The Unintended Consequences of Peacekeeping

Choice Reviews Online, 2007

CIPS Electronic Briefing Paper No, 2007

This chapter examines the degree to which the United Nations, as an international organization, will incur responsibility for harm caused during peace operations. It offers a synthetic overview of the key legal issues, examining both the substantive and procedural dimensions of UN accountability. Published in: THE 'UNINTENDED' CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE OPERATIONS, Chiyuki Aoi, Cedric de Cooning, Ramesh Thakur, eds., pp. 250-267, United Nations University Press, 2007

2008

2018

The United Nations has the largest deployed force in the world today. More than 110,000 UN peacekeepers are charged with keeping the peace in 1 6 operations across the globe. In both scholarly work and in American public opinion, UN peacekeeping has been assessed as largely successful.1 Peacekeepers have patrolled borders to prevent states from going back to war, and they have helped to knit many countries back together after civil war. In a very few but horrific and memorable instances, UN peacekeepers failed miserably to implement their mandates (in Somalia, Rwanda, and during the genocide in Srebrenica, BosniaHerzegovina). As a result of those failures, peacekeepers have been granted more robust "peace enforcement" mandates to protect civilians. However, in far more but less -noted places Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Cambodia, Croatia (Eastern Slavonia), Timor Leste, Burundi, and Sierra Leonepeacekeepers have successfully implemented complex mandates, without using...

This monograph is based on an edited selection of papers presented at Exercise Morning Star, which was conducted at the South African Army College, Pretoria from 9 to 20 September 1996. Morning Star consisted of a five-day seminar and a five-day map exercise, which were designed to provide senior officers of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), as well as invited participants from civil society and the armed forces of other Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, with a theoretical and practical orientation towards the doctrine, planning, and command and control of peace support operations at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. The SANDF enlisted the assistance of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a non-government research institute which focuses on security studies, in the planning and conduct of this high-level training seminar. The significance of the latter lies in the fact that expertise related to conflict management, peacekeeping and peacebuilding is no longer regarded as a purely, or even predominantly, military domain. Although this has been recognised for some time in the more developed world, the emergence of new partnerships for the pursuit of peace in Africa is a development which should be nurtured, if it is to grow into an effective instrument for appropriate action.

of spoilers as the main analytical framework, this paper offers insights into the failure of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in terms of civilian protection for a lengthy period in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. This failure arises not only from peacekeepers' failure to fully analyse the ambiguous status and relationship of spoilers and neighbouring states that are hostile to the peace process but also the United Nations' and peacekeepers' continuing support of spoilers and neighbouring states in three areas of implementation: military integration, military operations, and complacency regarding the chronic culture of impunity for key spoilers. Such support calls into question the neutrality of mediators and of the United Nations. The vicious cycle of violence created by spoilers and neighbouring states is likely to continue unless the United Nations develops appropriate preventive and proactive measures.

2001

The international challenges posed by conflict-torn societies are as great as ever.