Far from uniform, multipolarisation of the world order has also varied over time, even within the relatively short span of time since the turn of the millennium. For some rising powers, the bravado exhibited by rising power leaderships in the 2000s has given way to a more discreet participation in world affairs. This is especially the case for states undergoing signifcant economic slowdown or political turmoil, as in the cases of Brazil and South Africa. Others, such as Russia and Turkey, have become more combative of perceived Western pressures due to a combination of domestic politics and geopolitical interests. While the word "chaos" may overestimate the fragmentation of the current world order, rising powers certainly fnd more space in which to manoeuvre, certainly within their own regions and, in some cases, even beyond them. Although it remains to be seen what type of scenario will emerge out of these changes in world leadership and realignments among rising powers, the reconfguration of the system has deep repercussions for the UN security architecture, including its peace operations.

## Impact of Multipolarisation on UN Peace Operations

Multipolarisation has already generated new demands and changing expectations about UN peacekeeping. From the perspective of rising powers, although they have long been contributors (especially of troops and police) to UN peacekeeping operations, a systemic transition offers a chance to boost their normative infuence as well as operational role in international security and governance. UN peacekeeping has thus become part of a broader "rising power strategy" that combines intensifying engagement even as those states remain dissatisfed with the concentration of decision-making at the hands of Western states. However, not all rising powers are alike; those that are part of the P5 states (China and Russia) assume a more pivotal role than non-P5 rising powers. Broadly put, however, the resulting tension between engagement and contestation of the UN security architecture becomes apparent across both norms-setting and roles expectations.

#### *Norms-Setting*

UN peace operations are characterised by some glaring asymmetries in terms of which countries mandate, fund, and implement peacekeeping an imbalance that has sharpened since the 1990s, when Western countries decreased uniformed personnel from UN operations and as UN peacekeeping underwent a dramatic surge in the 2000s (Bellamy and Williams 2013). Industrialised states and P5 member states, bolstered by fnancial resources, political leadership, and accumulated institutional learning, lead the process of setting rules but do not all contribute significant numbers of troops and police to peace operations. There have been some efforts to redress this asymmetry. The "New Horizon" initiative, launched in 2009 by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and Field Support (DFS), sought to expand the pool of Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs) and Police Contributing Countries (PCCs). The 2015 report issued by the HIPPO addresses the normative imbalances in peacekeeping timidly and indirectly, through general recommendations on partnerships and effectiveness yet without addressing the geopolitical underpinnings of this divide (UN 2015).

Thus far, however, this picture has not been reverted. In 2016, the top providers of assessed contributions to UN peacekeeping operations were the United States (28.57%), China (10.29%), Japan (9.68%), Germany (6.39%), France (6.31%), the United Kingdom (5.80%), Russia (4.01%), Italy (3.75%), Canada (2.92%), and Spain (2.44%) (UN 2017a). In other words, aside from China and Russia (both P5 countries and states that are sometimes classifed as rising powers), all top contributors are Western states and Japan.

Developing countries, on the other hand, provide the bulk of military and police staff, who are deployed to the feld often without proper equipment and training (especially when compared with their Western counterparts) and are exposed to direct risks and suffer the majority of casualties. In 2016, the top peacekeeper contributors (military and police combined) were all African and Asian: Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Nepal, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Egypt (UN 2016a). These states have little voice in the formulation and adoption of peacekeeping mandates. China—the top contributor among the members of the UNSC since 2004—has moved up the ranks consistently and will probably continue to do so, but it has not yet broken into the top ten (China was listed as number 12 in early 2017).

This uneven distribution of decision-making power and risk can directly infuence the operations of a UN peacekeeping mission. For instance, Western powers can override the authority of commanding offcers of peacekeeping forces, including where geopolitical interests are at stake (Khan 2006). The Indian representative to the UN has recently complained about the lack of consultation between the Council and Member States contributing troops to peacekeeping missions, adding that "the current structure and working methods of the 15-member body were divorced from reality and represented a bygone era …" and hoped that "a cataclysmic crisis would not be needed to foster such a fundamental change" (UN 2016b).

The imbalance also appears increasingly sharp in the changing division of labour between the UN and the African Union, as well as African Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Although African states and organisations stress the importance of local and regional agency in dealing with conficts around the continent—to the extent permitted by its evolving capabilities—these partnerships face signifcant coordination challenges in terms of strategic, operational, and funding issues. Some African state complain that particularly the Security Council does not adequately take into consideration the region's views (Williams and Boutellis 2014). The asymmetries built into UN peace operations some of which UN offcials have referred to as "peacekeeping apartheid"2—thus undermine both the legitimacy and effectiveness of peace operations.

These asymmetries are a direct consequence not only of disparities in the ability to make fnancial contributions, but also of the anachronistic way in which the UN still refects the distribution of power at the end of World War II.3 Non-P5 rising powers have been more vocal about contesting global governance, including norms of peacekeeping, and are bound to continue to challenge them in two ways. First, rising powers seek to infuence global governance mechanisms and to participate more directly in rules-making (rather than to be mere "rules-takers") in international security. As the Indonesian ambassador to the UN spelled out it in a 2016 Security Council debate, "Responsibility should be shared by giving emerging powers responsibilities commensurate to their respective capacity and competence to contribute to regional and global peace." (UN 2016c)

As such, rising powers have been critical of the power structures, both formal and informal, that underpin decision-making. Second, they contest more specifc elements of the normative framework, including

2The phrase was used by Jean-Marie Guéhenno (2005), then Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, in a statement made to the Challenges Project on 2 March 2005 in London. See also Sidhu (2007).

3The only signifcant changes have been the replacement of Taiwan by the PRC and that of the Soviet Union by Russia.

aspects of peacekeeping. For instance, many such countries have contested the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm and, more recently, the intersection between peacekeeping and anti-terrorism initiatives. Rising powers, in other words, want a greater say in deciding under what circumstances to undertake such operations, when to allow the use of force, and what the rules of engagement should be. This helps to explain why reform of the UNSC is such a central element in these countries' multilateral agendas.

Three trends can be discerned in non-P5 rising powers' recent participation in normative debates about UN peacekeeping. First, refecting their aspirations to infuence conceptual developments more closely, these states have stressed that peacekeeping operations should only take place with the permission of, and/or in partnership with, the UN. While this may remain true, with multipolarisation, rising powers may fnd more manoeuvre space for pursuing their regional ambitions, as well as deepening rivalries in areas where regional cooperation fails to take off or is undertaken in a lopsided manner.

For instance, regional dynamics in Eurasia have already begun to change dramatically not only due to the rise of China, but also due to the implementation of the Beijing-led Belt and Road Initiative. Although it remains largely a vision rather than a concrete project, the platform has already begun to change geopolitical and geo-economic relations between major regional players in Asia, promoting new confgurations in cooperation but also potentially triggering new tensions in an area where rising powers have already resisted the presence of the UN security mechanisms (The Indian government, for instance, has called for an end to the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), which supervises the ceasefre line between the two countries). In June 2017, for instance, just as India grew more resistant to participating in the OBOR, India and China experienced another border fare-up when Indian troops halted a Chinese road-building project in the Himalayas (Barry and Huang 2017). Multipolarisation of the world order may heighten the regional geopolitical concerns and interests of some rising powers, hence weakening the position of the UN as the leading confict management actor.

Second, rising powers have upheld the principle of respect for national sovereignty, for instance questioning the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) on the grounds that it can lead to violations of national sovereignty, that the norm is invoked in a highly selective manner that serves narrow Western interests, and that it has tended to lead to (at best) highly uncertain outcomes (Laskaris and Kreutz 2015). This scepticism was in full view when the BRICS countries criticised the UNSC Resolution 1973 in 2011, which permitted the establishment of a no-fy zone over Libya. The resulting intervention was presented by critics as an abuse of the UN mandate; as de Carvalho and de Coning put it, "The representatives of the BRICS in the Security Council argued that they will not make the mistake again of trusting the West with the authority to undertake 'limited action,' which can then be used as a justifcation to launch an intervention that amounts to regime change" (de Carvalho and de Coning 2013). In a Security Council meeting in February 2016, the Egyptian ambassador stressed that "the Council must remain objective and it must adopt the 'natural path' to address issues according to the Charter, giving priority to peaceful means of confict resolution and respecting the sovereignty of States" (UN 2016c).

The Russian annexation of Crimea and, more recently, its role in the Syrian confict have cast doubt on Russia's commitment to the principle of non-intervention, at least as understood from a Western perspective. Although China has historically adopted a cautious stance in UN security discussions (most notably by exercising its veto power very infrequently), its economic and defence interests have rapidly globalised, not only in Asia but increasingly in Africa and Latin America. Some analysts argue that China is beginning to be fexible in its stance on non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, for instance by offering to carry out some mediation of international conficts, by carrying out large-scale evacuations of Chinese citizens when confict breaks out, or even through its increasingly bold peacekeeping engagement, for example deploying peacekeepers in South Sudan starting 2017 (The State Council of the People's Republic of China 2017). Within the UNSC, however, China has generally remained more engaged in tempering the use of force than in proposing new norms for peacekeeping altogether (International Crisis Group 2009, pp. 2–3).

Third, rising powers have often opposed what they consider to be the sometimes premature mobilisation of peacekeepers to address outbreaks of confict, arguing that instances of escalating violence must be analysed on a case-by-case basis. The trend towards more robust peacekeeping mandates notwithstanding, in their view, UN mechanisms such as economic sanctions and especially the use of military force is to be used only as a last resort, when peaceful means to confict resolution have been exhausted. In this perspective, despite the UN Charter's emphasis on early warning, preventive diplomacy, good offces, and mediation, the UN sometimes exhibits a knee-jerk reaction in deploying peacekeepers.

Within a more multipolar world order, there may be room for further convergence between rising powers and Western states as scepticism of nation- and state-building, based on the assumption that societies can be (re)engineered through a top-down approach to "fxing" "failed states," also spreads in Western countries and institutions. As more people recognise that, rather than invariably benevolent and objective, the liberal peace paradigm of democracy and market economy can lead to unexpected results, including exacerbated instability (Zambakari 2017), rising powers are bound to feel less isolated in their positions at the UN. This convergence, however, will depend heavily on Secretary General Guterres' ability to push forward an agenda for reform of peace operations that not only ensures the implementation of the HIPPO recommendations but, in fact, goes well beyond those.

Rising powers have at times been accused of acting more as norms-blockers—setting up obstacles to the implementation of proposed norms—than as norms-entrepreneurs who bring to the table new ideas and invest politically so as to back up innovative proposals (Abdenur 2016). Brazil's proposal of the Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) concept was an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the use of force and the protection of civilians, but the proposal was hampered in part by a lack of political commitment to advancing the discussion (Almeida 2013). South Africa's introduction of the concept of non-indifference has been infuential in other states' foreign policies (including that of Brazil's) and within the discourse of the African Union, but the concept has remained rather vague and is applied in a highly uneven fashion. In a context of declining US leadership within the UN, rising powers (both those within and outside the Security Council) may fnd more space for proposing normative innovation, but gathering the political momentum required to enact change will require creating a critical mass around new proposals.

#### *Role Expectations*

Most discussions around role expectations and UN peacekeeping revolve around missions' ability to carry out their mandates, or the mandates themselves. Here I refer more specifcally to expectations on the part of the international community, especially at the UN and partner organisations, regarding the offcial and unoffcial division of labour that emerges in defning, structuring, and implementing peacekeeping. With multipolarisation, expectations have begun to shift, especially around "pivotal states"—countries that could help fll the space left behind by a declining US leadership.

