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The Ralph Bunche Centennial:Peace Operations Then and Now
James Cockayne and David M. Malone
A century after the birth of a father of peacekeeping, Ralph Bunche,UN peace operations have changed dramatically. The narrowly defined,lightly armed, strictly neutral operations of Bunches day have becomecomplex, multidisciplinary state-building operations. Then, peace-
keeping buttressed essentially self-enforcing cease-fires; now, it aimsto build the foundations of a self-renewing peace. These changesreflect six deeper shifts: the end of the Cold War; engagement withinternal conflicts; rising regional organizations; North-South politics;the U.S.-UN relationship; and changes in peace operation mandates.These shifts create three future challenges: state building; the recon-ception of sovereignty; and the need for realism. The December 2004High-Level Panel report proposes modest steps toward meeting thosechallenges, but the burden of realizing the proposed framework restssquarely with UN member states. KEYWORDS: peacekeeping, peace-building, state building, High-Level Panel, Ralph Bunche.
Scholar, civil rights activist, and Nobel Peace Laureate, Ralph
Bunche left his most enduring legacy in the field of UnitedNations peace operations. The centennial of his birth in either
2003 or 20041 served not only as an opportunity to celebrate that legacy,
but also as the occasion to reflect on the changes that have occurred in
UN peacekeeping since Bunches day.
In Bunches day, peacekeeping was a term narrowly defined andclearly understood. Today, UN peace operations cover a multiplicity of
UN field activities in support of peace, ranging from essentially pre-
ventive deployments to long-term state-building missions. In this article
we analyze the major shifts in UN peace operations since the mid-
1900s. After describing how peacekeeping operations looked in
Bunches era, we seek to identify continuities and changes in todays
peace operations. We then analyze the reasons for these changes and
conclude by examining the consequences of these changes for the UNs
involvement in world politics today and speculating on the shape of
future UN peace operations.
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Peacekeeping Then
Peacekeeping emerged not by design but out of necessity. The found-
ing members of the UN had included in Chapter VII of the UN Charter
provisions (Article 42) that allowed the UN to take action by air, sea,
or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international
peace and security. The vision of a body of national military forces
permanently available to the Security Council on its call (Article 43)
and serving as the instrument of collective security did not materialize
due to Cold War antagonisms. Paradoxically, Cold War tensions served
to increase the need for an independent and impartial actor on the world
stage, ensuring that conflicts did not spiral out of control and further
fuel the confrontation between capitalist and communist camps.
Buncheand a cast of other notables, including secretaries-generalTrygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjld; members of the UN Secretariat,
such as Brian Urquhart; and key players from the member states, par-
ticularly Lester Pearson, Canadian minister for external affairs (and
later prime minister)stepped into that gap. They generated an opera-
tional capacity for the UN that had not been imagined for the organiza-
tion. The Secretariat staff started from scratch, as Bunche himself
suggested, unaware of what peacekeeping would involve, improvising
as they went along, and making mistakes.2
The system of peacekeeping they generated involved UN missions
staffed by lightly armed Blue Helmets (as they came to be known),
operating under the strict instruction to use force only in self-defense.
Falling between Chapter VI (Pacific Settlement of Disputes) and Chap-ter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the
Peace, and Acts of Aggression), these peace operations were creatively
crafted Chapter VI 1/2 and required, in principle, invitation or con-
sent on the part of the recipient state(s).3 They operated under UN com-
mand, primarily undertaking activities agreed on by belligerents, such
as separating warring parties, monitoring borders, overseeing with-
drawal of foreign troops, and ceasing aid to irregular or insurrectionist
movements. The guiding principle of early peacekeeping was that it
must not give an advantage to either side involved in the conflict. Blue
Helmets sought to adopt an attitude of strict neutrality and objectivity.
The aims of peacekeeping in this earlier era were limited. In the
Middle East, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO)4 started
out as a truce monitoring operation, later taking on the task of super-
vising the implementation of the General Armistice Agreements, which
Bunche facilitated on Rhodes in 1949 and for which he received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Similarly, the UN Emergency Force (UNEF),5
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established by the General Assembly in the wake of the Suez crisis, was
mandated to supervise the withdrawal of foreign troops and, later, to actas a buffer between Egypt and Israel. Other peacekeeping operations
in Cyprus,6 Kashmir,7 and Yemen8had similarly limited mandates.9
Peacekeeping TodayWhat Is the Same?
Important aspects of peacekeeping remain now as they were in this ear-
lier era. A small number of the operations that Bunche oversaw remain
alive today, notably UNTSO in the Middle East, the UN Military
Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) for the Kashmir
region, and the UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP). In other areas, notably
the Congo, crises of Bunches day were resolved, only to reappear, indifferent forms, back on the Security Councils agenda today. In part,
that continuity is a product of the approach adopted by Bunche and his
colleagues, which they saw largely as buying time to allow political and
diplomatic developments to yield a solution where none had previously
been apparent.10 The resulting riskossifying an unresolved situation or
only deferring further conflict until a later date, a charge made against
the UN mission to Cyprus since 1974 and the UNs role in the Middle
East in 1967can be detected in the UNs approach to Kosovo today.
