The UN Secretariat's Influence on the Evolution of Peacekeeping

S. Weinlich

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137309358
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using a unique analytical framework, the UN Secretariat's Influence on the Evolution of Peacekeeping reveals deep insights in the UN's peacekeeping decision-making and shows that even international bureaucracies with limited autonomy can shape international politics.

1

Introduction

In 1994 the former American ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and well-known UN critic, John Bolton, attacked the UN by saying: ‘The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference’ (CNN 2005). While Bolton is renowned for his suspicion with regard to the legitimacy and efficiency of the world organisation, his words direct our attention towards a phenomenon that has only recently begun to generate greater scholarly attention: the influence of international bureaucracies. Do international bureaucracies matter and, if so, how do they matter and to what extent? Nowadays, with few exceptions, international bureaucracies are constituent parts of intergovernmental organisations. Together with intergovernmental organs, they make up international governmental organisations as diverse as the World Health Organization, the African Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Like bureaucracies in general, international bureaucracies are creatures of modernity, first established in Europe. The increase in international interactions in the second half of the 19th century led to the creation of permanent international organisations that soon needed staff to support their initially mostly coordinative activities. The Secretariats of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization count as the first real international bureaucracies. They comprised international staff recruited on the principle of geographical diversity and merit who owed allegiance to the goals of the organisation and were to act independently of national interest (Bennett 1977; Langrod 1963). Compared with the mostly technical tasks that international Secretariats were initially created for, their duties and functions have changed significantly in terms of both quantity and quality. The ‘management of routine’ – that is, conference services, translations, document and printing services, and other general support functions – still makes up a large part of their activities (Davies 2003: 363–93; Xu and Weller 2004: 40). Yet many international bureaucracies also perform tasks with greater political relevance.

Four broad categories of activity can be distinguished (Liese and Weinlich 2006: 498–500). First, international bureaucracies engage in the generation, categorisation and analysis of knowledge (see also Barnett and Finnemore 2004: 31–2). They collect, evaluate and disseminate information concerning social, economic, demographical, environmental, human rights, political and even military developments of member states and the world as a whole. Such information may be used to monitor state compliance with international treaty obligations, to support member states in their decisions, or for early warning purposes. The information might also help in defining a new problem worthy of international action, inform the planning and implementation of operational programmes, or may be made available to the wider public. Second, international bureaucracies promote international norms. They seek to persuade states to sign or ratify multilateral treaties or other agreements, and promote adherence and norm compliance (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009a; Finnemore 1993; Schimmelfennig 2005). Third, international bureaucracies support intergovernmental negotiation processes within and outside international organisations (Xu and Weller 2004: 40–7). They prepare agendas, formulate policy options, support the president or chair of, and even draft bits and pieces (or more) of multilateral agreements, resolutions, programme documents and other papers. Senior officials in particular may perform mediation and moderation functions in negotiation processes within the international organisation or in the settlement of disputes between member states (Newman 1998). Fourth, international bureaucracies carry out the implementation of programmes on the ground. Such field activities take many different forms and include monitoring compliance with international rules and norms, such as the protection of children, the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and the adherence to human rights. They comprise the planning and execution of programmes as diverse as fighting poverty, preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, improving access to drinking water, empowering women, and capacity-building. Refugee and humanitarian relief work is part of it, as is the planning and execution of multidimensional peace operations.

1.1 The agency of international bureaucracies

It is hardly possible to imagine world politics without the work of international bureaucracies. At the same time, we possess little systematic knowledge about their role and influence. ‘Taken together, the state of knowledge on the influence and dynamics of international bureaucracies in world politics is unsatisfactory’, Bierman and Siebenhühner (2009b: 3) concluded in their seminal volume on international bureaucracies in environmental politics. One of the reasons for this is that many scholars who investigate international organisations as actors have not bothered to distinguish between the thickly institutionalised interactions of states within a given international organisation and the actual international bureaucracy, acting on behalf of the organisation as a whole (Bauer and Weinlich 2011: 251–2). In general, the disciplines that would traditionally study international organisations – political science, international relations, international law – have disregarded international bureaucracies and their potential impact on world politics (Venzke 2008). This is not only significant because we do not know enough about a large group of actors and their agency but also because this neglect might lead to a misconception of the agency of other actors, as Biermann and Siebenhühner (2009b: 2) argue. They warn that ‘the limited understanding of the influence of international bureaucracies is likely to mislead conclusions about the state of world politics and to result in an overemphasis on state power and on a perception of international institutions as mere structures devised by states with no role of other actors’.

