Understanding Peacekeeping. Alex J. Bellamy

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      Echoes of the post-Westphalian approach appeared well before 1989, of course. They can even be heard in the Preamble of the UN Charter, which in many other ways is a document prescribing Westphalian rules for the world. Yet the Preamble starts with ‘We the peoples’ of the United Nations (not the member states), determined to – among other things – ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’ – ambitions that go well beyond the maintenance of stable peace between states through rules of mutual coexistence.

In the post-Cold War era, prominent post-Westphalian voices came from around the world. They included the British prime minister Tony Blair, who developed a ‘doctrine of the international community’ to justify NATO’s intervention in Serbia/Kosovo in 1999 and British military operations in Sierra Leone the following year. Another particularly important voice was that of the former Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng, who served as the UN’s Special Representative on Internal Displacement and then Special Representative on the Prevention of Genocide. With his focus on the plight of IDPs, Deng argued that, where a state was unable to fulfil its responsibilities to protect its neediest citizens, it should invite and welcome international assistance to ‘complement national efforts’ (2004: 20). Or, as he and his collaborators put it nearly a decade earlier, ‘Sovereignty carries with it certain responsibilities for which governments must be held accountable. And they are accountable not only to their national constituencies but ultimately to the international community’ (Deng et al. 1996: 1). In a similar vein, in the late 1990s, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan provided a useful shorthand for this debate as a struggle between two conceptions of sovereignty, each of which protects certain values worth preserving. As Annan noted, the ‘old orthodoxy’ of Westphalian sovereignty

      was never absolute. The Charter, after all, was issued in the name of ‘the peoples’, not the governments, of the United Nations. Its aim is not only to preserve international peace – vitally important though that is – but also ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’. The Charter protects the sovereignty of peoples. It was never meant as a licence for governments to trample on human rights and human dignity. Sovereignty implies responsibility, not just power …

      Can we really afford to let each State be the judge of its own right, or duty, to intervene in another State’s internal conflict? If we do, will we not be forced to legitimize Hitler’s championship of the Sudeten Germans, or Soviet intervention in Afghanistan? (Annan 1998a)

      This post-Westphalian understanding of international order viewed the state’s sovereign rights as contingent on fulfilling its responsibilities to its civilian population, most notably protecting them from atrocity crimes, civil wars, forced displacement, famine, gross human rights violations, and other ills. This implied a much broader set of roles for peace operations than that envisaged by a Westphalian view. In a post-Westphalian order, peace operations need to help build states and societies capable of fulfilling these responsibilities. Where host states prove unwilling or unable to do so, peace operations should be prepared to step in. The ongoing debate between advocates of Westphalian sovereignty and proponents of the post-Westphalian approach continues to underpin contemporary arguments about the purpose of peace operations (see SIPRI 2015). But it is not the only way of thinking about the roles of peace operations in global politics. There are other prominent theories and frameworks to which we now turn.

1.2 Theorizing peace operations in global politics

Students might ask why we need to think theoretically at all about peace operations as inherently practical activities. One good reason was summarized by Roland Paris when he noted that, for too long, the study of peace operations had suffered from a ‘cult of policy relevance’ whereby ‘students … neglected broader macrotheoretical questions about the nature and significance of [peace] operations for our understanding of international politics. This omission has stunted the intellectual development of the field and isolated the study of peace operations from other branches of international relations’ (2000: 44). We should, therefore, ask what gets missed from the study of peace operations if we refuse to acknowledge or reflect upon our theories about them. The short answer is an awful lot, not least because global contexts shape the causes and dynamics of armed conflicts, as well as how they end (Howard and Stark 2018).

      All investigations of social phenomena are guided by theoretical assumptions, whether we recognize it or not. Theories such as realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism, Marxism, etc., help us to make sense of complex and seemingly random social interactions. They tell us what to look for, what types of actors are important, and what counts as valid or valuable knowledge and expertise about particular phenomena. Theories inform the methods we use and the causal connections we draw, our values and our politics (Booth 2007: 182–208). It is therefore dishonest to claim to be working without theory when one studies political phenomena such as peace operations, for we cannot know about those phenomena without theories. Although there is no single theoretical or methodological framework that can pose or answer the myriad questions associated with peace operations, it is incumbent on analysts to be self-consciously theoretical and to ask basic questions about СКАЧАТЬ