Understanding Peacekeeping

Paul D. Williams, Alex J. Bellamy

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780745686752
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Politics

Peace operations remain a principal tool for managing armed conflict and protecting civilians. The fully revised, expanded and updated third edition of Understanding Peacekeeping provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the theory, history, and politics of peace operations.

Drawing on a dataset of nearly two hundred historical and contemporary missions, this book evaluates the changing characteristics of the contemporary international environment in which peace operations are deployed, the strategic purposes peace operations are intended to achieve, and the major challenges facing today's peacekeepers.All the chapters have been revised and updated, and five new chapters have been added – on stabilization, organized crime, exit strategies, force generation, and the use of force.

Part 1 summarizes the central concepts and issues related to peace operations. Part 2 charts the historical development of peacekeeping, from 1945 through to 2020. Part 3 analyses the strategic purposes that United Nations and other peace operations are intended to achieve – namely, prevention, observation, assistance, enforcement, stabilization, and administration. Part 4 looks forward and examines the central challenges facing today's peacekeepers: force generation, the regionalization and privatization of peace operations, the use of force, civilian protection, gender issues, policing and organized crime, and exit strategies.

PART I
CONCEPTS AND ISSUES

1
Peace Operations in Global Politics

This chapter analyses the relationships between peace operations and global politics. Initially, peacekeeping was concerned mainly with creating the conditions for states to settle their disputes peacefully. Over time, as interstate war diminished and the frequency of civil wars within states increased, peace operations were used more frequently to maintain peace within states and sometimes to influence domestic structures in order to turn war-torn territories into peaceful democratic societies. Whereas the Westphalian order rested on a notion of sovereignty that granted states protection from interference by outsiders, the post-Westphalian account conceived of sovereignty as entailing responsibilities, especially for the protection of their populations from atrocity crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. As the number and scope of peace operations informed by the post-Westphalian approach has grown, so too has the number of theories and conceptual frameworks used to understand them.

To address these issues, this chapter starts by summarizing the basic principles of the Westphalian and post-Westphalian conceptions of international order and the respective role of peace operations within them. The second section then presents different ways of theorizing peace operations and five prominent theoretical approaches that offer insights into the roles that peace operations play in global politics. Finally, we note the conclusions of existing scholarship about the overall impacts peace operations have had on trends in armed conflict.

1.1 Westphalian and post-Westphalian order

Peace operations were initially conceived as a tool for maintaining order between states. As discussed in this book’s Introduction, we label this context the ‘Westphalian’ international order even though it coexisted with continuing forms of empire and colonial rule. Within this context, the principal role of peace operations was the facilitation of decolonization and the peaceful settlement of disputes between states. In contrast, advocates of what we call a ‘post-Westphalian’ order suggested peace operations should sometimes also play a role in shaping the domestic governance structures of states to ensure the government fulfilled its responsibilities to its civilian population. This post-Westphalian view rose to ascendancy at the United Nations during the 1990s, although it remained highly controversial for some UN member states which preferred a more limited vision of what peace operations should be for. To some extent, the twenty-first century has seen a merging of these two visions as more peace operations were tasked with ‘stabilization’ activities, helping the host state impose its authority across its territory. These missions, such as those in Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Mali and, initially, South Sudan, have been quite intrusive in terms of their involvement in domestic affairs (and are thus ‘post-Westphalian’). But their principal aim is to support the state in fulfilling its basic functions (and are thus to some degree classically ‘Westphalian’).

The Westphalian order takes its name from the settlements concluded at the end of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which took place between the ‘Union’ of Protestant German princes and free cities and the ‘League’ of their Catholic counterparts (Jackson 2000: 162–7). Politically, the treaties recognized the territorial sovereignty of the approximately 300 states and statelets within Europe. They also symbolized the sovereign state’s success in prevailing over other forms of political organization (Tilly 1992). In doing so, the state forcibly acquired five key monopoly powers:

1. the right to monopolize control of the instruments of violence;
2. the sole right to collect taxes;
3. the prerogative of ordering the political allegiances of citizens and of enlisting their support in war;
4. the right to adjudicate in disputes between citizens; and
5. the exclusive right of representation in international society (Linklater 1998: 28).

The treaties also reaffirmed the Peace of Augsburg (1555) at which the principle of cujus regio ejus religio was formulated, whereby each ruler declared which brand of Christianity (Protestantism or Catholicism) would hold exclusive rights within their territories and other rulers agreed to respect the sovereign’s right to determine the country’s religion (Jackson 2000: 163).

The state’s success in Europe brought with it the development of three fundamental norms (Jackson 2000: 166–7). The first norm held that the monarch was emperor in their own realm. Thus, sovereigns were not subject to any higher political authority. The second was that outsiders had no right to intervene in a foreign jurisdiction on the grounds of religion, while the third affirmed the European balance of power as a means of preventing one state from making a successful bid for hegemony that would, in effect, re-establish empire on the continent. These three norms created an international order that permitted different cultures and nations to live according to their own preferences while respecting the rights of others to do likewise and avoiding the danger of assimilation.

These norms evolved incrementally and took nearly three hundred years to develop fully. Nor was this system anywhere near universal. Despite the rise of sovereign states, until 1918 most of Europe was actually governed by empires (Russian, Austrian and Ottoman), and these norms applied only to European – and a small handful of non-European – states. A quite different set of rules applied in the colonized world. Finally, the norms and practices that characterized European diplomacy in this Westphalian order were Christian and Latin (Stern 1999: 65–9).