The fields of international relations and global governance have only recently started to pay more attention to international organisations and international bureaucracies, and their role and influence. Scholars have been engaging in debates about whether international bureaucracies should be considered autonomous actors. They discuss the degree and the limits to their autonomy, and debate which kind of authority or even power international bureaucracies are able to exert, or whether their actions are predominantly guided by the directives of states or by the respective organisational cultures. Scholars offer widely diverging interpretations. No one assumes anymore that international bureaucracies dutifully fulfil their missions and only work for the greater global good. They are considered to be ‘invisible governors’ (Mathiason 2007) and ‘managers of global change’ (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009a), or are called ‘institutional Frankensteins’ who terrorise the global countryside, who have slipped the restraints imposed by their creators – states – and run amok (Hawkins et al. 2006b: 4). Others depict them rather as slaves to powerful Western countries that impose their will on the world by means of international organisations (Mearsheimer 1995).

1.2 The case: The influence of the UN Secretariat on the evolution of peacekeeping

The overall aim of this book is to enhance our understanding of the influence of international bureaucracies in world politics by means of an in-depth case study. The study focuses on the UN Secretariat and its influence on the evolution of peacekeeping. The analysis is driven by three research questions:

• Has the Secretariat influenced the evolution of peacekeeping?

• If so, how did it exert influence?

• To what extent has it influenced the evolution of peacekeeping?

The Secretariat and peacekeeping are chosen for several reasons. The Secretariat is a well-known, well-established international bureaucracy that is actively involved in many areas of world politics. While its history and reform processes have been scrutinised (Dijkzeul and Beigbeder 2003; Myint-U and Scott 2007), and many UN textbooks dedicate a section to it (Gordenker 2005; Ziring et al. 2005), scholars have always paid more attention to the head of the organisation, the UN Secretary-General. The Secretary-General’s room for manoeuvre is periodically re-explored (Chesterman 2007; Johnstone 2003; Rivlin and Gordenker 1993), yet there is little knowledge of the Secretariat’s influence. The UN does not belong to the group of ‘usual suspects’ which are in the limelight of research. Bureaucracies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank or the EU institutions allegedly possess a high degree of autonomy and are investigated more often (Haftel and Thompson 2006: 254). Rather in contrast, the Secretariat has been renowned for having its work monitored and interfered with by member states. Taken together, this makes the Secretariat an interesting and relevant object of study.

Peacekeeping is among the most important fields of activity of the UN and it has been undergoing profound changes. It refers to a technique of essentially non-violent conflict management by deploying military and/or civilian personnel. Initially invented as a crisis-management tool during the Suez Crisis, with heavy involvement of the then Secretary-General, Hammarskjöld, and his close staff, during the Cold War it was occasionally used to provide space for political solutions to interstate conflicts and to avoid the escalation of regional conflicts. However, peacekeeping has taken on a new guise. Today’s peace operations¹ are billion-dollar enterprises involving altogether hundreds of thousands of military, police and civilian personnel who seek to assist in rebuilding war-ridden states and societies. Many authors have described the fundamental changes that have taken place. There is no lack of scholarly work on single UN peace operations, or on their positive and negative effects on host countries (Chesterman 2004; Dobbins et al. 2005; Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Durch 1993a; 1996a; 2006). Likewise, taxonomies and classifications of different phases, modes or generations of peace operations exist in abundance (Bellamy et al. 2004; Goulding 1993; James 1990). Only a small number of authors, however, have tried to systematically explain the fundamental changes (Lipson 2007). Similarly, only few scholars have explicitly focused on the activities of the Secretariat and their impact on the overall changes in peacekeeping (Benner et al. 2011; Karns 2012). Since the Secretariat is an important peacekeeping player that not only is responsible for information and knowledge generation but also supports the intergovernmental negotiations and is the main implementing agent of peace operations, this can indeed be considered a shortcoming of the literature. The analysis of the influence of the Secretariat as undertaken in this book therefore contributes to a better understanding of what brought about the evolution of peacekeeping and the emergence of a new peacekeeping model, and it helps to provide a better appraisal of the impact of the actions of international bureaucrats at the East River.

