cockayne malone ralph bunch centennial

8/14/2019 Cockayne Malone Ralph Bunch Centennial

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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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Global Governance 11 (2005), 331350


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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

332 The Ralph Bunche Centennial


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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,

James Cockayne and David M. Malone 333


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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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