This idea was reinforced during a June 2017 news conference in New York, when Secretary-General Guterres warned that an American retreat from the world meant serious risks: "When someone leaves space, that space is always occupied by others" (UN 2017b). In May, during a talk at New York University, Guterres had given concrete examples: "It's not only the Russias and the Chinas that are occupying the ground; if you look at Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the regional powers in many parts of the world—when the big powers leave some space, they will occupy it" (Nichols 2017). In addition to voicing concerns about the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, new US migration policies, and deep cuts to the UN budget, Guterres was raising the issue of what leadership at the UN will look like in a multipolar world order.

Many of these changing expectations concern the responsibilities that different sets of actors should assume within a world order in which confict-related demands seem to grow more complex even as available resources shrink. As suggested by Guterres' comments, leadership roles are up for grabs, with expectations of the European Union (EU) stepping in dashed by the uncertainties and identity crisis unleashed by the UK Brexit referendum in 2016. The 2017 G-20 meeting, held in Hamburg, was widely interpreted as refecting a divided world leadership and signalling a rapid decline in expectations of the US. Many G20 countries, including traditional partners like France and Canada, have opted to circumvent the Trump administration rather than bandwagon with the new foreign policy decisions implemented by the US; at the same time, Russia and Turkey have stepped up their defant tones. In as much as UN politics mirror broad shifts in geopolitics, these shifting alignments generate further uncertainty for UN peacekeeping.

Another set of expectations subject to change involves the North/ South split in UN peacekeeping decision-making and implementation. Budget cuts means there will be even fewer resources with which to level the playing feld in terms of equipment, training, intelligence, and coordination, increasing risks to the TCCs and PCCs. These problems are of particular concern in robust peacekeeping operations like the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) and the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), in which troops, police, and other personnel are subject to complex conficts. In Mali, for instance, MINUSMA peacekeepers are increasingly targeted by improvised explosive devices and car bombs; a total of 146 peacekeepers there have been killed since 2013 (UN 2017c). Although including counterterrorism operations in peacekeeping mandates is controversial, as the commander of the MINUSMA intelligence unit has put it, those risks are unlikely to abate in peacekeeping settings: "This is not the end of this type of mission. It's the beginning" (Sieff 2017). Coupled with growing scepticism of UN peacekeeping effectiveness, these risks, as well as more traditional ones from state and non-state armed groups, are likely to magnify the perception of unfair burdens assumed by Global South contributors to UN peacekeeping.

Regarding rising powers like the BRICS states, there are increasing expectations (by global powers as well as lower-income states) that they will expand and diversify their contributions to international security. This applies to both the Security Council permanent seat holders and to the other three countries, but unevenly. Among the P5, China in particular is called upon to expand its contributions, not only in terms of fnancing and personnel deployment, but also with respect to defning mandates and the appropriateness of the use of force. Even before Guterres was selected as Secretary General, China had been diversifying and intensifying its commitments to UN peacekeeping, contributing thousands more troops, making major investments in peacekeeper training, and placing 8000 troops at the disposal of a UN standby force. By 2016, China was the second-largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget and deployed more peacekeepers than the four other P5 countries combined (Lynch 2017).

China's increased interest in, and engagement with, UN peacekeeping especially at a time when the Trump administration voiced open disdain for the United Nations—triggered alarm bells among some Western specialists. In October 2016, a *Foreign Policy* article warned that China had set "its sights on the United Nations' top peacekeeping job," adding that Chinese leadership in this area would have serious normative implications, especially for human rights. The article cited a senior UN offcial stating Russia was also "making a play for DPA" and an expert saying that "We're seeing the frst phase of a Chinese bid to, frstly, assert itself over UN peacekeeping and, secondly, to rewrite the rules of UN peacekeeping" (Lynch 2017). The *Diplomat* asked, "Is the UN About to Enter the Era of Chinese and Russian Dominance?" (Witthoeft 2016). New York-based think tanks viewed the bid as a potential turning point; the International Peace Institute (IPI) opined that "China heading up the United Nations Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) would represent one of its most signifcant overtures toward leading, rather than merely participating in, the post-1945 global order" (Bowen 2016). Although Guterres ended up appointing France's Jean-Pierre Lacroix as Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Operations, the breathless tone of the debate about expanding non-Western infuence at the UN—especially the concerns over an ambitious China and a revisionist Russia—refects the changing expectations for rising powers in UN peacekeeping.

While the recent increases in China's contributions to UN peacekeeping signal a clear uptick in its commitment to peace operations, it is not yet clear whether Beijing would be willing to assume a clear-cut leading role—or, even if it is, whether it is capable of doing so in the near future. Xi Jinping is attempting to lead a diffcult (albeit not insurmountable) structural transition, and the relative deceleration of the Chinese economy—down from double-digit rates to a "mere" 6.5% annual GDP growth per year—translates into fewer resources. Abroad, aside from the UN, China has many other areas of diplomacy and cooperation it is trying to build up, both regionally and globally. Alongside China's engagement with the UN, its multilateral diplomacy (and its engagement with international security) also encompasses a variety of non-UN initiatives, including emerging regional or trans-regional cooperation confgurations such as the two-pronged OBOR, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the new fnancial institutions it has helped to launch, especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). In addition, China deals with a large number of domestic security issues, including separatist groups, as well as territorial disputes and reawakened historical rivalries in the South China Sea and recurring instability in the Korean peninsula. Chinese scholars have warned that, even within the context of a rapidly changing world order and the emergence of new opportunities, "China mustn't spread too thin" (Yinhong 2016).

Thus far, even as China openly competes with the US for power, leading both countries to reappraise their positions vis-à-vis one another as well as in global governance, Beijing has generally opted for a cautious projection rather than brash power-grabbing. Deng Xiaoping's exhortation to "keep a low profle, never take the lead, and make a difference" may have been toned down, but it has not been altogether discarded.4 A China-dominated UN peacekeeping feld is possible, but unlikely to materialise in a just a few years.

To expand global peacekeeping engagement, the three rising power aspirants to a permanent seat at the Security Council—Brazil, India, and South Africa—have been called upon to assume greater responsibilities both within and beyond their immediate regions. The rationale is that, if these countries aspire to global power status, for instance as refected in their bids for a permanent seat at the UNSC, then they should demonstrate deeper long-term commitment (political, fnancial, and otherwise) to hands-on engagement in UN peace operations, both at the normative and at the operational levels. However, particularly during economic downturns, these states resist committing further resources by invoking their status as developing countries, with important challenges to tackle internally that constrain their capacity to contribute (particularly fnancially) to UN peacekeeping. At the time of this writing, this is particularly true of Brazil and South Africa, both of which have experienced a combination of economic deceleration and political turmoil at home—in both cases, fuelled by allegations of extensive corruption. Just how "pivotal" these rising powers will be in a multipolar order will depend not only on their ability to restore stability and inclusive growth at home, but also in their capacity to take advantage of the rapidly changing international order.

Finally, multipolarisation also changes expectations regarding the role of regional organisations. The UN has retained primacy in peacekeeping, handling the largest number of peacekeeping operations (including robust missions) and serving as the main normative platform for debating and discussing when and how peacekeeping should be carried out. Nonetheless, in some places, regional organisations have assumed increasing protagonism, not only due to the limits of UN capacity but also because of the growing belief in the legitimacy and effcacy of more regional, sub-regional, or even localised solutions.

Because the bulk of peacekeeping takes place in Africa—it is estimated that 87% of uniformed UN personnel are deployed around the

<sup>4</sup>For more on this debate, see *People's Daily* (2012).

continent—this growing complexity is particularly relevant to the region (de Carvalho 2015). As de Coning explains in this volume, the AU's African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) has expanded considerably in the past decade. Recent innovations, such as a mediation unit and gender-specifc policies, have lent momentum to some areas. However, the organisation's capacity is still highly uneven, with considerable weaknesses due to fnancing and capabilities. As multipolarisation accelerates, so do pressures for the AU and other regional organisations to take on an even bigger role in tackling conficts within its geographic space. In addition, as regional powers like Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa fnd more room for manoeuvring within a multipolar context, geopolitics will continue to shape AU politics as those countries jockey for infuence at a regional level.

## Conclusion

The multipolarisation of the world order is well under way. Some of the notable changes in leadership and alignments observed over the past decade include the emergence of new economic growth nodes, more vocal contestation of the current global governance system by rising powers, and emerging "parallel" institutions of the Global South. Since 2016 especially, these trends have dovetailed more clearly with the decline of Western powers, especially the retraction of US power under Trump and the identity crisis besetting the European Union since the Brexit vote. Yet some rising powers are bound to play a more pivotal role than others.

The shift towards a multipolar confguration has signifcant implications for UN peacekeeping, and some of the effects are already becoming apparent. At a political level, the perceived leadership vacuum creates pressure for new sources of leadership in global governance, and it raises concern among some circles with the possibility of non-Western states, namely China, occupying this space, with important normative repercussions. While China has shown growing interest in assuming a more proactive role at the UN, taking up leadership will require concerted effort, investment of resources and diplomacy, and time.

Russia stands to gain infuence, but will likely retain its predominantly legalistic views at the UN, including with respect to peacekeeping. Unlike China, it has no intentions of making a leap in contributions so as to expand infuence on peace operations from outside the UNSC. Its military attention is more focused on countering NATO in Eastern Europe and in maintaining its footholds in Central Asia and the Middle east.

The role of other rising powers is more variable. Countries that experience considerable turbulence at home, Brazil and South Africa, may lack the resources of the pivotal states, but their long tradition of multilateral diplomacy will allow them to retain relevance in a multipolar world, including at the regional level. Rising powers that are directly embroiled in geopolitical hotspots, such as Turkey and Iran, may assume increasingly contestatory stances, at least with respect to their immediate vicinities.

At an operational level, the impending budget cuts provoked by US pressure lead to the closing of a number of missions and are bound to reinforce some of the asymmetries seen in the feld. Although other Western states have begun signalling that they will not bandwagon with the US on major foreign policy decisions, the Trump administration's dismissive attitude towards the UN may promote a more hands-off approach to confict management on the part of longstanding allies such as Canada, even if they diverge on other issues, such as the Paris climate agreement.

Multipolarity increases uncertainty and provokes realignments, but it is not equivalent to chaos. New nodes of decision-making emerge and upend normative engines of previous eras. At the same time, multipolarisation is not uniform or unidirectional; it may web and fow and manifest itself differently in different areas and spaces. Just as the fortunes of rising powers are subject to oscillations and even, in some cases, reversals, so is the decline of Western powers. It remains to be seen whether the world is experiencing a Tump Era or merely a Trump Interregnum, but analysis over time shows that the policies implemented by the US governments in 2017 are not the only driver of systemic change. This means that UN peacekeeping will undergo geopolitical pressures and changes not foreseen in organisational initiatives such as the HIPPO process.

Further research on the impact of multipolarisation on UN peacekeeping should thus ratchet down the level of analysis to look more specifcally at how macro–level changes in inter-state and intra-state dynamics create new challenges for the UN architecture. Secondly, future research should investigate the ways that emerging regional cooperation arrangements like OBOR affect confict prevention and management, whether within the realm of peacekeeping or in parallel to it. Finally, special attention should be paid to how multipolarisation affects the behaviour, choices, and expectations of other member states, whether individually or through groupings like the G7+.

## References

Interpretation of Charter Principles. United Nations General Assembly meeting, February 15. https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12241.doc.htm. Accessed 4 Dec 2017.

