In many respects, the ongoing struggle between Westphalian and post-Westphalian conceptions of peace operations reflects a tension in the UN Charter over when the security of states or the security of human beings should be prioritized. In addition, the struggle reflects different concerns about the legitimacy of peace operations and the scope of multilateral authority vis-à-vis sovereign authority more generally. It also reveals different ideas about how best to promote rather than simply maintain international peace and security.
Until the end of the Cold War, the Westphalian conception of peace operations was usually privileged within debates in the United Nations, with supporters coming from across the globe, but particularly from post-colonial states in Asia and Africa, as well as the USSR/Russia and China on the Security Council (e.g. UN 2000). In comparison, after the Cold War the international debate tilted heavily in favour of the post-Westphalian conception and saw the majority of peace operations deploy to civil war settings. Initially, its most vocal supporters were found in Western states and humanitarian NGOs. Its vision was arguably reflected most intensely in the UN-run transitional administrations established in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor in the late 1990s. However, particularly after the introspection generated by the timid response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in the early 2000s the new African Union also advanced a distinctly post-Westphalian approach and a new set of frameworks for what it called ‘peace support operations’ (de Coning et al. 2016a). Another important symbolic moment came in late 2005, when over 150 UN member states acknowledged their ‘responsibility to protect’ their populations from genocide and mass atrocities and promised to take steps to prevent such crimes, including through the use of peace operations (Hunt and Bellamy 2011).
In the last few years, however, the international political climate has turned away from promoting the most intense forms of liberal peacebuilding. There are four main reasons why. First, the international financial crisis of 2008 generated intensified calls to reduce expenditure on foreign interventions, including peace operations. Second, as noted above, various criticisms of liberal peacebuilding were advanced that questioned its effectiveness. One prominent analyst concluded that ‘peacekeeping is broken’ and that ‘UN peacekeepers too often fail to meet their most basic objectives’, mainly because the organization operates with ‘a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes for a sustained peace’ that is preoccupied with top-down strategies (Autesserre 2019). Third, in 2017, the new UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, made clear that his priority was implementing more effective preventive diplomacy and special political (mainly civilian) missions with ‘lighter footprints’ than big, militarized peace operations. Finally, the arrival of President Donald J. Trump in the White House saw the United States significantly reduce its engagement with the United Nations, call for over US$1 billion in cuts to the UN’s peacekeeping budgets and the closure of several missions, and accrue over US$1 billion in arrears. In response, Russia and China articulated a more traditional Westphalian view of peace operations.
These pressures are promoting a new Westphalian concept of peacekeeping focused on helping states impose their authority across their territory but without necessarily reforming their governments to make them more legitimate, effective or democratic. At the same time, peacekeepers are tasked with mitigating some of the worst effects of civil wars on civilian populations without tackling the underlying causes. The word most commonly used to describe this approach is ‘stabilization’.
Enduring themes
These contemporary political developments do not signal the end of peace operations. Indeed, the relative spike in armed conflicts worldwide since 2011 suggests a continued demand for peace operations to help manage their endings and aftermaths. Moreover, near record numbers of peacekeepers remain deployed across some of the world’s most protracted war zones. As we seek to explain and understand these dynamics, it is worth briefly highlighting four enduring themes that continue to shape contemporary peace operations and thus lie at the heart of this book.
First is the ongoing and inherently political struggle between proponents of the more limited Westphalian conception of peace operations and the more ambitious agenda of those who understand them in post-Westphalian terms. It is important to recall, however, that even the post-Westphalian approach has some important practical limits, notably most of its advocates suggest that peace operations should deploy only with the consent of the de jure host government except in the rarest of circumstances.
A related theme is the struggle to conceptualize and respond effectively to the changing character of armed conflict. In particular, the design of peace operations should be based on a sophisticated and accurate understanding of key concepts related to armed conflict, notably globalization, stabilization, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and mass atrocities. Ultimately, peace operations will remain little more than band-aids or exercises in damage limitation unless they are based on an accurate theory of change for how their personnel and other international instruments of conflict resolution can turn war-torn territories into zones of stable peace.
A third enduring theme is the struggle to close the often very large gaps between the means and ends of peace operations. The subsequent capability gaps have assumed several forms, including not authorizing sufficiently large operations in order to save money; failing to deploy the authorized number of peacekeepers into the field; and failing to generate the appropriate type(s) of capabilities required to implement the mission’s mandate. It is therefore quite common for there to be large gaps between the theory and practice of peace operations.
Finally, as we will discuss throughout this book, it is important to remember that the United Nations does not have a monopoly on peacekeeping. Numerous multilateral organizations and states have conducted peace operations. An important part of understanding peacekeeping is therefore understanding the partnerships that have emerged and the ongoing struggle to professionalize and institutionalize the multiple bureaucracies of peace operations. This is not to suggest that peace operations can or should ever become formulaic. They are, by definition, responses to mostly unforeseen crises. But there is value to maintaining a degree of core bureaucratic and institutional predictability and capacity, as long as those mechanisms can remain flexible in responding to unique crises, work with partners, and adapt when circumstances change. This is something with which every organization and actor engaged in peace operations has to struggle.
Structure of the book
In order to explore these issues, this book is divided into four parts. Part I, ‘Concepts and Issues’, provides an overview of the main theoretical debates and technical issues relevant to contemporary peace operations. Chapter 1 investigates different ways of understanding peace operations and their relationship to broader processes and trends within global politics. As the number, range and complexity of peace operations has grown, so too has the number of theories and concepts used by analysts and practitioners alike to explain and understand them. Chapter 2 then develops this approach by identifying different types of peacekeepers (individual states, coalitions of states and international organizations, especially regional arrangements and the UN) and explaining how peace operations are assembled.
Part II, ‘Historical Development’, provides a narrative overview of how the theory and practice of peace operations has developed from the 1940s to the present day. Chapter 3 notes some of the historical antecedents of UN peace operations, such as the conference and congress