After the Second World War the Westphalian order gradually expanded to cover the entire globe, as former colonies sought to take their place as sovereign states (Bull and Watson 1984; Jackson 2001). Between 1947 and 1967, membership of the United Nations expanded from about fifty to over 160 (Jackson 2001: 46). By 2011, the UN had 193 members and roughly fifty additional political entities making claims to statehood. In some places the transition to sovereign statehood was relatively peaceful, but in others – such as Indochina, South Asia and Algeria – it was a bloody affair. If a global Westphalian order was to survive and achieve a degree of stability, it had to protect a sovereign’s right to rule and prevent strong states simply overpowering weak states. With decolonization and the expansion of the Westphalian order, therefore, came calls to protect the sanctity of state sovereignty through law.

Arguably the cornerstone of the Westphalian order was Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibited the threat and use of force in international relations. Alongside it, Article 2(7) insisted that the new global organization would not interfere in the domestic affairs of its members. In the subsequent years, these messages from the newly decolonized world came loud and clear and used the UN General Assembly to issue several declarations on the importance of self-determination and non-interference.

Many academics supported the idea that national communities were so different, and that diversity was a good worth preserving, that international order can be achieved only by rigid adherence to such Westphalian principles (Jackson 2000: 291). It was thought to be a short road from relaxing these Westphalian principles to relegitimating colonialism. Even today, international commitment to non-interference remains widespread and steadfast.

It was in this Westphalian order that modern peace operations were born and developed (see part II of this book). They were concerned primarily with the peaceful resolution of disputes between states but also ended up facilitating decolonization and assisting some states to suppress separatists. The Westphalian rules meant that peace operations deployed only with the consent of the host state(s). Particularly since the end of the Cold War, however, the Westphalian order was challenged by an alternative conception of sovereignty and order, which had major implications for the theory and practice of peace operations (see table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Westphalian, post-Westphalian and stabilization approaches

Echoes of the post-Westphalian approach appeared well before 1989, of course. They can even be heard in the Preamble of the UN Charter, which in many other ways is a document prescribing Westphalian rules for the world. Yet the Preamble starts with ‘We the peoples’ of the United Nations (not the member states), determined to – among other things – ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’ – ambitions that go well beyond the maintenance of stable peace between states through rules of mutual coexistence.

In the post-Cold War era, prominent post-Westphalian voices came from around the world. They included the British prime minister Tony Blair, who developed a ‘doctrine of the international community’ to justify NATO’s intervention in Serbia/Kosovo in 1999 and British military operations in Sierra Leone the following year. Another particularly important voice was that of the former Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng, who served as the UN’s Special Representative on Internal Displacement and then Special Representative on the Prevention of Genocide. With his focus on the plight of IDPs, Deng argued that, where a state was unable to fulfil its responsibilities to protect its neediest citizens, it should invite and welcome international assistance to ‘complement national efforts’ (2004: 20). Or, as he and his collaborators put it nearly a decade earlier, ‘Sovereignty carries with it certain responsibilities for which governments must be held accountable. And they are accountable not only to their national constituencies but ultimately to the international community’ (Deng et al. 1996: 1). In a similar vein, in the late 1990s, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan provided a useful shorthand for this debate as a struggle between two conceptions of sovereignty, each of which protects certain values worth preserving. As Annan noted, the ‘old orthodoxy’ of Westphalian sovereignty

was never absolute. The Charter, after all, was issued in the name of ‘the peoples’, not the governments, of the United Nations. Its aim is not only to preserve international peace – vitally important though that is – but also ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’. The Charter protects the sovereignty of peoples. It was never meant as a licence for governments to trample on human rights and human dignity. Sovereignty implies responsibility, not just power …

Can we really afford to let each State be the judge of its own right, or duty, to intervene in another State’s internal conflict? If we do, will we not be forced to legitimize Hitler’s championship of the Sudeten Germans, or Soviet intervention in Afghanistan? (Annan 1998a)

This post-Westphalian understanding of international order viewed the state’s sovereign rights as contingent on fulfilling its responsibilities to its civilian population, most notably protecting them from atrocity crimes, civil wars, forced displacement, famine, gross human rights violations, and other ills. This implied a much broader set of roles for peace operations than that envisaged by a Westphalian view. In a post-Westphalian order, peace operations need to help build states and societies capable of fulfilling these responsibilities. Where host states prove unwilling or unable to do so, peace operations should be prepared to step in. The ongoing debate between advocates of Westphalian sovereignty and proponents of the post-Westphalian approach continues to underpin contemporary arguments about the purpose of peace operations (see SIPRI 2015). But it is not the only way of thinking about the roles of peace operations in global politics. There are other prominent theories and frameworks to which we now turn.

1.2 Theorizing peace operations in global politics

Students might ask why we need to think theoretically at all about peace operations as inherently practical activities. One good reason was summarized by Roland Paris when he noted that, for too long, the study of peace operations had suffered from a ‘cult of policy relevance’ whereby ‘students … neglected broader macrotheoretical questions about the nature and significance of [peace] operations for our understanding of international politics. This omission has stunted the intellectual development of the field and isolated the study of peace operations from other branches of international relations’ (2000: 44). We should, therefore, ask what gets missed from the study of peace operations if we refus...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Concepts and Issues
• Part II Historical Development
• Part III The Purposes of Peace Operations
• Part IV Contemporary Challenges
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement