled by UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali in 1992 claimed a comprehensive and active role for the UN in stabilizing this post-Cold War world. The UN mandate should thus cover the entire conflict cycle, laying out concepts and strategies for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping, as well as peacebuilding, considered at the time as post-conflict efforts to strengthen and solidify peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992). The Agenda for Peace represents the first conceptual step in the evolution of UN thinking on peacebuilding and peace operations [see Figure 3]. While the military remained the backbone of UN peace operations, they were thus incrementally turned from restricted observational missions to multidimensional interventions, combining “keeping the peace” with restructuring of security sectors (through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration), supervising elections, promoting human rights, reconciliation, and at times also assuming civilian administrative roles. According to this new UN thinking, sustainable peace would be created through the (re)construction of liberal post-conflict political orders. Between 1989 and 1994, the UN Security Council authorized 20 new operations, among them securing complex peace agreements in Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and Namibia, thus increasing the number of blue helmets from 11,000 to 75,000.1 UN peace missions were also established in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Somalia, yet these three operations dramatically revealed the limits of UN peacekeeping in contexts of ongoing violent conflict. The new volatile contexts and more hostile environments represented a major challenge to the key principles of UN peacekeeping. Independent inquiries into UN actions during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and a UN Secretary-General report into the events of Srebrenica stressed the imperative for the UN to protect civilians. Within UN doctrines, starting with the Brahimi Report of 2000 (UN 2000), a shift occurred from a passive to a proactive conception of impartiality which requested UN missions in particular to protect civilians and human rights, irrespective of whether non-state actors or elements of the state apparatus posed a threat to civilians. Since then, protecting civilians is a standard element of peacekeeping mandates, yet UN contingents often lack the military resources required to prevent attacks on the people they are supposed to protect. While the principle of non-use of force might have been relaxed, in practice the use of deadly force, particularly in a proactive or preventive manner, remains a relatively rare occurrence (Duursma et al 2023: 420). In fact, during the more recent UN operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic, local populations even launched protests against the UN missions there for their failure to proactively fight rebel groups. The third peacekeeping principle, i.e. the main conflict parties’ consent to peacekeeping, has also been modified over time, and was increasingly understood as consent of the host state within post-1990s missions deployed in intra-state wars. The main lesson drawn from failures in Bosnia and Rwanda was not to reduce ambitions, but to upscale, and to move towards more complex and multidimensional missions, centred on protecting civilians, but also seeking to contribute to longer-term peace- and state-building. In East Timor (UNTAET) and Kosovo (UNMIK), the UN served as de facto authority of would-be independent new states. In 2000, UN Security Council also approved resolution 1325 formally establishing the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, which required UN peace operations to integrate gender relations into their mandates. In the following years, the UN Security Council authorized additional major peacekeeping operations, especially in Africa, such as in Burundi (2004), Chad and Central African Republic (2007), Côte d’Ivoire (2004), Liberia (2003), as well as several missions in Sudan and South Sudan (2005, 2007, 2011). Outside Africa, new missions were established briefly in Syria (2012) and Haiti (2004). Traditional observer peacekeeping missions in the Middle East (1948), Jammu/Kashmir (1949), Cyprus (1964), and the Western Sahara (1991) were also maintained