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## Politics in the Driving Seat: Good Offces, UN Peace Operations, and Modern Confict

## *Adam Day*

## Political Solutions to Intractable Conflicts

"Today's conficts are more intractable and less conducive to political resolution" (UN 2015, p. 2). This fnding of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) recognises that modern confict is increasingly complicated by the rising prominence of non-state actors, especially the growing infuence of global terrorist groups and transnational criminal networks. Similarly, increasing involvement of regional players in intra-state wars and expanding illicit fows of money and materiel across national boundaries in places like the Sahel, the Great Lakes and the Middle East have contributed to an entrenchment of confict and have complicated the search for sustainable peaceful outcomes (Bosetti and Einsiedel 2015). This evolution in confict raises diffcult questions about the traditionally state-centric approach of the UN, and how to effectively engage with a broader cast of characters at the local, national, regional, and international levels (Griffths and Whitfeld 2010).

A. Day (\*)

United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

C. de Coning and M. Peter (eds.), *United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99106-1\_4

Modern confict presents a particularly complicated terrain for the UN's political work, which the HIPPO places at the centre of confict prevention and management. Today, the UN is called upon to engage politically in a far broader range of confict settings and with a much more diverse set of interlocutors, with good offces mandates now specifically included special political missions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Haiti, and Iraq, and peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Mali.1 These cases have given rise to a new set of questions about the application of good offces in modern confict. How can UN representatives—from the Secretary-General's level down to the deep feld—employ good offces in situations where key players are resistant to traditional diplomatic tools of persuasion and pressure? How has the UN adapted good offces to address sub-national confict dynamics and the lines of regional infuence that cross state boundaries? To what extent is the UN well-placed to drive modern confict situations towards sustainable peace, and what kinds of partnerships would help it meet new challenges?

The new Secretary General is calling for "surge in diplomacy for peace," (UN 2017) placing good offces centre stage. But have we learned our lines, and who is the audience?

In this chapter, I briefy trace how good offces has evolved from early Secretaries-General through the expansion of UN peace operations in the 1990s. This lays the groundwork for a comparative analysis of modern applications of good offces in more recent conficts, examining how the UN has attempted to reshape its political engagement to accommodate the changing nature of armed confict. I argue that the inherently vague defnition of the term "good offces" has helpfully allowed for entrepreneurial approaches to political engagement, and that in many cases this has aided the UN in effectively preventing and deescalating violent confict.

From these cases, I identify some of the key elements for the success of good offces, including: a sustained political presence on the ground; the ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances; a broad set of relationships; the effective use of both local and regional leverage; and often the personal credibility of the UN representative. But these

<sup>1</sup>See Security Council resolutions 2277 (UN 2016a), 2299 (UN 2016b), 2274 (UN 2016c), 2039 (UN 2012). As discussed below, there is a school of thought which holds that all UN missions inherently possess a good offces mandate.

rarely come together, especially in large peace operations. In fact, I fnd a tendency for larger multi-dimensional missions to bifurcate their work into the operational and the political—often due to the enormous burdens of deploying and maintaining a large feld presence—with the political work sometimes dropping in priority. This can result in incoherent, often contradictory approaches and missed opportunities to leverage the UN towards its political objectives. On this basis, I argue that the political shift encouraged by the HIPPO is best achieved by moving away from larger peace operations to focus on leaner, more nimble approaches for the future, with good offces more deeply embedded in regional and sub-national networks.

## What Are Good Offices? An Old Question Worth Repeating

"Good offces" is a widely-used term outside of armed confict, present in a variety of international bodies (World Trade Organization 1994, art. 5; Vienna Convention 1985, art. 11), and in multilateral treaties preceding the formation of the United Nations (Convention for the Pacifc Settlement of International Disputes 1899, 1907). Traditionally, the term described the role played by a state in mediating international disputes, such as Switzerland in a range of inter-state crises from the Suez to Afghanistan (Fischer 2002), or the Security Council's establishment of a Good Offces Committee to help resolve a dispute between Dutch and nationalist forces in Indonesia in 1947 (Wainhouse 1966).

The Preparatory Commission for the UN Charter envisaged that the Secretary-General would have a "role to play as a mediator and as an informal advisor of many governments … to take decisions which may be justly called political" (UN 1945, pp. 86–87). However, the UN Charter itself contains no direct reference to good offces or even this advisory role. The most relevant provision is Article 99, which allows the Secretary-General to bring to the attention of the Council any threats to international peace and security, and considered a basis for much of the Secretary-General's authority.2 As Kof Annan has pointed

<sup>2</sup>See Chesterman (2011); see also Johnstone (2003) arguing that Article 99 was expanded under Resolution 1366 to allow the SG to also act in cases of serious violations of international law.

out, Secretaries-General have invoked this article "very sparingly,"3 but the provision does open the door for direct engagement with disputing parties. And the fact that the earliest General Assembly resolutions overtly called on the Secretary-General to employ his good offces to help Member States resolve disputes (UN 1988a, para. 20; UN 1982) affrms that they were seen from the outset as inherent to the job.4

The more diffcult task is defning good offces. The UN Handbook offers a very restrictive and state-centric defnition,5 but that is rarely, if ever, invoked in practice. Javier Pérez De Cuéllar simply referred to good offces as "quiet diplomacy" (Adams and Kingsbury 1994, p. 133). Boutros Boutros-Ghali more pragmatically described the term as "any diplomatic action taken to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conficts, and to limit the spread of the latter when they occur" (UN 1992a). In a similar vein, Teresa Whitfeld (2010a) has noted that good offces can mean "almost anything – from a well-timed telephone call by the Secretary-General, to exploratory conversations, or a full-fedged mediation effort conducted in his or her name." In my view, Ian Johnstone's (2010) concise but expansive defnition captures modern usage nicely: "everything the UN can do of a diplomatic nature to help prevent, manage or resolve conficts." This is particularly convenient because it covers pre-confict, confict, and post-confict settings, and includes mediation without being limited to it. However, good offces have not always been thought of so broadly, and a brief look at the evolution of the term from its early days is instructive in understanding how to implement the HIPPO's politics-frst agenda.

3Annan (2001); see also Chesterman (2011) (noting that the Secretary-General has only invoked Article 99 explicitly twice).

4Furthermore, the so-called "implied powers doctrine" would strongly indicate that good offces are inherent to the offce. This doctrine is articulated in the International Court of Justice: "under international law, the Organization must be deemed to have those powers which, though not expressly provided by the Charter, are conferred upon it by necessary implication as being essential to the performance of its duties" (International Court of Justice 1949).

5"When States party to a dispute are unable to settle it directly, a third party, may offer his [or her] good offces as a means of preventing further deterioration of the dispute and as a method of facilitating efforts towards a peaceful settlement of the dispute" (United Nations 1988b).

## The Evolution and Expansion of Good Offices

The frst recorded uses of the Secretary-General's good offces underscore two facets of the role: initiative and independence. In response to the 1946 Soviet invasion of the northern Azeri region of Iran, the Security Council tasked the parties to report to Secretary-General Trygve Lie on troop withdrawal, placing the UN at the centre of inter-state confict resolution (UN 1946). Perhaps more notable, however, was the fact that Lie had already begun talks with the parties prior to the resolution, indicating his willingness to employ good offces on his own authority. When Lie was again asked to provide good offces and report on the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, he took a personal line in his reports, often at signifcant variance with the parties and members of the Council (Franck 1995, pp. 360, 384). In these early uses of good offces, Lie began to carve out an important space for the Secretary-General to manoeuvre independently.

Under the dynamic Dag Hammarskjöld, good offces arguably expanded more quickly than at any other time in the history of the UN. In the 1956 Suez crisis, for example, he took on the role of guarantor, restoring the parties' confdence through direct talks with them, and working to ensure the armistice arrangements were effective.6 Hammarskjöld was also willing to stretch his own terms of reference, as in 1960 when he invoked Article 99 of the Charter to recommend the deployment of peacekeepers to the DRC. The resulting Security Council resolution granted Hammarskjöld unprecedented breadth to engage with the parties and command UN assets in the DRC (O'Donoghue 2014).

Perhaps the most important element of Hammarskjöld's use of good offces was his willingness to contradict other UN organs. In the context of a crisis involving US aircrew hostages held in China, the General Assembly presented Hammarskjöld with a deeply biased resolution, condemning the Chinese action as the basis for the Secretary-General's good offces mandate (UN 1954). Hammarskjöld openly distanced himself from this resolution and reassured the Chinese government that he had an independent basis for negotiating the issue. This so-called "Peking Formula" rests on Hammarskjöld's vision that the Secretary-General

<sup>6</sup>See UNSC Resolution 118 (UN 1956a) on a complaint by France and the United Kingdom against Egypt, and Resolution 119 (UN 1956b) on a complaint by Egypt against France and the United Kingdom.

should foremost follow "the principles and purposes of the Charter which are fundamental law and accepted by and binding on all States" (Jacobson 1979, p. 137). Drawing authority directly from the Charter, the Secretary-General is able to act nimbly, to initiate political engagement and take positions at odds with other UN organs.7

The intractable Cyprus confict—which has required a UN operation from 1964 to this day—captures key points along the trajectory of good offces over roughly the next 40-year period. U Thant's involvement with Cyprus in 1964 followed directly from a request by the Council, and was initially limited to his appointment of a mediator to work with the parties (UN 1964). In 1974, after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Kurt Waldheim adopted a more intrusive approach and proposed a common framework for negotiation between the parties (Waldheim 1980, pp. 70–71). Boutros-Ghali took it a step further, initiating intensive direct talks with the parties to generate proposals, rather than simply focusing on the forum and framework for negotiations (Michael 2009, p. 132). Annan went further still by proposing a fnal settlement to the parties, and attaching an ultimatum that failure to agree would put the plan to a referendum for Greek and Turkish Cypriot populations. As Annan (UN 2004) himself stated, this "enlarged the role foreseen for me, from completing any unfnished parts of the plan … to resolving any continuing and persistent deadlocks in the negotiation." It was also the frst time the Secretary-General's plan for confict resolution would directly involve affected populations, rather than solely state-level representatives.

Cyprus is but one example of a broader trend over the development of the UN's good offces role: Secretaries-General increasingly saw themselves as active participants in confict resolution with the ability to proffer substantive proposals, push the parties with external tools, and even engage outside the state-to-state framework by communicating with populations.8

7This formula has been used since, including by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to get around problematic General Assembly resolutions on Afghanistan in 1980, see UN (1980).

8The 1983 decision of Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to partner with the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States and a broader Contact Group to resolve several entrenched disputes in Latin America is another example of increasing use of points of leverage outside of the UN. See O'Donoghue (2014).

## Key Shifts: Delegation, Regionalisation, Expansion

Immediately after the Cold War, the rates of negotiated settlements of international confict increased, and by the end of the 1990s the number and intensity of armed conficts globally had dropped signifcantly, continuing to do so into the early 2000s despite major exceptions like Afghanistan and Darfur (Griffths and Whitfeld 2010). Renowned experts might have been justifed in assuming that the need for good offces would eventually dry up.9

However, while armed confict dropped during this period, the use of good offces did not in fact dissipate. Instead, there was a rapid increase in the establishment of peace operations through the 1990s, with 21 UN operations established between 1991 and 1995 alone.10 Unlike the Cold War period, where the Secretary-General tended to address conficts personally with Member States, the good offces function quickly began to spread across operational contexts and various representatives of the Secretary-General, requiring engagement with a broader range of nonstate actors.11 This refected the post-Cold War optimism that the UN

9Thomas Franck (1997, p. 180) predicted that the good offces function would "stagnate" in the light of these confict trends.