The focus on the Secretariat and the policy area of peacekeeping constitutes possibly a hard case for the study of the influence of international bureaucracies. Peacekeeping belongs to the area of security policy. Because this is closely linked to the very survival of states, states are considered to guard their sovereignty and control over such matters more closely than in other policy areas. Therefore they are likely to be more restrictive towards the activities of international bureaucracies. In addition, the study’s focus will be on UN headquarters and the Secretariat’s interactions with member states. This makes it even more likely that there will be limits to the Secretariat’s influence. As Cox et al. (1973: 5–6) concluded from their comparative study of international organisations, international bureaucracies have less influence in forum organisations that principally provide an arena for cooperation of member states than they do in organisations that perform operational tasks. In the area of peacekeeping the UN can be considered a hybrid organisation. It does both, providing an important forum to member states on security issues and performing a growing multitude of operational tasks. Many of the organisation’s rules and regulations, however, were never changed to accommodate the vastly expanded operational responsibilities. In this regard, the UN proper differs from UN funds and programmes, such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which can act with much greater discretion (Malloch-Brown 2008).

Peacekeeping comprises not only the actual peace operations but also related UN policies, polity and politics. The evolution of peacekeeping is here conceptualised as the move from a Cold War peacekeeping model towards the emergence of a 21st-century peacekeeping model. Both models possess distinct operational, institutional and conceptual characteristics (see Chapter 2). Surely the transition from one model to the other was advanced by a vast number of decisions taken by a multitude of actors at UN headquarters, in national capitals and in the field. Systemic shifts, such as the end of the Cold War or the relative increase in internal conflicts, also played a crucial role. In order to be able to assess the influence of the Secretariat on the evolution from one peacekeeping model to another, the book concentrates on peacekeeping decision-making at UN headquarters. This focus seems justified because these decisions are at the origins of all peacekeeping activities. As two peacekeeping experts noted, ‘While missions have considerable autonomy once they reach the field, the conceptual underpinnings, strategic goals, political guidance, and capabilities with which they deploy are largely determined by planning at UN headquarters’ (Holt and Taylor 2009: 101). Moreover, in line with the assumption of a hard case, the Secretariat’s autonomy at UN headquarters is assumingly more limited than in the field where the Secretariat acts as the implementing agent of peace operations. Since nearly all UN member states have a permanent presence in New York, it is easier for them to monitor and interfere with the Secretariat’s activities.

To further narrow down the focus, the analysis of the Secretariat’s influence will concentrate on three manageable units of analysis – namely, three decisions that can be considered crucial for the emergence of the new peacekeeping model. Decisions are considered critical if they stand at the beginning of a development that becomes more intensive in terms of scope or scale over the years. Accordingly, i) the establishment of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) in 1999/2000; ii) the instigation of peacekeeping reforms and doctrine development by the report of the panel on peace operations (Brahimi Report) in 2000/2001; and iii) the creation of the Standing Police Capacity (SPC), a small cadre of uniformed personnel under the authority of the Secretary-General, are chosen as in-depth case studies.

Arguably the most important evolution concerning the operational characteristics of UN peacekeeping is that today’s operations have transformative objectives and seek to create societies and states that are stable at minimum, if not more democratic and prosperous. Most of today’s UN peace operations intervene deeply in the society and institutions of host states. UNTAET, created in October 1999, is situated at the extreme end of the interventionist spectrum covered by UN peace operations. With its transformative mandate and comprehensive responsibilities in the military, administrative, humanitarian and socioeconomic realm, it was essentially authorised to exert government functions. It was furthermore entrusted with the coordination of humanitarian assistance and economic development, and the preparation for self-government. The actual robust peacekeeping functions were only a subset of the peace operation’s responsibilities. The Security Council devised a unique mandate that stands out from other mandates of multidimensional peace operations. For the first time in history it authorised the UN to take total control of a country, and vested all executive, legislative, judicial and military power in a UN official, the transitional administrator. This mandate gave the UN greater powers than in the three previous cases of modern transitional administrations – in Namibia (1989/90), Cambodia (1993/4) and Eastern Slavonia (1996–8) (Chesterman 2004). The UN undertook ‘sweeping responsibilities unprecedented in scope and complexity for any international institution’ (Griffin and Jones 2000: 77). The only other operation that gained as vast a responsibility was the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK), established only a few months before, in June 1999. The decision to establish UNMIK could also have served as a case study. However, UNMIK is considered to be an outlier case.² Although the UN has not taken over any other transitional administrations since, UNTAET’s mandate became a role model for other peace operations. The planning and mounting of UNTAET has been scrutinised by various reports of the UN and independent research groups (Azimi and Chang 2003; Conflict, Security and Development Group 2003; UN Joint Inspection Unit 2002). Lessons from the UN response to East Timor directly flew into the Brahimi Report and translated into reforms, for example, in the area of staffing and budgeting (Harston 2003: 230). UNTAET’s civil-affairs and rule-of-law functions were subsequently adopted in other multidimensional missions, such as in Sudan, and Burundi where, de facto, a state existed but its authority did not cover the whole national territory (Kaspersen and Sending 2005; Sherman 2010).