Contemporary peace operations also face many of the same opera-
tional challenges as early missions. Weak command and control, inade-
quate communications and logistical equipment, little prior opportunity
for detailed planning, and underequipped and ill-trained military per-sonnel are as much issues today as they were in Bunches day, if not
more so. In at least one area there has been an apparent decline: the
promptness with which the UN can deploy a peacekeeping force. In
Bunches day, a mission might be on the ground within weekseven
daysafter the decision to deploy; today it takes months. The reasons
for this are complex. Early missions sometimes deployed without ade-
quate support or equipment. Todays missions undertake a greatly
enlarged range of operational tasks requiring larger numbers of person-
nel. And the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has
undergone serious shake-ups affecting recruitment and deployment
times.11 The size of DPKO is also contentious. As the Brahimi Report12
of 2000 highlighted, the growth and complexity of todays peace oper-
ations have at times led to a diffusion of responsibility to a point where
it fails to be discharged.
The challenge of financing peacekeeping remains constant. Bunche
knew the problems of the tin cup, as he called it, only too well.13 So,
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too, the vulnerability of peacemakers is similar now to the situation in
Bunches day.14 The devastating attack on UN offices in Baghdad on 19August 2003, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty-one other
UN staff, demonstrated that terrorism has reemerged today as a threat to
the organization just as it was when Count Folke Bernadotte, UN media-
tor in Palestine, was assassinated in September 1948.15 It is a cold com-
fort that these attacks, separated by more than half a century, stand as tes-
tament to the ongoing appeal of the UN as a symbol of effective change,
change that can prove highly threatening to some in conflict situations.
Peacekeeping NowWhat Has Changed?
Although there are continuities between peacekeeping then and now,much has also changed. Todays peace missions do not simply monitor
cease-fires or supervise the implementation of a peace agreement
between states; more often they aim to resolve internal conflicts char-
acterized by intercommunal strife, crises of democracy, and fighting
marked by struggles over national resources and wealth, among other
precipitating causes of war. Peace operations aim increasingly to imple-
ment a preventive approach to the recurrence of conflict, creating an
operational and political space in which international actors undertake
peacebuilding activities. In Bunches day, peacekeeping aimed to but-
tress essentially self-enforcing cease-fires; today it aims to build the
foundations of a self-renewing peace.
These surface-level differences are the consequence of six deepershifts affecting peace operations: changes resulting from the removal of
Cold War constraints; a deeper engagement with conflicts traditionally
considered internal; an increased role for regional organizations; the
impact of North-South politics; the evolving U.S.-UN relationship; and
changing considerations in mandating peace operations.
From Cold War to P-5 Concord
The end of the Cold War brought a new complexion to Security Coun-
cil discussions of peacekeeping. The end of that era, which partially
paralyzed the Security Council, was signaled by Soviet president Gor-
bachevs famousPravda andIzvestia article on 17 September 1987 call-ing for wider use of . . . the institution of UN military observers and
UN peace-keeping forces in disengaging the troops of warring sides,
observing ceasefires and armistice agreements.16 With the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the five permanent members (P-5) adopted a more
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cooperative approach to peacekeeping, underwriting almost a decade of
unprecedented Security Council activism. Buoyed by the success of theUN-mandated enforcement operation against Iraq in 1990, the Council
massively accelerated its pace of work. In the period between March
1991 and October 1993, it passed 185 resolutions (a rate about five
times greater than that of previous decades) and launched fifteen new
peacekeeping and observer missions (as against seventeen in the pre-
ceding forty-six years).17 Vetoes also dropped by roughly 80 percent on
a year-by-year basis.18 P-5 cooperation largely continued throughout the
1990s, with Russian concerns over Yugoslavia and Chinese concerns
over Taiwan mostly quarantined from other issues.
There were, of course, exceptions to this concord, notably on Israel-
Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. In some ways, however, these
exceptions serve to prove the importance of the new pattern of P-5 con-cord, which paved the way for UN peace operations in Iran and Iraq,
Angola, Namibia, Central America, Western Sahara, Cambodia, Somalia,
Bosnia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, Georgia, Liberia, Chad, Libya,
Tajikistan, Haiti, Croatia, Macedonia, Eastern Slavonia, Guatemala, Cen-
tral African Republic, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
In sum, the removal of Cold War constraints has largely freed the
Council to engage in peacekeeping in places and forms that would have
been unthinkable during the Cold Warincluding internal conflicts.
From Interstate to Internal Conflict
A key characteristic of the Councils new approach has been its will-
ingness to intervene more often in essentially internal conflicts19 and
complex humanitarian situations.
Contemporary UN peace operations adopt a more multidisciplinary
approach than their precursors,20 emphasizing not simply the cessation
of military hostilities, but the creation of conditions for a durable peace.
Recent peace operations have attempted to implement complex man-
dates significantly more ambitious than most in the past (Opration des
Nations Unies au Congo [ONUC] being the one clear exception). 21
These operations often center on objectives such as humanitarian assis-
tance (in the short term), civil administration functions, police monitor-
ing and training, human rights monitoring and training, economic
reconstruction, and other essentially civilian functions. This diversifica-
tion creates significant challenges of coordination, which increasingly
are addressed by a civilian leadership. Although the military compo-
nents of these missions often remain the largest, the mission objectives
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are not necessarily ones to which the military can or wish to contribute
greatly. Sometimes, as in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the militarycomponents retain their own lines of command and control outside the
UN structure.