10The United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission (1991); United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (1991); United Nations Angola Verifcation Mission II (1991); United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (1991); United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia (1991); United Nations Protection Force (1992); United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992); United Nations Operation in Somalia I (1992); United Nations Operation in Mozambique (1992); United Nations Operation in Somalia II (1993); United Nations Observer Mission Uganda-Rwanda 1(1993); United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (1993); United Nations Observer Mission in Liberia (1993); United Nations Mission in Haiti (1993); United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (1993); United Nations Aouzou Strip Observer Group (1994); United Nations Mission of Observers in Tajikistan (1994); United Nations Angola Verifcation Mission III (1995); United Nations Confdence Restoration Operation in Croatia (1994); United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (1995); United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995); United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (1995); United Nations Mission of Observers in Prevlaka (1995).

11See, e.g. the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador which was mandated to use good offces to resolve a confict between the Government and the liberation movement FMLN (UN 1993); see also the UN Mission in Mozambique, mandated to oversee implementation of a peace agreement between the Government and the resistance movement (UN 1992b).

could work more constructively with Member States to resolve conficts, but also the growth of complex intra-state conficts that required UN intervention to prevent spill-over into the surrounding regions. The delegation and expansion of good offces—implicit in the appointment of a Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) or Special Envoy—was a dominant story of the 1990s.

A second development in the 1990s was the dramatic growth of the so-called "groups of friends," established by Member States to support or work in parallel with UN peacemaking efforts. Between 1990 and 2009 the number of groups of friends ballooned from only four to more than 30.12 While these groups were not mandated by the Security Council to provide good offces (in fact they have operated almost entirely outside Security Council mandates), their functions were largely to facilitate political agreements between conficting parties, and to support the UN operations when a unifed effort of particular Member States was necessary. Similar to the growth of UN operations, the rise of groups of friends resulted from post-Cold War global dynamics, but also from a recognition that the UN alone was often not capable of resolving the more complex conficts of the day.13 As such, the good offces work of the UN was not only delegated to more UN actors, but it was more entwined with these support groups and increasingly reliant on tailored constellations of Member States.

Following the downturn in violent confict in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a tripling of intra-state conficts between 2004 and 2014, a parallel tripling of battle-related deaths, and a strong tendency for relapse into confict by countries that had recently emerged from war (Einsiedel 2014). This trend was driven by signifcant changes in the nature of armed confict, including a rise in the infuence of non-state actors, the growing impact of transnational organised crime on state fragility and confict, increased impact of global jihadi networks, and deepening linkages between regional conficts and sub-national ones (Bosetti and Einsiedel 2015; Einsiedel 2014). The Arab Spring and US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were major watershed moments that fed into these confict dynamics, particularly the tendency of regional players to become involved in conficts within states. Other factors, such as

<sup>12</sup>Whitfeld (2010b). For a comprehensive study of groups of friends, see also Whitfeld (2007).

<sup>13</sup>Whitfeld (2016), providing a history of the groups of friends following the Cold War.

food prices, climate change, demographic shifts and water scarcity have combined to create new drivers of confict and a complex terrain for international mediators.

These changes in the nature of armed confict have contributed to further shifts in how good offces are employed today. Firstly, the increasing regionalisation of intra-state confict—by which I mean the role of regional states in affecting the trajectory of confict within a given country—has led the UN to rely more heavily on regional partnerships and structures to resolve confict. Examples of innovative partnerships include the AU/UN/Humanitarian Dialogue mediation support to Kof Annan in Kenya in 2008; the joint mediation for Madagascar in 2009 bringing together the AU, SADC, the UN, and the Organisation de la Francophonie (Whitfeld 2010c); and UN support to AU-led mediations in countries like the DRC where a more direct UN role may be counterproductive (UN 2016d). Another form of partnership with a lower likelihood of repetition is the so-called "hybrid" operation, such as the AU/ UN operation in Darfur (UNAMID).

The UN's regional focus and partnerships have become more institutional as well, most signifcantly with the 2002 establishment of the UN Offce for West Africa (expanded in 2016 to include the Sahel), the 2007 creation of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia, the 2010 establishment of a UN/AU offce in Addis Ababa, and the 2012 UN Regional Offce for Central Africa. With each of these offces granted a clear political mandate, good offces have been spread more broadly, and linked more closely with regional actors.

Perhaps the most important shift, however, has been the growth of large, multidimensional peacekeeping operations between the mid-1990s and today. Whereas traditional peacekeeping tended to be confned to monitoring and reporting on ceasefres and troop withdrawals across international boundaries, multi-dimensional operations are far more intrusive and complex. Sometimes, though not always, deployed to support the implementation of a peace agreement, large operations, such as those currently deployed in the Central African Republic, the DRC, South Sudan, Mali and Darfur, have sprawling mandates covering disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration, security sector reform, justice sector reform, extension of state authority, support to institutional development, protection of civilians, human rights monitoring, policing, support to humanitarian operations, local confict resolution, technical support to democratic processes, and *also* a political/good offces function. With mandates that are based in whole or in part on Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the largest of these missions typically have thousands of soldiers and police, dozens of feld offces in remote locations, military aviation and ground assets, and annual budgets of over one billion dollars.14 They are often deployed into situations of ongoing hostilities, where civilians are actively at risk of further violence, and where states are frequently the source of political intransigence and insecurity. At the same time, the missions often have extremely ambitious political objectives, such as to facilitate credible elections, help to resolve longstanding national-level disputes, support the establishment of accountable institutions, or implement complex regional peace agreements with little local buy-in.15

These shifts—proliferation of UN entities with a good offces function, increasing reliance on regional approaches, and the growth of multi-dimensional peacekeeping—combine with serious ramifcations for the good offces of the UN. On the one hand, the UN has far more points of contact across the globe than it had forty years ago. With regional offces and large missions employing thousands of national staff in often confict-prone areas, the UN is in principle able to keep its fnger directly on the pulse of societies. And there is evidence that this has made the UN better at identifying the early tremors of confict, if not necessarily acting immediately upon them.16 Deepened partnerships and more sustained presence has also improved the UN's knowledge and relationships with key actors involved in preventing and managing armed confict. As the next section will describe, this has resulted in some successes for UN good offces in high-risk situations.

But there are strong downsides to these shifts as well, particularly in the growth of the multidimensional peacekeeping mission. Heads of these missions are not only the chief political actor empowered to

14UNMISS' budget for 2016–2017 is roughly USD 1.1 billion (UN 2016e); UNAMID's is just over USD 1 billion (UN 2016f); and MONUSCO's is USD 1.2 billion (UN 2016g).

15See, e.g. Security Council Resolution 2277 (UN 2016a) and 2295 (UN 2016h).

16See International Crisis Group (2016); see also Zenko and Friedman (2011), arguing that there are a huge number of points of contact for gathering information, but criticizing the UN for failing to have a comprehensive method of bringing it together.

employ the good offces of the UN in country,17 they are also managers of complex, expensive operations with troops, police, and civilians often spread out over huge territories. As a result, heads of large peacekeeping missions tend to be faced with two fairly bad options. Either they can immerse themselves in management, diving deep into the budgetary, human resources, asset deployment, and structural confguration of the mission. This may make for well-managed operations, but it often leaves very little bandwidth for engagement with domestic political actors. Alternatively, an SRSG can leave the mission management to a deputy and focus instead on the political activities required by the mandate, splitting the mission into essentially a special political offce of the SRSG and a peacekeeping operation. The frst option leaves the political mandate unattended; the second tends to bifurcate the mission into a political and an operational component. There are of course ways to tie these two elements of peacekeeping together, but there are few clear success stories in recent history where a large mission was able to achieve meaningful political traction. Instead, there is some evidence arising from the cases considered below that good offces may be best provided by smaller, more agile confgurations, embedded in regional structures, rather than large peacekeeping operations.

## Essential Elements for Success: Where Modern Good Offices Work, and Don't

If good offces are successful, violent confict is averted before it escalates, or active violence is reduced rather than perpetuated. It is diffcult to measure success in this counterfactual situation: how much worse would the violence have been in the absence of an intervention, or how good would the election have been without the UN's engagement? Nonetheless, by comparing a variety of recent cases, it is possible to identify key elements for successful political engagement, and some of the outcomes when these elements are not present. The essential elements are: (1) an in-depth understanding of the confict based on sustained contact and relationships on the ground; (2) timing of the

<sup>17</sup>By defnition, the Special Representatives of the Secretary-General are empowered to represent him, and thus provide his good offces.

intervention; (3) leverage over the key confict actors; and (4) credibility of the mediator.18

#### *Knowledge and Relationships*

In-depth understanding of the situation, and relationships with the confict actors are critical to any successful political engagement, and are often the result of a sustained presence on the ground. During the 2009–2010 crisis in Guinea following a military coup, the UN's Special Representative, Said Djinnit, conducted 45 missions to the region, meeting with all actors, including the military junta. His ground game and clear commitment to engaging with a broad array of stakeholders were viewed as crucial for the success of the mediation effort.19 Similarly, the UN Offce for West Africa (UNOWA) SRSG Ibn Chambas was present in country ahead of, and frequently during, the electoral crisis that gripped the Gambia in 2016,20 and Special Envoy Jamal Benomar was lauded for having spent time in different locales in Yemen to better understand the players and dynamics during the 2011 crisis (Day and Fong 2017). Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo's success as a UN envoy in brokering a ceasefre in eastern DRC in 2008 was in part due to his deep experience in the region and broad set of relationships (Bright 2011).

Where there are limited relationships, diplomatic efforts are often stymied. The UN's experience in Darfur is one such example where, from 2007–2010 the Government's reluctance to engage on a meaningful

18The confguration of elements used here is drawn from Day and Pichler (2017). More broadly, the elements are included in a wide range of analysis of UN political engagement. See Babbitt (2012), focused on leverage and access as key elements; Chesterman (2017, p. 100), describing cases where leverage and legitimacy were key elements; Gowan et al. (2010), arguing that elements for success of diplomacy include anticipatory relationships, good understanding of elite actors, ability to anticipate political infection points, and suffcient leverage; Lund (1996), identifying several factors for successful preventive diplomacy, including timing, support from major players, multifaceted action, and moderate leadership.

19United Nations (2011, para. 55); UN Department of Political Affairs internal report on Guinea intervention, on fle with author.

20UNOWAS (2016); UN Department of Political Affairs internal report on Gambia intervention, on fle with author.

political process with the rebel groups resulted in limited access for the AU/UN mediation with key state actors.21 The fact that the joint AU/ UN mediation was structurally separate from the peacekeeping operation and based almost entirely out of country with infrequent visits to Darfur also curtailed the day-to-day knowledge of the situation and the possible range of relationships. This is a typical shortcoming when the good offces function is located out of country: the Geneva-based Syria mediation, for example, has suffered since 2011 with a lack of granular knowledge, limited access to key players, and little credibility on the ground.22

The establishment of regional offces like UNOWA and the United Nations Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia (UNRCCA) has boosted the UN's ability to maintain strong relationships and deep knowledge of confict-prone areas.23 The use of well-respected envoys with an established track record in the region has also bolstered the UN's relationships in confict settings.

#### *Timing*

It is particularly helpful for timing if the key parties to the confict are ready for the UN to play a role. There are several examples where this has led to relatively successful outcomes, including the request by the Government and opposition for UN mediation support in Sierra Leone in 2009; the willingness on the part of the Maoists and the Nepalese Government for the UN to play a good offces role from 2003 (Einsiedel 2012); a request by the Malawian Government in 2011 for the UN to broker a deal with the opposition; and the willingness of both the DRC and Rwanda for the UN to broker a ceasefre with the CNDP— National Congress for the Defence of the People, a rebel group active in both countries—in 2008 due to the very poor relationship between the countries at the time.

The ability of the UN to respond quickly when there is an opportunity to engage diplomatically is essential to the success of its good offces (International Crisis Group 2016). Again, regional presence and

<sup>21</sup>Guéhenno (2015), Chapter 8 on UNAMID.

