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CIAO DATE: 12/99
Terra Incognita: Here Be Dragons: Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution in Contemporary Conflict; Some Relationships Considered
Dr. Tom Woodhouse and Dr. Oliver Ramsbotham
Paper presented at the INCORE Conference on
Training and Preparation of Military and Civilian Peacekeepers
University of Ulster
June 13th-15th, 1996.
Table of Contents
This paper was presented in the introductory session of a major INCORE conference on the Training and Preparation of Military and Civilian Peacekeepers, held at INCORE’s headquarters, Abeerfoyle House, on 13-15 June 1996. The current nature and strategic implications of many of the issues raised in the conference, both in the papers presented and the general discussion they stimulated, has prompted INCORE to publish a number of the conference papers in Occasional Paper format. A summary of the conference proceedings, which includes an overview of the many issues raised in discussion, has also been published.
The paper by Woodhouse and Ramsbotham provides a timely assessment of how analysts have defined the changing nature of peacekeeping in the post Cold War world, particularly within the context of changing ideas of humanitarian intervention. They argue that peacekeeping provides the international community with the best means for the application of minimum standards of international humanitarian law and the alleviation of human suffering in violent suffering. At the same time, the authors realise that the peculiar nature of many contemporary conflict complicates the role of the peacekeeper. Drawing on the disciplines of conflict resolution and conflict analysis, they offer the term ‘international social conflict’ as a description of the type of conflict which is becoming prevalent in the post Cold War period; these international social conflicts do not respond well to traditional methods of inter-state management. They also tend to produce large-scale humanitarian emergencies. The exisitng international humanitarian system has been strained to the limit, and the military forces operating under UN mandates have been increasingly involved in providing assistance and protection for a wide range of agencies working to alleviate suffering in war zones. They argue that the traditional concept of humanitarian intervention (forcible action by states across internal borders to protect human rights) is no longer adequate to respond to contemporary problems and offer a new broader concept of non-forcible humanitarian intervention, which combines the actions of military peacekeepers, official aid and assistance by governments, and the actions of transnational, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations in areas of conflict. UN peacekeeping is a vital component of this broad concept, though its efficacy has been ciontested.
I: Introduction, and summary of main themes
It is remarkable how the imagery of navigation—maps, route signs, (or their absence)—crop up in the current literature on peacekeeping. It may be that the imagery was suggested by Alan James, whose influential book Peacekeeping in International Politics 1 explored the highways and by-ways of peacekeeping, referring to the “international high street”, “the back yard”, “the neighbourhood” and the “crossroads of international politics” to identify the various types of peacekeeping missions. Subsequently, William Durch entitled the concluding chapter of his book “Peacekeeping in uncharted territory”; 2 Cedric Thornberry remarked that in the new environment of intervening in civil wars there are not many maps; and that peacekeepers and humanitarian aid organisations have to work “under stressful conditions, under the eye of the camera lens, and with no instruction leaflets”. 3 For Hugo Slim, UN peacekeeping is a large “new kid on the block”, the subject of intense debate about the role of the military in humanitarian emergencies. 4 When the mapmakers of the old world came across terra incognita, they sometimes wrote on their maps, “beyond here be dragons”. For peacekeepers and others working in contemporary conflict zones, there are dragons aplenty in the terra incognita of complex emergencies and civil wars. This paper considers how analysts have assessed and defined the changing nature of peacekeeping, as confrontation with the dragons of post cold war conflict, particularly in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Angola, and Liberia, has forced rapid re-evaluation of what it is realistic to expect of peacekeeping deployments.
One broad aim of the paper, therefore, is to review the current debate about UN peacekeeping, which, following an analysis of humanitarian intervention options available to the international community, we roughly define as the middle ground between two other options—(i) abstention or the withdrawal of military forces, and (ii) enforcement. 5 As Alan James made clear in his study, “in relation to the control of international conflict (peacekeeping) is one of the more fruitful developments of the twentieth century”. 6 The issue now, following the experiences of the large scale expansion of peacekeeping between 1988 and 1995, is to assess its relevance for contemporary and future conflict management. Should this ‘middle option’ be confined to traditional ‘first generation’ peacekeeping functions, as characteristically exercised during the cold war, or does the virulence and confusion of much contemporary conflict with its devastating humanitarian implications and threats to regional order, demand that a capability for collective ‘second generation’ peacekeeping operations should also be kept open? We conclude that, despite all the problems encountered so far in attempts to mount wider peacekeeping operations in conflict zones in the 1990s, too hasty a foreclosing of this option would unnecessarily deprive the international community of an important possible tool of international conflict management.
Following this conclusion, we consider some of the implications for future UN peacekeeping from a conflict resolution perspective. It is common to find assertions in the literature, whether by military analysts or academics, that peacekeeping, being based on principles of consent and impartiality, is self evidently a form of conflict resolution. However it is only very recently that peacekeeping has been treated within the literature of conflict resolution, which has its own distinctive concepts and assumptions about conflict processes and which has emerged from a tradition of research over the last thirty years or so. In this paper we review this literature in order to define more clearly how peacekeeping is seen within the conflict resolution theory field: and conversely we look at how recent military doctrine on peacekeeping defines its links with conflict resolution. Out of this analysis will come a clearer idea of what each expects from the other, and what are the potential benefits of a closer dialogue between peacekeepers and academics around issues of conflict resolution. (We should not assume, for all the talk of ‘legitimacy’, ‘consent’, and ‘impartiality’ as words from a common vocabulary amongst academics and practitioners, that we are speaking the same language. We recently held a seminar in Bradford which was addressed by a high level American army officer with experience in Somalia, who stressed the importance of conflict resolution in peacekeeping. When asked what he thought was the ideal mode of conflict resolution, he replied “negotiations and the consent of all parties—backed up by the overwhelming use of force”!). Following a review of these issues we conclude with a summary of areas where conflict resolution thinking might help to illuminate and interpret the changing nature of peacekeeping.
