Understanding Peacekeeping. Alex J. Bellamy

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Peacekeeping in global politics

Although the term ‘peacekeeping’ was invented in the 1950s, the international management of political violence has a far longer history. As the most sustained international attempt to work in an organized and usually multilateral fashion to reduce and manage armed conflict, understanding the theory and practice of peacekeeping sheds important light upon trends and developments in global politics more generally. In particular, it provides important insights into the codes of conduct that states have collectively devised to maintain international peace and security, the relationship between the great powers, and the creation and diffusion of shared norms about the appropriateness of warfare itself and legitimate conduct within wars. Yet, at the same time, to gain a sophisticated understanding of peacekeeping we must remain sensitive to how it fits in with the ebb and flow of global political currents.

      Peace operations are shaped by the international order from which they emerged. The international order that was constructed from the ashes of the Second World War in the mid-1940s consisted of a series of rules and institutions based on the United Nations system designed to manage great power relations and thereby avoid a third world war. The Cold War struggle prevented these institutions and rules from functioning smoothly for over four decades and also ensured that there was never a complete consensus about the roles that peace operations should play. At the macro-level, a struggle persists between those who see the role of peace operations in global politics in mainly ‘Westphalian’ terms and those who see it in more ambitious, ‘post-Westphalian’ terms.

      In the former view, the primary function of peace operations is to assist the peaceful settlement of disputes between states. From this perspective, the conduct, ideological persuasion and political organization of states, as well as the relationship between state and society, should not concern peacekeepers, so long as states subscribe to the Westphalian norms of sovereign autonomy and non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states. In its most extreme form, this perspective suggests that human suffering within states, no matter how grotesque, should not concern peacekeepers unless it directly threatens international order and the maintenance of peace and security between states.

In contrast, a post-Westphalian conception of peace operations suggests that, in the long run, peaceful relations between states are best served by promoting democratic regimes and societies within states. This is based on the assumption that domestic peace and the way a state conducts its foreign relations is inextricably linked to the nature of its political system and society. From this perspective, threats to international peace and security are not limited to acts of aggression between states but may also result from violent conflict and illiberal governance within them. Moreover, proponents of this view generally argue that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and that, when they manifestly fail to do so, international society acquires a duty to protect vulnerable populations (Bellamy and Dunne 2016). Consequently, the role of post-Westphalian peace operations is not limited to maintaining order between states but instead takes on the much more ambitious task of promoting and sometimes enforcing peace, security, and political, institutional, social and economic reconstruction within states. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, this was to be achieved by promoting liberal democratic polities, economies and even societies within states that experienced violent conflict (Paris 2004, 2010). In principle, there is no intrinsic reason why post-Westphalian approaches must converge on promoting liberalism as the route to state reconstruction. As a result, other approaches to peace operations have been proposed as alternatives to the ‘liberal peace’ agenda, including republican, bottom-up and hybrid forms of peacebuilding (see Barnett 2006; Autesserre 2009; Mac Ginty 2010).

      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.

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