<sup>22</sup>Hinnenbusch and Zartman (2016), noting that the UN mediation for Syria suffered from a lack of access, consent on the ground, and credibility with key actors.

<sup>23</sup>See United Nations (2011), describing the successful interventions based out of the UN's regional offces.

partnerships have played an increasingly central role in recent years. For example, UN/ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) joint missions to Guinea in 2008 and to Burkina Faso in 2014 produced a clear and forceful reports on the likely deterioration of the situation in the period to follow and positioned the UN to be ready to act when the crisis struck.24 Similarly, in responding to the 2010 crisis in Kyrgyzstan, the proximity of the UNRCCA facilitated early contacts as the situation developed, quick establishment of a new in-country offce, and the rapid deployment of a senior reconciliation adviser (UN 2011, para. 23). Being present in the neighbourhood does not guarantee timely response by the UN, but it appears to help.

#### *Leverage*

Leverage is the most important of the factors, and perhaps the most elusive given that the UN "often appear[s] unable to do more than encourage contacts to behave responsibly" (International Crisis Group 2016, p. 18). Instead, the UN must rely more upon soft-power techniques, corralling international actors around common messages, fnding pressure points via bilateral relations, and offering hesitant leaders discreet ladders to climb down from confict (Wallensteen 2015; Ramsbotham et al. 2016, pp. 199–212).

However, often even the most well-coordinated messaging can fail to gain leverage by itself. In Gambia, SRSG Chambas was working to pressure incumbent President Jammeh to accept the results of the 2016 election, and during a single month Jammeh was made to receive similar messages from the King of Morocco, the presidents of Liberia, Mauritania, Chad and Nigeria, as well as from the Organization of Islamic Conference, the UN, and the AU.25 But even this exceptionally well-coordinated approach did not appear to change Jammeh's calculations, and it was only when ECOWAS demonstrated its willingness to use force to back up its message that he agreed to step aside (Al Jazeera 2017). In terms of preventing major escalation, sometimes diplomacy backed by threat of force is necessary (Johnstone 2003).

<sup>24</sup>UN Department of Political Affairs internal report on Burkina Faso intervention, on fle with author.

<sup>25</sup>UN DPA internal assessment of Gambia intervention, on fle with author.

Short of use of force, other sticks can generate leverage when combined with diplomacy. In Burkina Faso, the threat of sanctions by the AU, along with suspension of AU membership and united messaging from the Security Council (Reuters 2015), together contributed to the leader's decision to step down and avoid further violence. In contrast, the AU's imposition of sanctions on the military junta in Guinea in 2009 appeared to have no impact; in fact, the incumbent head of state reportedly entrenched his position immediately following the sanctions.26 There is no magic formula to gain leverage, but the combination of sustained international messaging, combined with something more coercive, has shown some success.

Often, a major bilateral actor or combination of actors can dramatically increase the leverage over a reluctant principal. In 2015, US Secretary of State John Kerry broke protocol and few to see incumbent Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, urging him to respect the outcome of the elections (Shapiro 2015). There is anecdotal evidence that this may have played a role in Jonathan's decision to stand down. Richard Holbrooke's famous role in pushing Slobodan Milošević to accept the 1995 Dayton Accords is another such example, which also demonstrates the importance of threat of force behind diplomatic action (Holbrooke 1998). The growth of groups of friends described above in fact refects the effcacy of getting the right constellation of Member States around a particular confict setting, one of whom often possesses outsize leverage (Whitfeld 2007).

A united Security Council is one of the most authoritative sources of leverage and, when it speaks with one voice, there is a far higher chance of success. But even a united Council cannot necessarily deliver. Strong, well-coordinated messaging on the need for both Presidents Kabila and Nkurunziza to step down in DRC and Burundi, respectively, have fallen on deaf ears, even in the face of widespread violence. And the Council has become increasingly notorious for its paralysis on key conficts, most importantly Syria, but also arguably in its failure to place Myanmar, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe meaningfully on its agenda in recent years, thwarted by the use of a Permanent Member's veto. A united Security Council is often necessary, but seldom suffcient, to achieving leverage (Gowan 2017).

<sup>26</sup>UN DPA internal assessment of Gambia intervention (Day and Pichler 2018).

Finally, it is worth considering the potential leverage provided by the presence of large peacekeeping operations, which often deliver signifcant programmatic funds, deploy troops, and engage with a range of actors on the ground. While this kind of presence should ostensibly generate leverage for the UN, experience has if anything underscored the extremely limited political sway of even the biggest peacekeeping operation. The 2008 deployment of nearly 20,000 AU/UN troops into Darfur had no apparent impact on the Government's or rebels' positions with respect to the peace negotiations (which are unresolved nine years later). Nor did UNMISS' very large presence in South Sudan in 2013 appear to give it much infuence over the protagonists of the civil war, and the 2016 relapse into open confict there has shown the lack of leverage of the UN in brokering a political solution there. Likewise, MONUSCO's sprawling presence across the DRC and significant state-building support programs have not positioned the UN as a central player in the ongoing negotiations over the electoral process.27 As the former Chief of the Department of Peacekeeping lamented, large missions like those in Darfur and the DRC frequently fail to use their presence as a fulcrum for gaining infuence in country, due to "a lack of understanding of the political nature of peacekeeping, as if the conduct of military operations and the military posture could be divorced from the politics of the situation" (Guéhenno 2015).

#### *Credibility*

There is no formula for achieving credibility in a diplomatic process, and frequently it is highly personality-based. In some cases, the respect afforded to a seasoned offcial with a history of success in the region bestows credibility on a process. Here, the particular status of Djinnit in Guinea, Obasanjo in eastern DRC, and Ibn Chambas in Gambia and Nigeria have been cited as critical to the success of the diplomatic effort (Hara 2011). But even the most seasoned and respected offcials are not always capable of delivering if the conditions are not right. Kof Annan was highly successful in Kenya in 2008, but made very little progress as the Syria Envoy in 2012. Lakhdar Brahimi brokered major breakthroughs in Afghanistan, but he too was stymied by Syria. What is clear

<sup>27</sup>In fact, the SRSG of MONUSCO has been largely limited to a supportive role to the AU-led mediation on the elections crisis.

is that a lack of credibility will undermine the process, particularly if the mediator is seen as an unwanted intervention or too dependent upon biased actors. Here again, as described above, embedding mediation processes in regional structures like UNOWA and the UNRCCA may have had a salubrious effect on the UN's credibility to address recent conficts.

## Too Big, May Fail: Recommendations Toward Nimble, Effective Good Offices

The nature of violent confict has radically changed since the inception of the UN in 1945, and the UN's role in preventing and resolving it has had to evolve as well. As the UN has become more deeply involved in intransigent civil wars, increasingly reliant on a broad range of international, regional, and local actors, and heavily invested in large peace operations, good offces have become only one of several tools available to peacemakers. In many ways, the waters of diplomacy have been muddied. But, as the HIPPO points out, the political work of the UN is *primus inter pares*, and political solutions must be at the heart of modern confict prevention and management.

A crucial step in this regard is to build strategies based on the successful elements of past efforts, looking to deepen knowledge and key relationships, identify ripe moments when diplomatic intervention will have the most impact, and connect all the points of leverage into a coherent approach. The cases described above have demonstrated that the vaguely defned notion of good offces has allowed for innovative, entrepreneurial approaches and some tangible stories of success. The establishment of lean, relatively responsive regional offces has especially helped deliver diplomatic interventions in a fexible and bespoke fashion, and could be usefully replicated in regions including North Africa and potentially the Middle East.28

At the same time, it appears that the growth of multidimensional peacekeeping has not contributed substantially to politics-frst approaches. In fact, the heavy administrative burdens and competing tasks of large missions may well have had a deleterious effect on SRSGs' capacity to focus on the political work of the mission. With much to lose and little demonstrable leverage, large missions appear to tend to become

<sup>28</sup>See Gowan et al. (2010), noting that the UN Secretariat had proposed the establishment of additional regional political offces for East Asia and Latin America, which had not been approved by Member States.

practical hostages of the host government, often sacrifcing leverage and independence when the time comes to press for political outcomes. Perhaps ironically, it seems that missions mandated to build state institutions and capacity—such as in the DRC, South Sudan, and Mali—may have had the least success in gaining political traction in country. Further down the size scale, and considering missions such as those in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, East Timor, and El Salvador, there may be instances where missions were able to employ their good offces more effectively. But there is little evidence that size matters when it comes to achieving political solutions in peace operations.

All of this leads to the conclusion that the UN's good offces appear best employed in a fexible, nimble fashion, unencumbered by overly ambitious peacekeeping mandates, and able to fnd leverage points outside of the UN, especially via regional players. In an era of paralysis within the Security Council and deepening divisions in many of the most fragile regions in the world, independent, entrepreneurial diplomats in the vein of Dag Hammarskjöld are sorely needed to carry out the demanding political work of the United Nations. In order to do so, protecting the good offces functions as "almost anything" (Whitfeld 2010a) is perhaps more important than ever.

## References

*Commentary*, ed. Bruno Simma, Daniel-Erasmus Khan, Georg Nolte, and Andreas Paulus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## People-Centred Approaches to Peace: At Cross Roads Between Geopolitics, Norms, and Practice

## *Youssef Mahmoud*

"We the Peoples" and the Act of Creation1

On the eve of the 2015 world leaders' summit that would unanimously adopt the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, "We the peoples," the emblematic frst three words of the UN Charter, were on full display during an art exhibit at the United Nations. In 1953, the American painter, Norman Rockwell, had been so hopeful about the creation of the United Nations that he sketched a drawing entitled the United Nations after the newly formed organisation (Husain 2015). The sketch features in the foreground the representatives of the Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the now-defunct Soviet Union. In the background, people of all ages and from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds looked over the shoulders of these representatives,

1See Schlesinger (2004).

Y. Mahmoud (\*)

International Peace Institute (IPI), Vienna, Austria

C. de Coning and M. Peter (eds.), *United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99106-1\_5

91

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

with anxious but hopeful eyes. Rockwell never fnished this sketch. Instead, in 1961, he drew from it to complete his now famous painting "the Golden Rule" (Norman Rockwell Museum 2014), currently on permanent display at the UN headquarters, featuring the same fgures of the people in the background but without the Government representatives in the front. A likely interpretation is that, after his original drawing eight years earlier, he had decided to de-emphasise governments (Reimers 2015): By giving "We the Peoples" centre stage, he wanted to convey the message that when people in their immense diversity and collective wisdom stand together in dignity and mutual respect, they can achieve the common goals enshrined in the Charter.

No one could have predicted that Rockwell's decision to remove government representative from the "Golden Rule" rendition of the "United Nations" would be a harbinger of the complex and, at times, tense state-society relations we are witnessing today in many parts of the world.

Many of the 50 founding states that had signed the Charter in June 1945 were undemocratic. Yet no one contested their right to speak for the people, who were admittedly exhausted from the ravages of World War II. Things are different today. While most governments are democratically elected, their remit to speak for "we the peoples" is regularly challenged (van Tongeren 2005). Aided by the democratisation of information, education, and the forces of globalisation, ordinary citizens and networks of interconnected people have become aware of the performance of their governments and thus do not shy away from vociferously making known their views about the quality of the services they expect from these governments. As attested by the wave of protest movements that swept over parts of Africa, the Middle East and several countries in Latin America, citizens are no longer content with the proposition that their right to change non-performing governments can only be exercised during election periods.