These changes in the structure and objectives of UN peace opera-
tions have occurred in slow motion, with practice in one mission often
influencing the design of ensuing ones in the same country (for exam-
ple, Haiti) or elsewhere. The evolutionary nature of this change has
robbed it of media coverage. Some acute observers, such as Elizabeth
Cousens and Karin Wermester, have arguedrightly in our view,
though not uncontroversiallythat the type of peacebuilding in which
the UN engages is much more political in nature than are most devel-
opmental or narrowly defined peacekeeping efforts.22
The UN has needed to identify new tools for peace. The SecurityCouncil has looked increasingly to sanctions regimes, as an alterna-
tiveor in additionto the use of force. After the early and disap-
pointing experiences with sanctions against Southern Rhodesia in 1966
and South Africa in 1977, the Security Council has since 1990 imposed
sanctions or embargoes on fifteen different countries or groups. The
regimes have grown increasingly sophisticated, targeting specific indi-
viduals, groups, and asset or goods types. Blanket economic sanctions
have fallen out of vogue as their humanitarian costs have become appar-
entfirst in Haiti, then in Iraqand as the ability of the targeted gov-
ernments to manipulate sanctions for their own ends has slowly become
apparent.23
The UN has also begun to explore the role that accountabilitymechanisms can play, both in removing the architects of violence from
political power and in regenerating the social fabric of war-torn soci-
eties. The Security Councils use of its Chapter VII powers to create ad
hoc international criminal tribunals for, first, the former Yugoslavia and,
then, Rwanda was a watershed that resulted in the UNs involvement in
the establishment of war crimes tribunals in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East
Timor, and now Cambodia. It also led to significant pressure for a more
universal International Criminal Court, which has now come into
being.24 There has also been increased experimentation with alternative
accountability mechanisms, notably truth commissions.25
The Rise of Regional Organizations
The removal of Cold War constraints has also allowed regional organi-
zations to take a more active role in peacekeeping. The Security Coun-
cils exclusive role in authorizing the use of force has been challenged,
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due to its own inaction, by the Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) in Liberia and Sierra Leone, by the North AtlanticTreaty Organization (NATO) in Kosovo, and most recently by a U.S.
and UKled coalition of the willing in Iraq. The UN increasingly relies
on regional mechanisms to discharge peace enforcement responsibili-
ties, mandating regional organizations to this end in the former Yugo-
slavia (NATO), Liberia and Sierra Leone (ECOMOGthe military arm
of ECOWAS),26 Democratic Republic of Congo (European Union), and
Afghanistan (NATO). The Security Councils recent endorsement of the
lead role the African Union has taken in the Darfur conflict in Sudan
emphasizes the trend.27
There are many arguments in favor of the integration of regional
arrangements and organizations into the UN peacekeeping system.28 They
often enjoy a special legitimacy, access, and influence within theirregions and may be more familiar than UN actors with local conditions,
particularly with the regional dimensions of conflict. They may be able to
mobilize incentives among affected actors in ways that the UN cannot,29
and they might play a key role in generating a culture of human rights,
transparency, accountability, and democracy. Where the UNs attention
and resources are inevitably split between multiple conflicts worldwide,
and where the Security Councils attention span is notoriously short,
regional organizations have strong incentives to stay the course.
However, key arguments against regionalization focus on politicalopposition to regional peacekeeping and on the disparity between re-
sources available to different regional arrangements, which could lead to
a de facto class system of regional responses, depending on the inter-est a particular crisis holds for the major powers.30 The politicization of
regional mechanisms is at the heart of the controversy surrounding their
place within the UN system. The prohibition contained in Article 53 of
the charter against enforcement action by regional organizations with-
out Security Council authorization remains salient as a check on great
power unilateralism and for that reason is particularly welcomed by the
global South; but it has also been seenoften by those in the Northas
an unwelcome restriction on humanitarian efforts.
The Impact of North-South Politics
The removal of Cold War constraints signaled a shift away from East-
West cleavages in world politics to North-South divides. This pattern
originally emerged in the heyday of decolonization, but several UN
decisionmaking bodies, notably the General Assembly and the Eco-
nomic and Social Council, have thus far failed to overcome them.31
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North-South politics play an importantif complexrole in con-
temporary UN peace operations. The Security Councils increasedinvolvement in essentially internal conflicts led to peace operations
tackling the legacies of state failure in the global South. Northern
statesmost notably the United States, as a consequence of attacks on
its troops in Somaliaquickly lost their appetite for such interventions.
At the same time, though, the severity of these internal emergencies
often required a more assertive military strategy than the UN had
become accustomed to, and which required the kind of high-tech mili-
tary punch that only Northern militaries could pack. In light of failures
in Bosnia and Somalia, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
concluded by 1994 that the UN should not itself seek to conduct large-
scale enforcement activities. Consequently, the Security Council in-
creasingly outsourced to coalitions of the willing peace enforce-ment operations: Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti in 19941995;
Implementation Force (IFOR) and then Stabilization Force (SFOR) in
Bosnia since 1995; Mission Interafricaine de Surveillance des Accords
de Bangui (MISAB) in the Central African Republic in 1997; Kosovo
Force (KFOR) in Kosovo since 1999; International Force for East
Timor (INTERFET) in East Timor in 19992000; International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since early 2002; and now the
Multinational Interim Force in Haiti since March 2004.32 Enforcement
action occurs where there is an adequate coalition of countries willing
to make available the necessary lift, troops, finance, political capital,
and military hardware. Notably, Western powers are not the only such
intervenors: ECOMOG has intervened in several West African conflictswith prior or post facto Security Council support.
