ABSTRACT
As an influential international organization, the United Nations (UN) has the legal mandate to maintain international peace and security. It does this through various means including peace operations. The fluidity and exigencies of wars and violent conflicts; and the need for the use of appropriate strategies and fallouts of peace operations have led to various reforms. This dissertation examines the key factors and reports that necessitated UN’s peacekeeping reforms in the 21st century and its implications on the conduct of some peacekeeping operations particularly in Africa since 2000 till date. The study is hinge on the theory of collective security, which explains how UN peacekeeping operations evolved as a strategy for the maintenance of international peace and security. The study employs the qualitative method of research using semi-structured interviews to collect relevant primary data from the respondents who were selected through purposive sampling technique. The study revealed that, cotemporary security challenges, coupled with changing prevailing security dynamics as well as experiences and difficulties faced by UN peacekeepers during peacekeeping missions are the major factors that necessitated UN peacekeeping reforms in the 21st century. The study also found out that, although the UN had instituted many reforms on peacekeeping operations in the 21st century, the Brahimi Report in 2000 and the HIPPO report in 2015 are the most prominent peacekeeping reforms. These two reforms are the landmark reforms and currently cover every aspect of the UN peacekeeping architecture. The study proved that current peacekeeping reforms has help put the protection of civilians at the forefront of current peace operation in Africa, and has ushered in more robust and multidimensional peacekeeping operations on the continent, while improving cooperation between the UN and AU in tackling Africa’s security challenges. The dissertation concludes by recommending that, the UN should clearly define its POC doctrine, and provide adequate resources for peace operations in Africa. Also, there is the need for more consultative and inclusive decision making between the UN and AU when drafting peacekeeping mandate.
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
Introduction to the Research Problem
The primary purpose for the establishment of the United Nations (UN) was to maintain international peace and security in an effort to prevent another World War. Although peacekeeping emerged after the formation of the UN as a necessity but was never part of the original design of the UN, as there is no mention of in the UN Charter.1 Originally, peacekeepers were only sent into a conflict environment where there was a “peace to keep”. Thus, they were only deployed after a ceasefire agreement had been reach among the warring parties, and they were there as military observers or a neutral party, in an effort to make sure all warring factions adhered to the peace agreement. Without an explicit definition, it makes it difficult to define the term peacekeeping without narrowing its scope and flexibility.2 The changing nature of the scope of peacekeeping over the years makes it difficult to have a universal definition for it. There are core principles of traditional peacekeeping operations namely consent, impartiality and minimum use of force.
Former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld famously defined peacekeeping as belonging to “Chapter VI and a Half” of the UN Charter. He placed peacekeeping in between pacific settlement (Chapter VI) and military action (Chapter VII).3 Agenda for Peace by Boutros Boutros Ghali in 1992, was the first attempt by the UN to define the term peacekeeping, it defined peacekeeping as “the deployment of a United Nations presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned, normally involving United Nations military and/or police personnel and frequently civilians as well”.4 Diehl also defines peacekeeping as “the prevention,
containment, moderation and termination of hostilities, through peaceful third-party intervention, organized and directed internationally, using multinational forces of soldiers, police, and civilians to restore and maintain peace.”5 In 2008, the Capstone Doctrine also defined UN peacekeeping as;
“A technique designed to preserve the peace, however fragile, where fighting has been halted, and to assist in implementing agreements achieved by the peacemakers. Over the years, peacekeeping has evolved from a primarily military model of observing ceasefires and the separation of forces after inter-state wars, to incorporate a complex model of many elements– military, police and civilian – working together to help lay the foundations for sustainable peace.”6
All these varying definitions show how UN peacekeeping has evolved over the years, making it very difficult to have a universal definition for it. For the purpose of this paper, the term peacekeeping will be used interchangeablywith peace support operations and peace operations as and when the term changes with subsequent reforms.