Global challenges such as development defcits, health pandemics, drug traffcking, food security, water, climate change, poverty reduction, criminal networks, and terrorism are no longer transnational problems for governments alone to worry about, echoing the conclusions of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations (UN 2004). This shift was in full display during the UN's 70th anniversary celebration where foreign policy discourse was not so much about augmenting the power of the state as about serving the people (Center for Strategic and International Studies 2015).

## "We the Peoples" in Development and Peace and Security

People-centred approaches are not a novelty for the UN system. In the early nineties, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) struck a balance between state-centric and people-centred approaches, most notably in its Human Development Report (HDR). Now its fagship publication, the HDR, was frst launched in 1990 with the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq as a key instigator. The aspiration was to put people centre stage in debates on development, which goal was to provide people with opportunities and choices (United Nations Development Programme 2017). "People are the real wealth of a nation," Haq wrote in the opening lines of the frst HDR (United Nations Development Programme 1990). "The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives." It is no surprise, therefore, that the UNDP's core mission is to empower people and build the resilience of nations.

The unanimous adoption in 2015 by the UN General Assembly of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change have been hailed as much as state achievements as a "peoples'" achievement. The frst was touted as a global social contract between the peoples' world and their states, and the second a trilateral compact, a covenant between states, peoples, and the planet. Both constitute a remarkable proclamation of hope at a time when the world is torn by much strife and violent confict. The intense engagement and mobilisation of grass root movements throughout the consultation process and the relentless pressure they exercised on world leaders account for the sense of collective ownership by all stakeholders of these two universal agendas (Leiva-Roesch et al. 2014). As the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations concluded (UN 2004, p. 3), "constructively engaging with civil society is a necessity for the United Nations, not an option."

## "We the Peoples" in Peace and Security

In the area of peace and security, integrating people- or community-centred approaches to manage confict has been a slow process met with occasional pushback. Despite the pervasive awareness that contemporary conficts are largely occurring within states and tend to be driven from below—often by non-state actors and citizens with unanswered grievances—the UN Security Council, designed to prevent and arbitrate interstate conficts, has been struggling to adapt its statecentric approaches to these new realities. Its mandate design is still dominated by the assumption that fxing imperfect or weak states, securing their juridical legitimacy through elections, and extending their remit throughout a particular territory would yield peace dividends for citizens and communities. This dominant paradigm equates state-building with peacebuilding, impervious to the empirical evidence indicating otherwise (Call 2012). This point was not lost on the g7+ Group of countries, composed of mostly fragile and confict affected states, when they agreed in 2011 together with their international development partners on the fve peacebuilding and state building goals that should guide their collective action out of fragility (G7plus 2017). Thus it comes as no surprise that the frst goal gave primacy to legitimate politics over state building. Their frm view was that no state authority is viable without inclusive, participatory governance and equitable delivery of basic services to the people.

## HIPPO and the Challenges of People-Centred Approaches

It is against this background that the High Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) set out to fulfl the mandate entrusted to it by the UN Secretary-Secretary in October 2014 (UN 2014). The High-Level Panel (henceforth the Panel) devoted considerable time in developing a shared and practical understanding of what was meant by people-centred approaches to peace operations before advocating these approaches as one of the essential shifts (UN 2015a, pp. viii and 16) that had to be embraced in the future in the design and delivery of UN peace operations. As a panel, we argued for a "renewed resolve on the part of United Nations peace operations personnel to engage with, serve and protect the people they have been mandated to assist." The Panel, not unlike the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the Peacebuilding Architecture and the High Level Advisory Group on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325, considered sustaining peace (UN 2015a, p. 34) as the ultimate objective of UN post confict engagements in which inclusive politics and people in their plurality, particularly women and youth, played a central role.

Panel members were keenly aware that reaching out to people and engaging with local communities and ordinary citizens are common practices in many peace operations, notwithstanding the Council's halfhearted acceptance of the concept as outlined above. These feld practices ranged from local perception surveys on mission performance, to communication and sensitisation outreach programs through UN radios.

However, the Panel felt that these practices tended to take the form of discrete activities, without suffcient strategic focus on their connections to self-sustainable peace. Whether stemming from Security Council mandates or conceived by feld missions, community engagement activities appeared as mission-centric (e.g. winning hearts and minds of local populations) or as appendices to various state-centric goals that were judged to be far more critical to stability, such as sustaining a fragile peace agreement, holding elections, or restoring and extending state authority. The latter activity tended to be carried out in a way that emphasised control by the centre rather than empowerment of the peripheries and their forms of self-government, especially in areas that had escaped government control in the past and where invariably the state suffers from a trust defcit. The Panel was also aware that in peacekeeping missions, operating in hostile environments where much of the military assets are mobilised to prevent or counter asymmetric threats, the space for meaningful community outreach tends to be limited or compromised, at times even securitised.

In pointing out the above shortcomings and operational constraints, HIPPO members were equally aware that people-centred approaches, are not without dilemmas, challenges, or risks, particularly in complex confict environments and notwithstanding normative advances, policy prescriptions, good practices, and guidance notes (UN 2015a, p. 66).

The central challenge for a state-centric instrument such as peacekeeping is to what extent it should have its own mechanisms for engaging and consulting directly with "we the peoples" without making government offcials feel that their unique prerogative, as elected representatives to engage with their own people, has been usurped (van Tongeren 2005) and thus would insist on being involved. The fip-side of this dilemma is how to partner with the government in this endeavour without the latter capturing UN devised people-focused processes for narrow political gains, including using them to shore up any perceived lack of performance legitimacy.

Another challenge is that it is not easy to identify, outside elite circles, civil society representatives who genuinely speak on behalf of local people. Therefore, questions of who and when and how to engage become central. Reaching out to communities associated with insurgent movements or terrorist groups that UN peace operations are expected to keep at arms-length, or even neutralise, could put UN personnel at risk (de Coning et al. 2015).

An additional challenge is the lack of capacity for rigorous analysis of local realities. This would require among other things a shift from focusing only on the drivers of confict and fragility to identifying the communities' endogenous capacities for peace and resilience. These usually include local norms, physical structures, traditional governance institutions, and networks through which information is collected and disseminated and mutual assistance is provided (UN 2015a, p. 35). It is these informal coping mechanisms that people turn to in times of national or local stresses, whether they are man-made or nature-induced (Interpeace 2016). And it is these very capacities that peace operations need to strengthen so as to help lay the foundation for less reversible and, hopefully, self-sustaining peace. In the absence of such analyses, missions tend to resort to ad-hoc programmatic interventions that are not well thought-out or that unwittingly may do more harm than good.

Another factor that has been found to contribute to unintended consequences is the tendency of the UN to value thematic expertise (DDR, SSR, electoral processes) over local knowledge. This legitimises the deployment of people to missions who do not speak any of the local languages, nor are fully versed or interested in the custom, norms, and behaviours of the host country. They tend to look at complex local problems through the lens of their expertise with supply-driven solution at the ready.

A further challenge that was brought to the attention of Panel members is that because of concerns for staff security and safety, particularly in hostile environments, there was and still is a tendency to gather information on local peace and confict dynamics from expatriates living in fortifed compounds (Autesserre 2015). Attempts to address this defcit by relying on information provided by national Community Liaison Offcers or Assistants in the employment of the mission have sometimes backfred or endangered their lives. This is particularly the case when local communities that are hostile to the mission or the government start suspecting these local employees (particularly those attached to UN military compounds) of using their privileged access to their communities to spy on them. The increasingly explicit emphasis on enhanced human intelligence capabilities as a force multiplier or for security and effective mandate implementation has fuelled these suspicions.

## HIPPO Specific Recommendations, UN SG's Follow-on Report, and Member States' Reactions

In order to overcome the above dilemmas and challenges, the Panel called for a number of shifts in mindset and operational practices and made several specifc recommendations. The most salient of these are discussed below.

For the Panel, countries emerging from confict "are not blank pages and their people are not 'projects'" (UN 2015a, p. 34). As outlined above, these people possess knowledge, expertise, and resilient mechanisms that help withstand the stresses of confict. Therefore, the Panel called for a shift from merely consulting with these people in order to validate pre-conceived ideas and solutions, to actively engaging with them so as to hear their perspectives and monitor and respond to how they experience the impact of the peace operation and ensure that the mission does no harm (UN 2015a, p. 24). In this connection, the Panel stressed the need to allocate the appropriate resources to, on a regular basis, conduct "independent surveys of local perceptions of the mission and progress towards mission objectives" (UN 2015a, p. 39). They also called on missions "to develop strategies for community engagement at various stages of the mission cycle—from assessment, analysis, planning, implementation, review and evaluation—and make increased and judicious use of national staff in designing and implementing these strategies" (UN 2015a, p. 66).

With respect to analysis, the Panel recommends that missions should focus inter-alia on identifying the local structures for managing and mitigating confict, resource fows, and revenue or illicit power networks (UN 2015a, p. 46). Missions should also engage in differentiated and gender sensitive confict analysis to better understand the specifc experience, rights, needs, perspectives, and roles of women and girls in confict situations (UN 2015a, p. 67). This would in turn "inform strategies for their protection and participation," and enable missions to draw on the expertise of local women leaders, and women's organisations (UN 2015a, p. 67).

With respect to community dynamics in zones of confict, the Panel recommended that peace operations "should maintain the closest possible interaction with the communities and support national initiatives regarding rural and local development. Missions should lend their assistance to the resolution of local conficts, and support community efforts to move toward reconciliation" (UN 2015a, p. 39).

In his follow-up report "The Future of UN Peace Operations" (UN 2015b), Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon endorsed the strategic shift for a people-centred approach to peace operations and highlighted the specifc, practical initiatives the Secretariat was already engaged in to implement many of the recommendations outlined in the Panel's report under this rubric. These include public opinion surveys undertaken by many missions to regularly assess progress and evolving community priorities, to recruiting national staff and community liaison offcers to help the missions foster public support for their mandates (UN 2015b, p. 27), to guidance notes on how to understand local perceptions.

In its 2016 substantive session report (UN 2016a), the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations (UN 2016a, p. 34) expressed its support for more people-centred approaches in peacekeeping, "including through local level analysis that draws on more strategic engagement with communities and an understanding of local perceptions and priorities" (UN 2016a, para. 131). It also noted that "effective mission-wide communication strategies can enable peacekeeping operations to build trust with local communities, manage expectations…and improve awareness of the work and contributions of UN personnel in complex and challenging environments" (UN 2016a, para. 133).

The Security Council has held several thematic debates on the contents and recommendations of the HIPPO report and the SG follow-on report, the most important of which took place on 20 November 2015 (UN 2015c). The ensuing Presidential Statement (UN 2015d), issued fve days after intense negotiations among Council members, was rather bland and made no reference to people-centred approaches in peacekeeping. The Resolution (UN 2016b) the Council unanimously adopted on 27 April 2016 jointly with the GA on sustaining peace was, however, hailed a signifcant conceptual and policy shift on the part of the Council (Mahmoud 2016). It argues that sustaining peace be "broadly understood as a goal and a process to build a common vision of a society ensuring that the needs of all the segments of the population are taken into account." The joint resolution also emphasises that sustaining peace is "a shared task and responsibility that needs to be fulflled by the government and all other national stakeholders." Throughout the resolution, civil society organisations, women's groups, youth organisations, and, where relevant, the private sectors were often mentioned as key strategic and operational partners in moving the sustaining peace agenda forward.

On 10–11 May 2016, the President of the General Assembly convened a High Level thematic debate on the synergies between the three peace and security global policy reviews mentioned in the frst part of this paper and issued a Chair summary containing a series of conclusions and observations. In this summary, it is stated that "the two-day debate made it clear that civilians are the main stakeholders of peace operations with the most to gain from their successes and the most to lose from their failures. Communities should be front and centre in decision-making. Placing people at the centre means also that peace operations are accountable to the people they are meant to serve" (UN 2016c).