Overall, this has had profound results on the demography of UN
peace operations. Increasingly, with the exception of West Africa, en-
forcement actions are advocated, then carried out, by the global North,
whereas traditional peacekeeping operations are executed mostly by
the global South,33 something Brian UrquhartBunches closest and
longest-standing collaborator at the UN, and his biographersuggests
would have appalled Bunche, if he had lived to see it.34 Developing
countries today make up over three-quarters of the troop contributors for
peacekeeping operations under the command of the UN, notably in
Africa. By contrast, a number of industrialized countries (especially
those in NATO) provide troops that operate under national command but
with UN authorization, in effect allowing the militaries of the industri-
alized world to play with each other.35 The United States, in addition
to participating selectively in NATO activities, effectively operates as a
free agent.
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U.S.-UN Relations
U.S. hegemonymost pronounced in the military sphere, where Wash-
ington spends as much on defense as the next dozen or so countries
combinedcreates a further challenge for the UN. In Bunches day,
bipolarity was the key problem; many today would suggest that the keychallenge for peacekeeping is unipolarity. The approval of the Dayton
Peace Accords (on Bosnia), brokered by Washington, was a turning
point in UN affairs, rendering the United States, according to one Secu-
rity Council ambassador in early 1996, the supreme power.36 The
Security Councils task in constraining this power without alienating it
was made infinitely harder by the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, in the eastern United States, which instilled a new sense of vul-
nerability in the United States, epitomized in the 2002 National SecurityStrategy. Greater hostility in Washington toward attempts in the UN andelsewhere to constrain U.S. power has been matched by growing suspi-
cions elsewhere of Washingtons intentions and of the wisdom of some
of its actions, notably in attacking Iraq. The challenge for the Security
Council is meaningfully to engage the United States on the major secu-
rity challenges without acquiescing in dangerous initiatives; to have
the courage to disagree with the USA when it is wrong and the matu-
rity to agree with it when it is right.37 The Council must keep intact
its integrity, while improving its effectiveness.38
A clear risk for the Council is that Washington will conceive the
Councils role mainly, at best, as one of long-term peacebuilding fol-
lowing short and sharp U.S.-led military interventions (the latterwhether mandated or not by the Council). UN peace operations risk
becoming picking-up-the-pieces operations of the sort we see emerg-
ing in Haiti and Afghanistan. Movement in that direction would only
serve to undermine the legitimacyand consequently the effective-
nessof UN peace operations. Urquhart again suggests that Bunche
would have deplored an increasing tendency to regard the UN as inca-
pable of first-instance peace-keeping, and as only being good enough
for a follow-up.39
Changing Considerations in Mandating Peace Operations
The UN system has long been concerned with the humanitarian plight
of refugees and other civilian victims of armed conflict. In the 1990s,
however, the Security Council increasingly invoked the plight of refu-
gees and their implied destabilizing effect on neighboring states as
grounds for its own involvement in conflicts, as it did in Yugoslavia,
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Somalia, Haiti, and (later) Kosovo. The globalization of civil society,
feeding on the so-called CNN effect of selective but intensive mediacoverage of humanitarian disasters, mobilizes public opinion and cre-
ates pressures on governments to do something.40 They, in turn, look
to the UN, with its specialized expertise and critical mass in the areas
of refugee protection and humanitarian assistance, to take the lead in
acting and in serving as an instrument for burden sharing.41 The main-
streaming of human rights discourse and the growth of nongovernmen-
tal activist networks has reinforced this trend.42 The creation of the
position of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1994 served
further to highlight the humanitarian imperative in the UNs political
and security work. Kofi Annan, elected to the post of secretary-general
in late 1996, staked out new ground in championing human rights and
concern for civilians in war as key themes. As he recently acknowl-edged at a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda
genocide, his own thinking was much influenced by the failures of the
UN system in Bosnia and Rwanda.43
By the late 1990s, the pressures for a more proactive approach to
humanitarian crisis and serious human rights violations had led some
states to break with the Security Council and undertake their own unau-
thorized humanitarian interventions, as NATO did in Kosovo in 1999.
Resistance to such an approach came from several quarters within the
UN, including some countries of the South, but also from Russia (over
Kosovo) and China.44 Other governments supported a more interven-
tionist approach: the July 2000 Constitutive Act of the African Union
featured a right of the Union to intervene in a member state in respectof grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes
against humanity.45
Since the end of the Cold War, UN peace operations have also
increasingly been mandated in support of internal political processes,
the organization of elections, and the defense of democracyfor exam-
ple, in Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Kosovo, East
Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq.46 Democracy has become both a reason
for intervention and an exit strategy: the holding of free and fair
national elections, perhaps after a longer democratic process of consti-
tutional reform, marks one of the few clearly agreed indicators of per-
formance success in complex state-building peace operations. At the
same time, the reliance on democratic elections alone carries terrible
risks, most clearly illustrated in East Timor in 1999. The Security Coun-
cil today understands that one successful election says little about the
sustainability of democracy and the durability of peace.
