Understanding Peacekeeping. Alex J. Bellamy
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Understanding Peacekeeping - Alex J. Bellamy страница 29

Название: Understanding Peacekeeping

Автор: Alex J. Bellamy

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика

Серия:

isbn: 9780745686752

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#u46b9ba02-6c92-59b8-b2c7-6dbd0ff2c003">chapter 7). It is not surprising that there was a general retreat from peace operations, given the deep divisions that wracked the world along these two axes: the USA vs. USSR and the West vs. the Non-Aligned Movement.

      As already discussed, peacekeeping is not synonymous with the UN. Other actors also conducted peace operations during the Cold War. However, it is important to note that, during the entire Cold War – in stark contrast to the 1990s and beyond – there were only two UN-authorized peace operations. Both of these were small and short-lived monitoring missions, in Indonesia (1947) and Burma (1953). Non-UN missions, on the other hand, were much more common, with twenty-seven established between 1947 and 1987. Thirteen of them were small and generally short monitoring missions involving fewer than fifty personnel. But there were also some larger operations, which were conducted mainly in the Americas, the Middle East and Africa, either by regional organizations or small coalitions of states.

      Despite Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, the main international problem raised by these missions was that they brought into doubt which actors had the authority to mandate peace operations (Wilcox 1965). This issue arose over Palestine in 1948 (in relation to the Arab League), Hungary in 1956 (in relation to the Warsaw Pact) and the Dominican Republic in 1965 (in relation to the OAS). The upshot of these debates was that the precise nature of the relationship between the Security Council and regional organizations remained heavily contested into the post-Cold War era (see chapter 13).

      The development of regional peace operations in Africa was more chaotic, involving a wider range of actors and a number of different organizations, including the British-led Commonwealth. Nonetheless, the OAU became involved in several operations despite its strong commitment to non-interference in the domestic affairs of its members. However, it mainly provided a legitimizing framework for third-party engagement rather than conducting operations itself. In 1963, Mali and Ethiopia despatched military observers to monitor the Bamako Communiqué, negotiated under the auspices of the OAU between Algeria and Morocco. A year later, Sudan interceded in a conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia under its auspices. In 1974, the OAU created a mediation commission of inquiry to negotiate and monitor an agreement between Mali and Burkina Faso. It was also involved in the despatch of several relatively large peace operations. In 1978–9 it deployed an ‘Inter-African Force’ of 2,645 troops to assist the government in Zaire and oversee the withdrawal of Belgian and French forces, and in 1981–2 it deployed 2,600 troops to oversee the Lagos Accord in Chad.

      Although some of these operations, most notably the LAS activities in the Middle East, were obviously self-serving (Collelo 1989), others made some important contributions to international peace and security and filled voids where, for one reason or another, the UN was inactive. However, they remained largely outside the UN framework and thus developed in a piecemeal fashion. One of the principal changes in peace operations after the Cold War was the growing recognition of the contribution made by regional arrangements and their increasing incorporation into the UN Charter system, either through the joint operations or through the authorization or formal recognition of the Security Council.

      The genesis of modern peace operations is intimately connected to three big ideas. The first is that the great powers have a special responsibility to maintain international peace and security because they have a vested interest in preserving the international order in which they occupy a privileged position. This produced the ‘legalized hierarchy’ (Simpson 2004) that was evident across the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations and the UN Security Council. In the realm of peace and security, international organization depends on the world’s most powerful states having a vested interest in preserving the status quo or managing orderly reform. The UN’s architects sought to achieve this by creating permanent members of the Security Council with veto powers. While critics of the veto complain it arbitrarily privileges the five victorious states in the Second World War and prevented the UN from operating effectively during the Cold War, the system has important merits. As Roberts and Kingsbury (2000: 41) point out, the veto system is superior to the League’s decision-making procedures in several ways: it helped to get and keep the great powers within the UN framework; it may have saved the UN both from damaging conflicts with the great powers and from entangling itself in impossible and divisive operations; it has encouraged the habit of consultation between the P5 states; and it reduces the risk of major discrepancies between power politics and the law of the UN Charter.

      The second big idea in the evolution of peace operations was collective security. Specifically, peace operations were based on the idea that wars between and within states were rightly the subject of international concern and could be ameliorated by collective action. The League of Nations and the UN both developed peace operations because they were unable to pursue the form of collective security envisaged by the architects of the League’s Covenant and UN Charter. Moreover, with the decline in the number of interstate wars and the relative increase of intra-state armed conflicts during the Cold War, the traditional model of collective security became less and less appropriate for addressing the whole range of challenges to international peace and security.

      Third, although muted by Cold War politics and less salient than the first two ideas, the history of international organization and the evolution of early peace operations after 1945 were both influenced by the growing significance accorded to humanitarian concerns. It is often overlooked that some of the UN’s earliest operations (e.g. ONUC and UNFICYP) were tasked with protecting and promoting human rights (Månsson 2005). As the next two chapters demonstrate, this was to become a central challenge facing peacekeepers during the 1990s СКАЧАТЬ