Notwithstanding the above conceptual convergence and policy consensus on the importance for people-centred approaches to peace and security and on its constituent elements such as inclusive ownership, the Council in its legislative work continues to shy away from using the exact "people-oriented" phrase, preferring instead to the generic terms "civil society, including women and youth." Where it appears under various guises, it tends to be confned to the preamble part of resolutions rather than in the operational one which has more binding power, with the exception of gender as a cross-cutting theme. A happy exception is the Security Council Resolution 2301 of 26 July 2016 renewing the peacekeeping operation in the Central African Republic (UN 2016d) in which local people's participation and consultations were welcomed. On the contrary, in the one extending the mandate of the peace mission in Mali (MINUSMA) (UN 2016e), people-centred approaches or variations of the phrase are nowhere to be found.

## What Would a People-Centred Approach Look like on the Ground?

The purpose of the following paragraphs is to articulate, in light of what was outlined above, how best HIPPO recommendations and the emerging policy consensus on people-centred approaches can be best implemented on the ground. In doing so, the author draws on personal feld experience, including a recent visit to the UN mission in Mali (MINUSMA), on current best practices by seasoned practitioners, guidance notes for community engagement and insights garnered from scholarly research conducted by de Coning et al. (2015) and Karlsrud (2015) among others. Outlined below are some strategic and programmatic considerations, as well leadership skills and attitudinal shifts which, if heeded, may help achieve this objective, bearing in mind they may need adaptation depending on a mission's political and operational environment.

A starting point for creating a propitious environment for peoplecentred approaches in peace operations is to secure the explicit acceptance and adherence of national authorities to the strategic importance of the policy of inclusive ownership that creates space for all national stakeholders to contribute to self-sustainable peace. This adherence could be a part of the development of a shared understanding of the specifc mandate authorised by the Security Council for UN engagement in a particular country, both at the incipient and renewal stages. Where feasible, such a broad understanding of the principles of inclusivity and some of its practical modalities should be part of any agreement that may be drawn between the UN peace mission or the Security Council and the government regarding the practical modalities of implementing the mission's mandate. This contract would provide a measure of transparency in the mission's activities and avoid any misunderstanding with respect to the government's sense of ownership and legitimacy, however tenuous the latter may be. More importantly, it will foster trust and strengthen the initial consent given by host country for the deployment of the mission.

Secondly, and as the High-Level Panel recommended, one should develop a strategy for community engagement at various stages of the mission cycle, that is not only guided by the overall strategic objective of sustaining peace and the principle of doing no harm but also contains elements that address and mitigate some of the dilemmas, challenges, and risks outlined above. To be viable, such a strategy should contain the following:

1. A participatory context analysis that takes peace, and not confict, as a principal referent that seeks to identify not only the factors that drive and sustain communal violence and the related dynamics, but also the resilience capacities touched upon earlier that communities resort to in times of stress, including local dispute management and reconciliation mechanisms and processes. The analysis, if properly designed and conducted, could serve as a barometer for assessing the quality of state-society relations in a particular region or community and thus help guide the implementation of the state-centric provisions of the mission mandate in a context-sensitive manner. In addition, the analysis should include an assessment of risks that community engagement may unwittingly engender. Programmatic interventions, however well designed and intentioned, can be captured by governing elites, create new structures, challenge existing power relations and vested interest, and may even reinforce exclusionary practices. Such an assessment should also evaluate, as the Panel recommended, the impact on the mission mandate and staff security, particularly when local outreach involves engaging with communities targeted by aggressors or judged to be sympathisers of groups that are deemed spoilers or extremists. In other words, inclusivity, noble as it may be, is neither necessarily politically neutral nor always peace-friendly and may therefore cause harm to the mission or the people it is meant to serve.

regular perception surveys of people who are at the receiving end of mission activities, as recommended by HIPPO and the UN Secretary General.

Thirdly, to implement a people-centred approach, one should establish, at mission Headquarters and in regional feld offces, standing civil society advisory groups. These would include religious, academic leaders, women, and youth representatives, judged to be credible voices for their respective communities. Such groups, as de Coning and colleagues proposed, can provide inputs and/or feedback on the peace and confict analysis outlined above, "contribute to the mission's self-evaluation of its programmes and initiatives … [and] enable [it] to stop and re-direct those actions that have harmful effects…" (de Coning et al. 2015, p. 6). "Involving the community," de Coning, Karlsrud, and Troost (Ibid.) add, "not only ensures that the mission's work is relevant to the society it serves, but can also help the peace operation to become a learning organization…". The analysis, as outlined above, if conducted properly, should help overcome the inclusivity and representativeness challenges inherent in the selection of the members of these advisory groups.

The above three prescriptions are not novel and certainly not exhaustive. But if they have a fghting chance of succeeding, they require leadership and attitudinal shifts.

## *Leadership Shifts*

With respect to leadership, senior mission leaders should invest time and energy early on in their tenure to encourage the government and other national stakeholders to develop a medium to long-term vision of what sustaining peace and development would look like for the country, including some indications on the part to be played by local communities in crafting and achieving that vision. It is not uncommon for post confict countries to devise such a vision. Liberia's and East Timor's 2020 vision are but two examples. Mission leaders should also be seen as engaging meaningfully and on a regular basis with these people-oriented processes both at the strategic and programmatic levels. People-centred activities must be treated as a UN system-wide priority. These activities should not be seen as ancillary, or ad-hoc technical exercises best left to less senior staff, usually under pressure to spend post-haste the funds allocated to these activities. Senior leaders should hold program manager accountable for the sustainability of the peace dividends they are purported to yield, in addition to the immediate goodwill and well-being effects they may generate. Some senior mission leaders tend to treat Security Council mandates as a ceiling and are therefore not inclined to engage in initiatives that are not contained in that mandate even when realities on the ground dictate otherwise. It is hoped that the emerging international consensus around the concepts of sustaining peace, inclusive ownership, and the primacy of politics will encourage these leaders to do what is right for the people they are deployed to serve, without prejudice to the primary responsibilities of the host government, however weak it may be.

#### *Attitudinal Shifts*

With respect to the attitudinal changes that need to take place, I will mention just two. First, there is a pressing need to forego the illusion that the UN builds national ownership by simply consulting people on the ground. The reality is that such consultations tend to be perfunctory, largely dictated by the pressing need to validate situational analyses and assessment that have been made in a hurry or seek the acquiescence for pre-conceived solutions. Not unlike genuine communication, consultation is a two-way street. And in order for that to happen, UN staff need to suspend the certainty that comes from thematic knowledge and expertise and let go of the comfort that past remedies provide. What the UN should do is to start investing in the business of listening—listening with the intent to understand, and not with the intent to solve, advise, or justify. Listening with intent might even help us understand what the UN is not good at and come to the inescapable realisation that building peace is what the local people do, not what outsiders do. A cursory look at any contemporary Security Council resolution should dispel the notion that the burden of building peace rests on outsiders' shoulders. Almost every single operative paragraph of these resolutions starts with the key word "support." This is plainly the case of the most recent resolution extending the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA) (UNSC 2018). The critical message is that the primary responsibility for building peace rests with national actors.

Second, there is an equally urgent need to forego the prescriptive biases of liberal peace (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2014), including the notion that the solution to state imperfections or failures is state building and institutional building. The common assumption informing the state building enterprise where the focus is on technical expertise, and where the emphasis is on juridical legitimacy through elections rather than on performance legitimacy earned through the equitable provision of basic services to "we the peoples," without exclusion. Extending state authority without some degree of performance legitimacy is hardly the best recipe for sustaining peace which is a relational goal, and an integral part of rebuilding the social contract. It looks at the quality of the relationship between the state and the citizen. Context and gender sensitive as well as people-centred approaches to peace and development can help promote a different understanding of legitimacy and ownership and thus may prove more effective for achieving some measure of sustainable peace. In other words, we need to strike a balance between top-down, externally prescribed peace and popular, locally prescribed peace (Roberts 2010).

## Conclusion and Recommendation to the Security Council

The world we live in is clearly no longer ordered by states alone, and the monopoly of violence is escaping the grasp of states. As mentioned above, many of the new and emerging threats to international peace and security such as terrorism, organised crime, and violent extremism tend to be driven from below by non-state actors, some with state aspirations. These threats, in addition to their tragic humanitarian consequences, are perceived to constitute a clear and present danger to states and to the state-based multilateral governance system. This partly explains why the UN Security Council tends to resort to state-centric approaches, often militarised, as default responses to counter these threats. These responses, invariably prescribed under Chapter 7, tend to populate the mandates of contemporary peacekeeping operations. Many of these mandates are guided by the illusory proposition that the best way to repair failing states is to build strong state institutions and extend their remit at all cost, without credible checks and balance mechanisms and a reform agenda to address the governance and leadership defcits at the origin of their failures. I am not suggesting that people-oriented peace approaches within a peacekeeping context constitute magic silver bullets. What I am advocating is that these approaches, if properly designed and carried out, can facilitate the capacity of fragile societies to self-organise (de Coning et al. 2015), help repair frayed social contracts and thus make fragile peace less reversible, while the country embarks on the long-term process of building capable, inclusive, and accountable state institutions.

For reasons outlined in this paper and given the resurgence of unhealthy geopolitics within the Council as well as the visceral mistrust of the Council by a majority of the rest of UN members, I do not expect the Council to have a change of heart and fully embrace a people-centred approach to peace operations. What I am encouraging the Council to do is to muster the residual political will and request, as a standard practice, under Chapter 6, nations that are hosts to a peace operation to develop with the support of the UN system on the ground and the Peacebuilding Commission, a *compact for sustaining peace* that would articulate the primary responsibilities of the host government, the contributions of civil society, and the supportive role to be played by international partners on the ground. All of which will be assorted with an exit strategy undergirded by performance benchmarks and timelines to ensure accountability and facilitate reporting to the Council upon mandate renewal. This will be a strategic framework, not unlike compacts facilitated by the Peacebuilding Commission for certain situations, and not unlike the type of compact proposed by the Panel (UN 2015a, pp. 38–39). It is through this contract, I hasten to add that all the three foundational pillars of UN engagement will fow in an integrated manner, as advocated by Security Council Resolution 2282 (UN 2016c) on sustaining peace, and that people-centred approaches will fnd a natural and uncontested home.

In the absence of such a framework for mutual accountability, peace operations, particularly in environments of asymmetric threats, will fnd themselves pressured to make up for the defcits of imperfect states, captured by the political elites, however well-elected they may be, and be far more concerned with power and the next elections than governance. Some of these governing elites might even use the pretext of fghting terrorism and organised violence to escape scrutiny and resist the implementation of the requisite reforms for effective governance and sustainable peace. And as a result, and as several ongoing situations attest, the Council will fnd itself caught between the hammer and the anvil, damned if it withdraws prematurely and doubly damned if it has no other choice but to extend the peace operation ad-infnitum, and observing rising costs and mounting risks to "We the peoples."

## References

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## Mandates and Strategy

## What Are the Limits to the Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping?

*Mats Berdal*

## Introduction

The use and utility of military force have been central, if sometimes underlying and unarticulated, themes in discussions about the purposes, practices, and, indeed, the very identity of United Nations peacekeeping since its inception. The precise historical and normative context within which those discussions have taken place has necessarily evolved over time. And yet, as the 2015 report of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) makes clear, many of the key questions raised by the use of force in peacekeeping—be they of a practical or conceptual kind—are not fundamentally new (UN 2015). Chief among these is an overarching question that also frames and animates the present chapter, to wit, what are the limits to the use of force in UN peacekeeping? In approaching this question, the chapter and the arguments it advances have been divided into three closely connected parts.1

1Some of these arguments, especially in part three, draw upon and are more fully developed in Mats Berdal (2016).