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Tomorrows Peace Operations: Challenges for the Future
What can we expect of tomorrows peace operations? It is difficult to
predict long-term trends; we can, however, offer some speculation on
the challenges of the immediate future: state building, with all its oper-
ational and policy complexities; the shift under way in the UNs
approach to both sovereignty and security; and the need for realism.
The Challenge of State Building
The UNs involvement in state building47 is not likely to cease anytime
soon. If anything, the difficulties faced by the U.S.-led coalition in
postwar Iraq have only highlighted that the UN is, to adapt a phrase
used by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the indis-pensable organization for the political management of international
crises involving the interests of several powers and regionsif often an
exasperating one. The difficulties outsiders face in helping a people
build a state are so greatfrom the technical expertise required to the
need for coordination among contributing statesthat perhaps only a
multilateral organization with the experience and universal legitimacy
of the UN can hope to pull it off.48 In some ways, though, the UN may
face state-building challenges that states do not, particularly since it has
not traditionally been in the business of day-to-day government. Its
learning curve as virtual trustee has been steep.49
The policy content of specific exercises in trusteeship and state
building often remain unclear. What kind of state should the UN attemptto build? What are the indicators of success? There is convergence
around the paradigm of representative democracy, but peace operations
too often arise as an ad hoc response by the Security Council to a situ-
ation spiraling out of control. To be successful, state building demands
something more than firefighting. It requires taking seriously the con-
nection between conflict prevention and development, between human
rights and security.50 It requires the involvement of members of the
multilateral community whose mandate has traditionally been perceived
as falling outside that of peace operations: the World Bank, the UN
Development Programme (UNDP), and even the World Health Organi-
zation. That may mean that complex peace operations require a more
deliberate, whole-of-organization approach, with the secretary-general
and the Security Council acting as the coordinating actors. This
approach might require the Council to delegate portions of that role
elsewhere within the organization, as the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy
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suggested in 2001 might occur through the Economic and Social Coun-
cil.51 The Peace-Building Commission proposed by the secretary-generals High-Level Panel on Security Threats, Challenges and Change in
December 2004 may do much to achieve these objectives. The devil will,
inevitably, rest in the details of final implementation, even if the proposal
is broadly approved at the UN summit to be held in September 2005.
Reevaluating Sovereignty and Security
The convergence of peacekeeping and state building points to a deeper
trend at work in UN processes: a slow-moving reinterpretation of sov-
ereignty. Although sovereignty is still the lingua franca of UN diplo-
matic discourse, the degree of intrusiveness the Security Council was
prepared to mandate throughout the 1990s was striking, responding as itwas to a sharp redefinition in practice of what constitutes a threat to
international peace and security and justifying the piercing of the veil of
sovereignty. That said, the sovereignty of states, more than ever, is not
equal in the practice of the Council, with the P-5 being more equal than
the rest.
This gap between de jure and de facto sovereignty fuels perceptions
of a North-South divide in world politics. It serves to intensify concern
that currently fashionable discourses on human rights and humanitari-
anism serve as a Trojan horse for the political interests of the North.
The UNs increased humanitarian focus is, for the South, a two-edged
sword: on the one hand, it offers a basis for arguing that the North
should focus its resources as much on dealing with the threats ofpoverty, deprivation, and disease as on terrorism and the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction; on the other hand, it offers the North a
platform from which to argue for greater intervention in Southern coun-
tries where governments fail to guarantee their citizens human security.
Accordingly, when the Brahimi Report recommended the creation of a
new information and strategic analysis unit to enhance conflict preven-
tion activities, representatives of the South worried about the potential
intrusiveness of improved UN information management. In contrast, the
North worried about financial, personnel, and materiel overcommitment
in the peacekeeping field.
Increasingly, sovereignty is coming to be seen not just as a source of
rights, but also as a source of duties to provide security to individuals
and groups within society, a responsibility to protect. This idea was
born from the Canadian-inspired International Commission on Interven-
tion and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in December 2001.52 However, tak-
ing the responsibility to protect seriously would have consequences not
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only for states, but also for the UN, forcing it to work ever harder to
forge coalitions of the willing for humanitarian purposes, even wheremember states short-term political interests apparently run counter to
such action. Countries working together within Groups of Friends,
often spanning the North-South divide, can serve to build support at the
UN for intervention in specific instances.53
Terrorism places a further premium on cooperation; but it also
poses enormous challenges for UN peacekeeping.54 Not only can it
make UN peacekeepers targets; it also calls into question whether the
UN is equipped to deal with todays security threats. Addressing trans-
national nonstate terrorism certainly falls outside the paradigm of UN
peace operations. Some states are increasingly pushing to use Chapter
VII powers of the Security Council not as the basis for UN peace oper-
ations, but as the basis for global legislation and regulation against ter-rorism. This legislative penchant emerged first in the 1990s with the
establishment of the ad hoc criminal tribunals and the oil-for-food pro-
gram in Iraq, but it has moved to center stage with the establishment
and operation of the Counter-Terrorism Committee under Resolution
1373 and with current moves in the Security Council to criminalize
activities resulting in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). Thus, in the future, UN peace operations may have to compete
for scarce resources with other forms of Security Council intervention
designed to legislate or regulate for peace.