UN deployed its first peacekeeping mission in 1948, to oversee the Armistice Agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbours, since then there have been 71 peacekeeping missions, covering almost all the continents in the world.7 The UN has used peacekeeping “to provide security and political, and peace building support to help countries transition from conflict to peace, protect civilians, assist in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants, support for organizing free and fair elections and the promotion and protection of human rights.”8 Currently, the UN has 14 peacekeeping missions in four continents, with 124 contributing nations, and 104,043 personnel, which consist of 87,916 uniformed personnel, 12,830 civilian personnel and 1,308 U.N. Volunteers.9 The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) is the largest in the world with about 22,492
peacekeepers. The UN spends approximately $6.80 billion every year on peacekeeping missions around the world, with the bulk going to missions in Africa.10
Post-Cold War upsurge in conflicts called for an unprecedented need for more peacekeeping operations and peacekeepers, but this time around with roles that are more complex. Thus, now peacekeepers moved away from being military observers to civilian protectors, election monitors and nation builders. Unfortunately, in many cases the organization failed to live up to these expectations, as UN military failures became common in the 1990s, with Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia serving as key reminders.
These peacekeeping reports seek to evaluate the whole UN peacekeeping architecture, which consist of several areas, but for the purpose of this research I will be assessing these impacts of the reports in only five key areas in UN peacekeeping, which are (i) Protection of Civilians (ii)Peacekeeping mandates (iii) Peacebuilding (iv) UN partnerships with other regional organizations and (v) Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA). These five key areas give me enough information to assess these reports, and also seem to run through all the peacekeeping reports.
Statement of the Research Problem
As an influential international organization, the UN receives huge public attention, and because of the importance of its peacekeeping operations, used as a tool to maintain international peace and security, calls for reforms are very frequent. Since the end of the Cold War UN peacekeeping operations have move away from consensual truce monitoring to a more multidimensional nature, like humanitarian intervention and assistance, election monitoring, institutional transformation, nation-building(post-conflict reconstruction) and many more.11 The
key principles of traditional peacekeeping were impartiality, consent and minimum use of force, popularly known as the ‘holy trinity’.12 However over the last two decades, these principles have evolved, especially after the failures of some UN peacekeeping operations in the mid-1990s, in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda led to gross human suffering, and the frequent use of the phrase ‘never again’ by the UN and other world leaders.
The end of the Cold War saw a significant increase in the number of violent conflicts especially in Africa. The world was ravaged with intra-state civil wars, political instability, drought and famine, endemic diseases, extreme poverty and underdevelopment, gross human rights violations and refugee crisis. From 1948 to 1988, the UN deployed only 15 peacekeeping missions around the world. Surprisingly, the number of peacekeeping missions jumped to 31 between 1989 and 1999, with the majority of them in Africa.13 Thus, the UN had to restructure its peacekeeping architecture in order to deal with these dynamic conflicts.
This new era of peacekeeping required fundamental modifications in UN peacekeeping guidelines and practices as well as a myriad of administrative reforms during the last 20 years, to enable UN peacekeeping operations to evolve to those new conditions and demanding situations..14 UN peacekeeping debacles in the 1990s in countries such as Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, led to a necessary re-evaluation of U.N. peacekeeping. Therefore, the UN started a systematic and in-depth assessment of its peacekeeping architecture with a view to strengthening its capabilities to conduct peace operations guided by some key reports such as the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (2000) popularly referred to as “Brahimi Report” and the Report of the High- Level Panel on Peace Operations (2015), also known as “HIPPO Report”. The reforms have impacted some areas including the Protection of Civilians (POC), Mandates, Peacebuilding, UN
partnerships with other regional organizations such as the African Union (AU), and Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. The aim of this research therefore, is to assess how some of these reports have ushered in peacekeeping reforms of reforms and its implications on the conduct of some peace operations particularly in Africa since 2000.
Research Questions
- What factors and reports necessitated UN’s peacekeeping reforms in the 21st century?
- What are the consequent reforms and its implication on UN peace operations particularly in Africa?
- What implementation challenges have these reforms faced and the way forward for the UN in the conduct of peace operations in Africa?
- What is the way forward for UN in the conduct of peace operations in Africa?