M. Berdal (\*)

113

Department of War Studies, King's College London, London, UK

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

C. de Coning and M. Peter (eds.), *United Nations Peace Operations in a Changing Global Order*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99106-1\_6

The frst of these seeks to locate current preoccupations regarding the use of force within a wider historical context. To this end, it briefy traces both the thinking and practice around the use of force by UN blue helmets from the conceptual foundations laid in the era of "classical peacekeeping" to the focus on the protection of civilians (POC) and "robust peacekeeping" that have come to defne the period since the Brahimi Panel Report of 2000 (UN 2000). It highlights how changes in geopolitical context and normative expectations have shaped and broadened the scope and aims of UN peacekeeping in important ways, with direct implications for the use of force. It also notes, however, that third-party involvement in civil war-like situations—as in South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where more than 80,000 peacekeepers are currently deployed—have brought to the fore cross-cutting challenges and policy dilemmas of a more fundamental kind when it comes to the application of military force by UN peacekeepers.

Developing the argument further, part two dwells on two sets of limitations to the effective use of force in UN operations. The frst of these may be viewed as *structural barriers* to military effectiveness in UN operations, that is, limitations built in, as it were, to the very machinery and system for mounting, conducting, and sustaining UN peacekeeping operations. While some of the constraints thus imposed can be mitigated through reform of practices and procedures, to the extent that they are rooted in the intergovernmental and political character of the UN as an institution, they can never be fully overcome. This is an oft-neglected reality that will continue to place signifcant constraints on the effective use of force by blue helmets in the future. Indeed, as will be argued more fully, with UN missions now routinely deployed in conditions of actual or latent civil war, entrusted with POC responsibilities and given mandates that allow for the robust use of force, the debilitating impact of inbuilt capability constraints on force cohesion and military effectiveness has become ever more acute.

Added to these structural, seemingly quasi-organic impediments to effectiveness in UN peacekeeping is a second set of limitations. These are the political and practical challenges that inevitably present themselves to a peacekeeping force deployed as an impartial third party in conditions of on-going or unfnished civil war, that is, in conditions of persistent insecurity and violence fuelled by power struggles among political elites for control of territory, populations, and governmental authority. Over time, and indeed wherever the UN has deployed, such conditions have also given rise to distinctive, complex, and frequently mutating political economies of confict, the dynamics of which the UN, with its limited analytical capacities both at its headquarters in New York and in the feld, has struggled to grasp, let alone factor into policy. Any assessment of the prospects for the effective use of force by UN peacekeepers, nearly all of which are now deployed in situations of internal confict, must take these realities into account.

The third and fnal section of the chapter looks in greater detail at the record of "robust peacekeeping" and the kind of lessons that can reasonably be drawn from operations since the late 1990s. In brief, it argues that the use of force in Sierra Leone (2000), Haiti (2006–2007) and the DRC (2003) all suggest that, at the *tactical level*, a properly equipped and properly commanded force can be used with decisive, albeit short-term, effect in response to immediate crises or emergencies. The larger *strategic* lesson from the history of robust peacekeeping since 1999, however, is, fundamentally, a far more cautionary one; one that highlights the need for the activities of peacekeepers to be much more closely aligned than they have become over the past decade and half to the search for durable and inclusive political settlements to disputes. As such, it is a conclusion that echoes one of the central messages of the HIPPO, and which has also emerged as an early theme of Antonio Guterres' tenure as the ninth Secretary-General of UN.

## From the Sinai to the Kivus

In a concise and intellectually compelling effort to distil from the UN's early forays into peacekeeping "certain basic principles and rules" that might "provide an adaptable framework for later operations," the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, identifed the "prohibition against any *initiative* in the use of force" as one of UN peacekeeping's defning characteristics (Hammarskjold 1958). Alongside the principles of consent and impartiality, this commitment to minimum use of force except in self-defence came to constitute one of the core principles of so-called classical peacekeeping, defning its character as a distinctive form of third-party intervention involving the deployment of lightly equipped troops drawn from different member states and placed under UN command. Although the UN's peacekeeping experience during the Cold War was richer and more varied than is often assumed, that experience did not lead to a fundamental questioning or re-examination of those principles. Indeed, even some of the most "painful peacekeeping" of the Cold War era—in the Congo in the early 1960s and South Lebanon between 1978 and 1982—were seen, in the fnal analysis, as a vindication of their importance (James 1983).

It was only with the changes in political climate spawned by the end of the Cold War that more radical ideas began to be foated about the future directions of UN operations and the sanctity of the principles on which these had traditionally been based. Between 1987 and 1992, the liberating impact of improvements in the international political landscape was demonstrated in a series of successful UN feld operations from the Middle East and Asia to Central America and sub-Saharan Africa.2 Although these operations were all, with one exception, comparatively modest in aim and small-scale in scope, they nonetheless contributed to a growing, if inchoate, sense that the long-established practices and functions of UN peacekeeping might now be developed in new and far more ambitious directions.3 Thus, in *An Agenda for Peace*, released in June 1992 when the hopes and normative aspirations of international society were still closely aligned with the optimism of the early post-Cold War period, the newly appointed Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali urged the Security Council to "consider the utilization of peace-enforcement units in clearly defned circumstances" (UN 1992b). More suggestive still, he defned peacekeeping as involving the deployment of a UN presence "*hitherto* with the consent of all the parties concerned," (ibid., para. 20, my emphasis) thus hinting that the self-denying ordinance governing the use of force was ripe for re-examination.

Such optimism as could be gleaned from *An Agenda for Peace* proved, however, to be short-lived. Between 1992 and 1995, the horrors of Angola, Somalia, Rwanda, and former Yugoslavia—all places where UN peacekeepers had been deployed yet conspicuously failed to halt mass

2These included the UN Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG), active from 1988 to 1991; the UN Good Offces Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP) between 1988 and 1990; the UN Angola Verifcation Mission (UNAVEM I) from 1988 to 1991; the United Nations Observer Group (ONUCA) established in 1989 and successfully terminated in 1992; as well as the larger, more complex and, ultimately, successful, UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia (UNTAG) between 1989 and March 1990.

3For a revealing sense of the climate of optimism at the time, see the various presentations made by member states at the Security Council summit, the frst of its kind, held in late January 1992 (UN 1992a).

atrocities—ushered in a profound crisis of UN peacekeeping. Taking stock in early 1995, Boutros Ghali issued a *Supplement to An Agenda for Peace*; a document markedly different in tone from the optimism of three years earlier and, more signifcantly, gloomy in its conclusions regarding the prospects for the use of force in peacekeeping operations. In essence, Boutros-Ghali called for a return to "basic principles," arguing that "peacekeeping and the use of force (other than in self-defence) had to be seen as alternative techniques and not as adjacent points on a continuum, permitting easy transition from one to the other" (UN 1995, para. 36). Both more rigorous and cogent in its analysis of the real-world challenges of post-Cold War peacekeeping than its precursor document, the *Supplement* rightly emphasised the limits of UN-led operations in civil war-like situations, especially so when member states were only prepared, as they had repeatedly demonstrated over the previous three years, to will the ends and not the means. Even so, the Secretary-General's intervention in early 1995 did not settle the discussion about the use of force by UN peacekeepers. The nature and the scale of UN's peacekeeping failures between 1992 and 1995 meant that, at one level, there simply could be no "return to basics." This would become even clearer some six months after the release of the *Supplement*, when the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. The bloody and horrifc aftermath of Srebrenica's capture, just one year on from the genocide in Rwanda, inevitably and quite understandably infuenced the subsequent evolution of UN peacekeeping and the discussion about its purposes.4 As the spate of new operations since 1999 has shown, the apparent determination to ensure that the horrors of Rwanda and former Yugoslavia would never again be repeated on the UN's watch has emphatically *not* resolved the deeper tension between ends and means highlighted by the *Supplement*, tensions which, if anything, have become more acute. What it plainly has done, however, is to infuence the mandate and change the operational focus of UN peacekeepers, with important implications for the question of the use of force.

The single most important manifestation of this change is the growing centrality of the "Protection of Civilians" (POC) as a task formally

<sup>4</sup>Contributing powerfully to this, were two detailed and damning inquires into UN's role in Rwanda and Srebrenica, both of them published in 1999. See "The Fall of Srebrenica" (UN 1999a) and "Report of the Independent Inquiry in UN actions During the Rwanda Genocide" (UN 1999b).

entrusted to UN peacekeepers. The Security Council frst expressed "its willingness to consider how peacekeeping mandates might better address the negative impact of armed confict on civilians" in September 1999 (UN 1999c, para. 11). Since then, POC has become the subject of regular debates by the Council and, more signifcantly, beginning with the establishment of the UN operation in Sierra Leone in October 1999, missions have routinely and expressly been mandated under Chapter VII of the Charter "to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence" (UN 1999d, para. 14). The growing focus on civilian protection is also a key factor behind the calls for more muscular, or robust, peacekeeping that have become such a notable feature of contemporary UN peacekeeping practice and discourse (UN 2009). Since 1999 the Council has given peacekeepers authority under Chapter VII of the Charter to "use all necessary means," or "take the necessary action," to accomplish their mission. In a number of individual operations, notably in Sierra Leone, Haiti, and the Congo, that authority has in turn provided the basis for taking the *initiative* in the use of force. The trend culminated in March 2013 when the Council decided that the UN's troubled Congo mission should be strengthened with the creation of a Force Intervention Brigade (FIB)—a "milestone" in the evolution of UN peacekeeping, according to the Secretary General at the time (UN 2014)—whose mandate would be "to carry out targeted offensive operations … in a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner" (UN 2013, para. 12b).

When the Secretary-General authorised his review of peace operations in 2014, fve of the UN's largest missions—in Darfur, the DRC, the CAR, Mali, and South Sudan—were all operating under Chapter VII, and all were centrally focused on the protection of civilians. The distinctly uneven record of civilian protection in these operations, along with the absence of political progress towards lasting stability in each case, provided the immediate backdrop to the HIPPO and to the continuing discussions about the precise role of force, its limitations, and possibilities in UN peacekeeping.

## Limitations to the Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers

#### *Structural Barriers to Military Effectiveness*

In a written submission to the HIPPO in March 2015, some twenty former UN Force Commanders offered a series of detailed recommendations whose implementation would, in their view, help ensure "success in future peace operations." Penned by Robert Mood, a respected offcer with extensive UN experience, the letter stressed the need for "strengthened command and control, improved preparedness and mission design, use of modern technology, enhanced capabilities, improved mission information, and strengthened logistics and support" (Mood 2015). Designed to address long-standing capacity gaps and impediments to operational effectiveness, the proposals ranged widely. Unsurprisingly, given the breath of experiences shared by the signatories to the letter, the recommendations also made good operational sense.

To any long-time observer of UN feld operations, however, very few of the defciencies that the letter sought to address were fundamentally new. The haphazard and unreliable provision of key capacities and force enablers, notably in logistics, intelligence, engineering, aviation support, and reserves; the persistence of complex and cumbersome regulations governing fnance, procurement, and human resources; the challenges of force generation and speed of deployment; and the "dysfunctional" nature of relations between the UN in New York and feld headquarters, have all long plagued UN peacekeeping.5 They have also proved remarkably resistant, if not entirely impervious, to substantive reform. The UN's system of human resources management—a distinctly unglamorous but nonetheless critically important area if one is genuinely concerned about improving the effectiveness of UN feld operations—illustrates the nature of the problem.