The Need for Realism
The salience of state building and new approaches to sovereignty and
security has evolved gradually from Bunches day to the present. One
challenge remains constant: to marry the UNs idealistic, long-term
objectives with realistic tactics. Todays peace operations reflect a num-
ber of hard lessons calling for greater realism, whether in the changed
approach to impartiality in peace operations55 or in the mandating
process. Looking ahead, the UN needs to be both bold and realistic
about what it can achieve in the short term: pushing harder for a rapid
response capacity, making a virtue of necessity in the move to greater
regionalism, and accepting that Africa (with its orphan conflicts)56 is
likely to remain at the center of the peacekeeping agenda for many
years to come.
Rapid deployment could certainly be achieved today, given that it
was achieved more than forty years ago in the Congo. Two keys to
improved performance on this front are reducing the time it takes to hire
staff for peace operations and, on a parallel track, providing greater sup-
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port to attempts to establish a rapid response capacity, such as the
Standby High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) project, or through closerUN cooperation with regional rapid reaction initiatives (such as that of
the European Union). A better-defined relationship between the UN and
regional organizations is highly desirable on a number of levels.
Regional organizations and other, more flexible enforcement and some-
times peacekeeping arrangements involving several states will likely
play more, and the UN less, of a role in international security in the
future unless the UN can demonstrate greater capacity for operational
effectiveness.57 Realism also dictates that the UN must accept that Africa
will remain at the center of its peacekeeping agenda for many years to
come, if only because coalitions of the willing are likely to address
conflicts in more geostrategically significant regions. The Security
Council already spends the majority of its time on African issues, withmixed success. The regionalization of conflicts in West Africa and the
Great Lakes has posed challenges to the UNs traditional models of
mediation and peacekeeping. The severe underdevelopment of most of
Africa contributes tremendously to the severity of many of these con-
flicts, and this is unlikely to be reversed soon. The key question is
whether the UN will be able to mobilize the resources, and then adminis-
ter them adequately, to address these most murderous of todays conflicts.
Conclusion: Building on Ralph Bunches Legacy
The end of the Cold War led to heightened activism on the part of theSecurity Council and a more cooperative approach to peacekeeping
among the P-5. Although the Council remains split on some issues,
notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq, it has demonstrated an
increased willingness to engage with a broader range of conflicts, includ-
ing a number of essentially internal ones. This has produced mixed and
complex results, including a new multidisciplinary approach to peace
operations, a reevaluation of impartiality, and experimentation with new
tools for peace, such as accountability mechanisms and new forms of
sanctions.
Regional organizations play an increasingly important role in dis-
charging peacekeeping and peace enforcement mandates. At the same
time, UN politics has shifted from outright confrontation across an East-
West chasm to more subtle tensions across a North-South divide, with
the consequence in peace operations that the North increasingly takes
on peace enforcement activities, particularly in geostrategically salient
regions, and the South plays more traditional peacekeeping roles,
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particularly in Africa. This risks making peace enforcement appear a tool
of Northern policy, especially in the context of U.S. military superiority.Peace operations are increasingly mandated with human rights and
democratic development objectives, reflected in a broader engagement
with state building. This poses enormous operational challenges for the
UN system, which requires a more integrated whole-of-organization
approach. More attention must be paid to clarification of the objectives
of state building and indicators of success. Nevertheless, the UN remains
the indispensable organization (if not always a successful one) in
many postconflict contexts, as the United States has learned in Iraq.
The UN has learned hard lessons about the dangers of old con-
ceptions of sovereignty and now stands on the brink of a fundamental
repositioning. Growing support is emerging for concepts of sovereignty
and human security serving the notion of states responsibility to pro-tect, but much work remains to be done to develop and operationalize
these ideas. This is made all the more challenging by the scourge of ter-
rorism, which influences many contemporary attitudes to military inter-
ventions in the name of peace and security.
Following the presentation of the High-Level Panels report, AMore Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,58 in December 2004,the responsibility of building further on Bunches legacy rests primarily
with member states. From the peacekeeping perspective, the centerpiece
of the panels report is the proposal to establish a peacebuilding com-
mission to assist states in the transition from the immediate postconflict
phase to longer-term reconstruction and development. It also offers
careful compromise proposals in a number of other areas, such as Secu-rity Council enlargement, that will help to ensure the organizations
continuing relevance to the most pressing issues of international peace
and security. The secretary-generals own report In Larger Freedom,59presented in March 2005 and formulating a package of reforms from the
menu provided by the High-Level Panel, takes up many of the most sig-
nificant proposals and proposes, in addition, significant reform of the
UNs human rights machinery to create a human rights council on par
with the organizations other organs, or as a direct subsidiary of the
General Assembly.
The burden of reaching consensus on these proposals and their
implementation rests with member states. Although UN delegates tend to
regard the UN as their preserve, rather than theirs in trust for humanity,
and to see the organization evolving by incremental reform and not rad-
ical overhauls, many outsiders, not least at the political level, hope to see
this reform process lead to fundamental change. Tinkering at the margins
will be viewed as failure. Ultimately, however, it will be member states
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that determine how to take these proposed solutions forward. It is only
member states that can breathe life into the proposals.The strictures of the Cold War conditioned Bunches tremendous
contributions to developing techniques for multilateral mediation and to
creating UN peacekeeping. These no longer apply and have been suc-
ceeded by new challenges. The High-Level Panel has proposed modest
steps toward a framework for dealing with the challenges of terrorism,
weapons of mass destruction, state failure, and related economic and
social phenomena. Now it rests with member states to make that frame-
work real. Without such solutions, we risk squandering Ralph Bunches
legacy, failing to move the UN toward digging up the deeply imbedded
roots of war.60
Notes
James Cockayne is a graduate scholar at the Institute for International Law andJustice at New York University. David M. Malone is assistant deputy minister(Africa and the Middle East), Department of Foreign Affairs Canada. This arti-cle was completed prior to Malones return to the Canadian Foreign Ministry. Itdoes not necessarily represent that ministrys views on peacekeeping or othertopics addressed. The authors thank Brian Urquhart and George Sherry.
