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EVALUATING PEACE OPERATIONS: the CASE of CAMBODIA Jeni

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EVALUATING PEACE OPERATIONS: the CASE of CAMBODIA Jeni EVALUATING PEACE OPERATIONS: THE CASE OF CAMBODIA Jeni Whalan* For Colonel Cathcart, Joseph Heller’s ambitious group commander in the novel Catch-22, policy evaluation is an exercise in binary simplicity: outcomes are either ‘feathers in his cap’ or ‘black eyes’.1 His purpose for evaluation is clear: to ascertain whether a particular endeavor would reflect well or poorly on him in the eyes of his superiors. Heller’s example serves to remind us that evaluation is not a neutral exercise. The purposes – and consequences – of evaluating a peace opera- tion are the cause of much contestation. In organizational terms, who deserves the ‘black eye’ of failure: the UN or its member states; the Secretariat in New York or the field operation; or particular agencies or components within an operation? Or, indeed, is it agents within the con- flict environment: parties to the conflict, political leaders, or spoilers? Who deserves the ‘feather’ of success? And as Colonel Cathcart so tragi- cally discovers, when might a feather by one standard turn out to be a black eye by another? In a practical sense, the outcomes of evaluation can have real policy effects. Success has a legitimizing function for peace operations and fail- ure a delegitimizing one. In the field, an operation’s ability to point to success may help peacekeepers to gain the local support they need to achieve further goals. Internationally, evaluations of success help to justify particular acts of intervention, courses of action and, perhaps most important, the expenditure of resources. While independent academic analysis can more often stand back from the sharp end of such contestation and apply a seemingly neutral evalua- tive framework, here too we must be mindful of our purpose. Do we intend to better understand causality? To improve future practice? To apportion blame and responsibility? To justify future action? * Jeni Whalan is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales and a Research Associate of the Global Economic Governance Programme, University of Oxford. 1 Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (London: Vintage Books, 1994). 30 jeni whalan The Diehl and Druckman framework puts these concerns at the heart of its evaluative method. In doing so, Diehl and Druckman achieve that rare accomplishment of identifying and understanding complexity as well as providing a framework that makes sense of it. Their recommendation that analysts use multiple measures, striking a balance between their different strengths and weaknesses is taken up here in an evaluation of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC, 1992–1993). Background to UNTAC UNTAC was the largest, most ambitious and most expensive peace operation of its time, granted an unprecedented degree of authority over the domestic governance of a state under the terms of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements. The settlement contained therein had dual ambitions: first, to resolve a 12-year conflict bound up in the Cold War order; and second, to transition and rebuild the Cambodian state through many of the goals and tasks which now define contemporary peace operations. As such, the Security Council’s authorization of UNTAC in 1991 marked a much larger shift in global security order, establishing an operation that addressed a Cold War conflict with post-Cold War means. Cambodia had experienced two decades of armed conflict, including the brutal Khmer Rouge reign, ended by Vietnam’s invasion of late-1978 and its establishment of a Vietnamese-backed regime from 1979. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the Thai border, and to Western countries, as a 12-year civil war emerged between four parties: the incum- bent Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea, later known as the State of Cam bodia (SOC); the Khmer Rouge; and two smaller parties, the royalist Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique et Coopé ratif (FUNCINPEC), and the republican Khmer People’s National Libera tion Front (KPNLF). International efforts to negotiate a settlement intensified towards the end of the Cold War. In 1989, Vietnam announced that it would withdraw its troops from Cambodia. In September 1990, the four Cambodian parties accepted a draft Framework Document – prepared with substantial effort from Australia, France, Indonesia, Japan and the five permanent Security Council members – as the basis for a final peace settlement. Negotiations eventually culminated in the Paris Peace Accords, signed by the four Cambodian factions, the Security Council permanent .
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