Who's Keeping the Peace?

Who’s Keeping the Peace? Who’s Keeping the Alex J. Bellamy and Peace? Paul D. Williams Regionalization and Contemporary Peace Operations Peace operations in- volve the dispatch of expeditionary forces, with or without a United Nations (UN) mandate, to implement an agreement between warring states or factions, which may (or may not) include enforcing that agreement in the face of willful deªance. Although the UN has the most experience in authorizing and conducting such operations, the organization has never possessed a monopoly on them. This situation has become more obvious in recent years as a variety of non-UN actors have conducted peace operations, often without the Security Council’s authorization. In Africa, for instance, since 1990 regional organizations have conducted ten peace operations: ªve by the Economic Commu- nity of West African States (ECOWAS), two under the mantle of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), one by the Economic and Mone- tary Community of Central African States (CEMAC), and two by the African Union (AU).1 Africans have also witnessed British operations in Sierra Leone; French operations in Central African Republic and Côte d’Ivoire; a South African detachment deployed to Burundi; and a French-led force dispatched to the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In Europe, Italy led a peace operation in Albania in 1997; Russian troops—often under the um- brella of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—have deployed to Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continues to lead a large peace operation in Kosovo and in December 2004 handed control of its Bosnia operation over to the European Union (EU). In addition, in 2003 NATO took command of the International Security Assis- tance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. In the same year, following NATO’s departure, the EU conducted Operation Concordia in Macedonia and followed it Alex J. Bellamy is Lecturer in Peace and Conºict Studies in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Paul D. Williams is Lecturer in Security Studies in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. The authors would like to thank Stuart Croft, Matthew McDonald, Michael Pugh, Nicholas Wheeler, and the anonymous reviewers for International Security for their comments on earlier ver- sions of this article. 1. These operations took place in Liberia (twice), Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Le- sotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Burundi, and Sudan respectively. International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 157–195 © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 157 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.157 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 29:4 158 on with a police mission, Proxima. In the Americas, the United States led a multinational force into Haiti after the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the spring of 2004. Finally, in Asia, Australia has led two peace operations: one to East Timor in 1999 and the other to the Solomon Islands since 2003. These developments have reinvigorated older debates about which actors and institutions can authorize and conduct peace operations most effectively. Thus far, much of the literature discussing these issues has been framed in terms of the debate about “regionalization,” that is, how to devise the most ap- propriate relationship between the UN and regional arrangements in matters related to international peace and security. The label “regionalization,” however, does not accurately reºect recent trends in peace operations. As we dem- onstrate, not only have regional arrangements sometimes gone out-of-area, but non-UN peace operations have also been conducted by individual states and coalitions of the willing. This raises the thorny issue of how to evaluate these different types of non-UN peace operations and their impact on what the UN charter refers to as “international peace and security.”2 We argue that this can be done by assessing these operations in terms of their legitimacy, their ef- fectiveness in achieving their mandate, and their ability to contribute to stable peace and security in the respective region. In developing these criteria, we reªne several earlier attempts to evaluate peace operations in a way that takes account of the different types of actors authorizing and conducting them.3 We contend that the non-UN peace operations assessed here have not fundamen- tally challenged international society’s norm of nonintervention without host- state consent. There is, however, a danger that the persistent recourse to non- UN operations may reduce the likelihood that poorer parts of the world will enjoy the beneªts of high-quality peace operations as envisioned by the so- called Brahimi report.4 2. It is not our intention in this article to explain the rise in non-UN peace operations. 3. Earlier attempts to evaluate peace operations include William J. Durch, “Keeping the Peace: Politics and Lessons of the 1990s,” in Durch, ed., UN Peacekeeping, American Policy, and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 17–22; Steven Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conºict after the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); A.B. Featherston, Towards a Theory of United Nations Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); R.C. Johansen, “UN Peacekeeping: How Should We Measure Success?” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (October 1994), pp. 307–310; and Daniel Druckman and Paul Stern, “Perspec- tives on Evaluating Peacekeeping Missions,” International Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1999), pp. 1–14. 4. “The Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations” (A/55/305 S/2000/809) is commonly re- ferred to as the Brahimi report after its chairman, former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.157 by guest on 27 September 2021 Who’s Keeping the Peace? 159 To explore these claims, the article proceeds in four parts. In the opening section we discuss the debates generated by non-UN peace operations during the Cold War and in more recent years, and brieºy highlight the limitations im- posed by thinking of these developments in terms of regionalization. The sec- ond section develops a typology of non-UN peace operations according to the different actors conducting and authorizing them, namely, individual states, coalitions of the willing, and regional arrangements. The third section develops criteria to evaluate these operations in terms of their legitimacy, success in accomplishing the mandate, and contribution to stable peace and security. We then use these criteria to assess a contemporary example of each type of non-UN peace operation, namely, British operations in Sierra Leone, the Australian-led coalition in the Solomon Islands, and the African Union’s mission in Burundi. The Proliferation of Non-UN Peace Operations Although scholars and practitioners have recognized the proliferation of actors conducting peace operations, most analyses have focused on the problems and prospects of regional arrangements acting as peacekeepers and peace en- forcers.5 On the one hand, there are those who believe that regional solutions could bridge the gap between means and ends that plagued peace operations in the early 1990s and offer an alternative to the “corrupt,” “wasteful,” “politi- cized,” and “overly bureaucratized” practices of the UN.6 On the other hand, there are those, including many former and current senior UN ªgures, who in- Brahimi. The report was published in August 2000 in response to UN Secretary-General Koª Annan’s request that the panel thoroughly review the UN’s “peace and security activities” and “present a clear set of speciªc, concrete and practical recommendations to assist the United Na- tions in conducting such activities better in the future.” See Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, “What Future for Peace Operations? Brahimi and Beyond,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 183–212. 5. See, for example, Hilaire McCoubrey and Justin Morris, Regional Peacekeeping in the Post–Cold War Era (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000); Renata Dawn, International Policing in Peace Operations: The Role of Regional Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Diehl and Joseph Lepgold, eds., Regional Conºict Management (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleªeld, 2003); Connie Peck, Sustainable Peace: The Role of the UN and Regional Organizations (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleªeld, 1997); Jane Boulden, ed., Dealing with Conºict in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Michael Pugh and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, eds., The United Nations and Regional Security (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003); and Paul Diehl, “Forks in the Road: Theoretical and Policy Concerns for 21st Century Peacekeeping,” Global Society, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 2000), pp. 337–360. 6. This latter position is presented throughout Frederick H. Fleitz Jr., Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2005.29.4.157 by guest on 27 September

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