1. Many sources cite 1904, rather than 1903, as Bunches year of birth. He,in fact, appears (incorrectly) to have inclined toward 1904. See Brian Urquhart,
Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 2526.2. Comments by Ralph Bunche on Palestine delivered to the UN Secre-
tariat, 16 June 1949, quoted in Urquhart,Ralph Bunche, p. 187.
3. George Sherry has recently revealed that Bunche expressed interest inthe possibility of invoking Article 40 of the UN Charter as a basis for peaceoperations. Peace operations would have formed a provisional measure takenby the Security Council under Chapter VII, giving those peace operations agreater independence of their hosts, but at the cost of those operations beingmore tightly controlled by the Security Council. By choosing not to go downthis route, Bunche imprinted Secretariat control over peace operations. Sherryinterview, New York, 26 March 2004.
4. UNTSO, established in 1948, Palestine.5. UNEF, 19561967, was the first to supervise withdrawal of forces fol-
lowing the Suez crisis, then to act as a buffer between Egyptian and Israeliforces.
6. UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), established in 1964, was mandated toprevent a recurrence of fighting and to contribute to the maintenance of law andorder and a return to normal conditions.
7. UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), estab-lished in 1949, monitored the cease-fire in Jammu and Kashmir; and the UNIndia-Pakistan Observation Mission (UNIPOM), which operated from Septem-ber 1965 to March 1966, and supervised the withdrawal of Indian and Pakistanitroops in Jammu and Kashmir.
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8. UN Yemen Observer Mission (UNYOM), which ran from July 1963 to
September 1964, was mandated to observe and certify the implementation ofthe disengagement agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United ArabRepublic.
9. The mandate of Opration des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) involvedremoving foreign forces and preventing civil war and was thus the exception.
10. See, for example, the record of meeting with Abba Eban, 12 Decem-ber 1956, quoted in Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, p. 273.
11. SeeReport of the Office of Internal Oversight Services on the Audit ofthe Policies and Procedures for Recruiting Department of Peace-keepingOperations Staff. Note by the Secretary-General, UN Doc. A/58/704 (6 Febru-ary 2004); the report found that recruiting to DPKO in 2002 took 347 days onaverage. See also Jean-Marie Guehenno, A Plan to Strengthen UN Peace-keeping,International Herald Tribune, 19 April 2004.
12. Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, UN Doc. A/55/305-S/2000/809, 21 August 2000.
13. Ralph Bunche, The UN Operation in the Congo, 1964, in CharlesHenry, ed.,Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings (Detroit: Univer-sity of Michigan, 1995), pp. 203204.
14. See Benjamin Seet and Gilbert Burnham, Fatality Trends in UnitedNations Peacekeeping Operations, 19481998,Journal of the American Med-ical Association 284, no. 5 (August 2000): 598603.
15. Urquhart,Ralph Bunche, p. 178ff.16. Mikhail Gorbachev, Reality and the Guarantees of a Secure World, in
FBIS,Daily Report: Soviet Union, 17 September 1987, pp. 23-28.17. See David Malone, The UN Security Council in the PostCold War
World: 198797, Security Dialogue 28, no. 4 (December 1997): 394.18. This may be due in part to greater informal coordination by the Secu-
rity Council, making formal vetoes less frequent. We are indebted to an anony-mous reviewer for this point.
19. We describe internal and civil conflicts as essentially so because theyrarely remain strictly internal for long. Neighboring countries spill in (as in theDemocratic Republic of Congo) or the conflict spills over (as with Colombiasturmoil spilling into Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela).
20. Multidisciplinary Peace-keeping: Lessons from Recent Experience,United Nations, DPKO, April 1999.
21. See Thomas Weiss, David Forsythe, and Roger Coate, The United Nations in a Changing World, 2d ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1997); see alsoMichael Williams, Civil Military Relations and Peace-keeping (London:Oxford University Press, 1998).
22. See Elizabeth Cousens, Chetan Kumar, and Karin Wermester, Peace-building as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder: LynneRienner, 2001); Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and ElizabethCousens, eds.,Ending Civil Wars: The Success and Failure of Negotiated Set-tlements in Civil War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002); and Chester Crocker,Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Herding Cats: Multiparty Media-tion in a Complex World(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1999).
23. See generally David Cortright and George Lopez, Sanctions and theSearch for Security: Challenges to UN Action (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002);
Making Targeted Sanctions Effective: Guidelines for the Implementation of UN
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Policy Options, Report of the Stockholm Process, 14 February 2003, available
online at www.smartsanctions.se.24. See Philippe Kirsch, John Holmes, and Mora Johnson, International
Tribunals and Courts, in David Malone, ed., The UN Security Council from theCold War to the 21st Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 281294.