The most important evolution concerning the conceptual characteristics of UN peacekeeping is that they have grown more definite. It is by far clearer today than in the early 1990s what peace operations can or cannot do. A broad consensus has emerged regarding what peacekeeping should be, which activities it includes and how strong the use of force should be. The 2007 peacekeeping Capstone Doctrine mirrors this consensus, and forms, together with an ever-growing body of policy guidance, the conceptual underpinnings of peacekeeping. This new clarity means a parting from the strictly interpreted traditional peacekeeping principles and a better appreciation of the grey areas between peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peacebuilding. Although the consent of the host country remains important, peace operations are expected to use force in order to protect civilians who are in danger. For a long time, conceptual issues of UN peacekeeping were decided by the Security Council; they were concomitant with its mandating of individual peace operations. Only recently have UN member states become less opposed to fixing a dedicated peacekeeping doctrine. It was the Brahimi Report and the subsequent set of decisions taken by the Security Council and the General Assembly that heralded the start of explicit doctrine development. The Brahimi Report continues to be the most influential peacekeeping document to date. It is considered to be ‘conventional wisdom, if not outright gospel’ (Smith 2009: 1). Be it the peacekeeping reform agenda of 2010, the Capstone Doctrine or the latest ‘New Horizon’ project, all of these conceptual and institutional guidelines build on and refer to the work of the Brahimi panel. On the occasion of the report’s tenth anniversary, the responsible Under-Secretary-General, Le Roy (2010), judged that

It [the Brahimi Report] laid the foundation for policy consensus among peacekeeping stakeholders regarding the use and application of UN peacekeeping. It underlined that peacekeeping missions should deploy only when there is a peace to keep. It reaffirmed the three basic principles of UN peacekeeping – consent, impartiality, and the non-use of force except in self-defence – while providing guidance on the implementation of these principles in complex post-conflict settings.

The Brahimi Report and the subsequent Security Council and General Assembly reform decisions are considered to have been critical to the development of the conceptual characteristics of UN peacekeeping, therefore they are selected as a case for analysing and assessing the influence of the Secretariat.

The organisational structures for the planning and implementation of UN peacekeeping have become much denser, more professional and more formalised. This can be considered the most important development in the institutional realm. The UN’s capacities to undertake peace operations have grown larger, more permanent and more professional than ever before, although they continue to be under strain. While many missions continue to lack crucial assets and the UN’s access to peacekeeping forces still remains ad hoc, its access to police and civilian personnel has grown much more institutionalised. One development in the area of police and rule of law sticks out and can be considered critical to the trend towards better-regulated access to personnel and improved UN peacekeeping capacities. The establishment of the SPC in 2005 avails the UN with a core foundation of police and law-enforcement expertise that it did not have before. To date the creation of the SPC represents the most far-reaching development in the overall trend towards m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping: Towards the Emergence of a 21st-Century Peacekeeping Model
• 3. The Influence of International Bureaucracies: A Framework for Analysis
• 4. The UN Secretariat’s Capacities for Autonomous Action
• 5. The Operational Dimension: The Peace Operation in East Timor
• 6. The Conceptual Dimension: The Decisions to Reform UN Peacekeeping and Instigate Doctrine Development
• 7. The Institutional Dimension: The Creation of the Standing Police Capacity
• 8. The Shaping Powers of the UN Secretariat: Conclusions and Future Prospects for Studying the Role of International Bureaucracies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index