25. See generally Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting StateTerror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26. ECOMOG is the Economic Community of West African States(ECOWAS) Military Observer Group.
27. UN Security Council Resolution 1556 (2004), S/RES/1556 (30 July2004).
28. See generally Michael Pugh and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, eds., TheUnited Nations and Regional Security: Europe and Beyond(Boulder: LynneRienner, 2003).
29. See, for example, Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper, with Jonathan Good-hand, eds., War Economies in a Regional Context (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,2004).
30. See Shepard Forman and Andrew Grene, Collaborating with RegionalOrganizations, in Malone, The UN Security Council from the Cold War to the
21st Century, pp. 302-304.31. See David Malone and Lotta Hagman, The North-South Divide at the
United Nations, Security Dialogue 33, no. 4 (December 2002): 399414; andDavid Malone, Laffrontement Nord-Sud aux Nations unies: Un anachronismesur le dclin?Politique trangre 1 (2003): 149164.
32. See UNSC Resolution 1529 (2004), 29 February 2004.33. David Malone and Ramesh Thakur, Racism in Peace-keeping, Globe
and Mail (Toronto), 30 October 2000.34. Urquhart argues that Bunche would have been appalled at the current
tendency of Western governments to allot peacekeeping duties more and moreexclusively to third-world governments. Brian Urquhart, correspondence with
the authors, 16 March 2004.35. Other countries are often invited to participate in such coalitions, as
Russia was in both Bosnia and Kosovo, but they often come to represent mili-tary afterthoughts.
36. Confidential interview.37. Interview with Mexicos ambassador to the UN Adolfo Aguilar Zinser,
26 January 2003.38. Interview with Michael Doyle, New York, 16 May 2003, cited in David
Malone, Conclusion, in Malone, The UN Security Council from the Cold Warto the 21st Century, p. 644.
39. Urquhart correspondence; see note 34.40. See, for example, Stephen Livingston, Clarifying the CNN Effect: An
Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention,Research Paper R-18, Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, June 1997.
41. See Thomas Weiss, The Humanitarian Impulse in Malone, The UNSecurity Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 37; and JoannaWechsler, Human Rights, in ibid., p. 55.
42. See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders:Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1998).
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43. Secretary-generals remarks at Memorial Conference on the Rwanda
Genocide, New York, 26 March 2004, available online at www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=840.
44. Support of Muslim countries for the NATO strike did much to defeatcriticism of the West at the UN over Kosovo.
45. See Constitutive Act of the African Union, adopted in Lom, 11 July2000, Art. 4(h), available online at www.africa-union.org/home/Welcome.htm.
46. For the only clear-cut case in which the Security Council authorizedthe use of force to restore democracy, see David Malone, Haiti and the Inter-national Community: A Case Study, Survival 39, no. 2 (summer 1997): 126146. See generally Gregory H. Fox, Democratization, in Malone, The UNSecurity Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 69.
47. See Simon Chesterman, You, The People: The United Nations, Transi-tional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2004).
48. See Simon Chesterman, Bush, the United Nations and Nation-building,
Survival 46, no. 1 (spring 2004):101116.49. See Simon Chesterman, Virtual Trusteeship, in Malone, The UN
Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 219.50. See, for example, Chandra Lekha Sriram and Karin Wermester, From
Promise to Practice: Strengthening UN Capacities for the Prevention of ViolentConflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
51. To date these efforts have resulted only in a modestly conceived Coun-cil-ECOSOC Working Group on Guinea-Bissau.
52. See www.iciss.gc.ca/menu-e.asp.53. One of the key means of securing this cooperative approach to security
governance may be reform of the working proceduresif not the structureof the Security Council. See Teresa Whitfield, Groups of Friends, in Malone,The UN Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century,p. 311.
54. See generally Edward Luck, Tackling Terrorism, in Malone, The UNSecurity Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 85; and AndrsFranco, Armed Nonstate Actors, in ibid., p. 117.
55. Bosnia and Rwanda both taught that peacekeepers must be empoweredto defend not only themselves and the mission mandate, but also civilian vic-tims of war. The UN system learned the hard way that impartiality cannot beequated with moral equivalence among the parties to a conflict, nor withunwillingness to intervene to prevent atrocities. See especially Report on the
Fall of Srebrenica, UN Doc. A/54/549 (15 November 1999); Report of theIndependent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994Genocide in Rwanda, UN Doc. S/1999/1257 (15 December 1999); and theBrahimi Report, Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, which arguedfor the primacy of impartiality over neutrality in peace operations.
56. This expression was used by former French ambassador to the UNJean-David Levitte to describe the relative lack of interest some of the most
murderous contemporary conflicts elicit in key capitals.57. Revealed in early 2004, multiple systemic failures relating to the UNs
security functionsfrom multiple lapses in ensuring security for the UN Mis-sion in Baghdad at the time of the August 2003 destruction of the UN officesthere, to suspected mismanagement of and possible corruption within the
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oil-for-food program in Iraqundermined perceptions of the UNs operational
capabilities.58. UN Doc. A/59/565 (2 December 2004).59.In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights
for All, UN Doc. A/59/2005 (21 March 2005).60. Ralph J. Bunche, Man, Democracy and PeaceFoundations for
Peace: Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 1950, in Henry,Ralph J.Bunche, p. 166.
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