II: Changing contexts: the nature of the contemporary conflict environment
It is axiomatic in conflict theory, that, before determining optimum modes of positive intervention, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict which interveners hope to affect for the better. Clearly, this is a highly complex task which we can only outline here. 7 For example, how many conflicts within any given period can be said to come to an end? What proportion of these is decided outright by force majeure? And what proportion is ended by negotiated settlement? How many of the settlements hold? And what is the role of peacekeepers in all of this? Can the success or failure of peacekeeping missions be quantified or objectively assessed? According to Wallensteen and Axell’s analysis, fewer than half (41) of the 90 conflicts active between 1989-1993 had experienced some form of conflict termination. Of the 41 conflicts terminated between 1989 and 1993, six ended as a result of some form of peace accord (in Lebanon, Mali, Morocco/Western Sahara, Mozambique, El Salvador and Nicaragua). However 17 of the 41 cases resulted in victory for one side over its adversaries. In a further 20 cases there was neither victory, nor agreement, and the conflicts were terminated in the sense either that they fell below their threshold for inclusion (fewer than 25 battle related deaths) and/or because cease-fires or other reasons meant a decline in activity of the warring parties in 1993. From these figures it appears that victory through domination and defeat of the opponent is more common than mutual agreement through peace accords; however, taking the 1993 ‘still active’ conflicts into account (47), the overall picture is that ‘non-victory’ outcomes are the most commonplace. 8
‘Non-victory outcomes’ is an academic sounding phrase: what does it mean? The reality behind this phrase is the most intense and widespread human misery, compounded of every element in the humanitarian repertory: unspeakable war crimes, gross crimes against humanity from ethnic cleansing and rape to genocide, terrible deprivation of basic essentials through siege or starvation. As always, it is the innocent who suffer most. In the early 1990s there has been a succession of refugee crises as people have fled from conflicts: in 1992 alone over 3.5 million people were forced to flee across an international border. In the former Yugoslavia the number of people dependent on humanitarian assistance rose from 500,000 to 3.6 million in the sixteen months between December 1991 and June 1993. In 1992 over 10% of the population of Somalia were refugees in neighbouring countries. By the end of 1992 the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia created more than 800,000 refugees, while the civil war in Tajikistan had displaced a further 500,000. In February and March 1993 over 280,000 people fled from Togo to Benin and Ghana. During 1994 the problem erupted devastatingly in Rwanda, and in early 1995 refugees fleeing from Burundi into Tanzania signalled yet another humanitarian crisis.
Can conflict theory shed any light on how the international community might be able to address this kind of problem? We can begin to look for an answer to this question by considering the work of a group of academics who have pioneered the field of conflict resolution and have taken a comprehensive approach to conflict analysis. A concern of this conflict resolution approach has been to identify the social and domestic causes of conflicts which escalate to become civil wars. The work of Edward Azar and his colleagues at the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management has been of particular significance. Azar has defined a type of conflict which he terms ‘protracted social conflict’ (PSC) which “originates when communal groups (defined by shared ethnic religious linguistic or other cultural characteristics) are denied their distinct identity or collective developmental needs... )”. 9
In Azar’s analysis PSCs emerge from the interaction of four causal categories, which he terms communal content, human needs, governance and the role of the state, and international linkages. Societies with multicommunal composition provide the starting point for PSCs. The second factor in the model, human needs, is a central one in conflict resolution analysis in general. In Azar’s formulation, the denial of access needs (participation in the superstructural institutions of society), of acceptance needs (recognition of identity defined as shared cultural values and heritage), and of security needs (physical welfare), opens up the fault lines. The provision or denial of collective goods is dependent on the role and nature of the state. States which experience PSCs, or which are prone to it, will have ‘incompetent, parochial, fragile and authoritarian governments that fail to satisfy basic human needs’ for the whole community. 10 Azar’s fourth factor, international linkages, refers to the non-domestic influences on PSCs and the way in which the nature of the state and its behaviour in internal conflict is conditioned by its relationship with other states in the international system. Once conflict is triggered in a multicommunal society, weak, rigid, and sectarian states will seek to contain it, in part by cutting off external support for domestic conflict actors, in part by seeking external support for itself. In this way the scope and intensity of the conflict becomes magnified and internationalised.
This analysis reflects what has been distinctive about conflict resolution since its inception in the mid 1950s. Conventionally, conflicts have been separated into internal and external types. A range of social scientists study internal conflicts (that is the variety of domestic conflicts within states: historians, sociologists, anthropologists, systems and organisations specialists), while external conflicts (wars, invasions, blockades etc.) have been the concern of international relations scholars. Within these distinctions scholars have also defined different types of conflict including ideological conflict, authority conflict, resource conflict, environmental conflict, and identity conflict. Burton has used the term “deep rooted conflict” 11 Kriesberg writes of “intractable conflict”; 12 and Azar, as has been seen, refers to protracted social conflict.
Building on this work, and combining it with categories from international law, we have elsewhere employed the term ‘international social conflict’ (ISC) to define more closely the type of conflict syndrome which emerges when cultural identity groups and systems of governance are disarticulated. 13 We define international social conflict as conflict which is neither purely inter-state conflict (such as the Iran-Iraq war), nor confined within the normal institutionalised rules and procedures of domestic conflict management (such as the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots), but which sprawls somewhere between the two. There are many other terms for this level of conflict, most commonly ‘internal conflict’ or ‘civil war’, but these do not capture the further twin characteristics of ISCs: (a) that they are rooted in relations between communal groups within state borders (the ‘social’ component), and (b) that they have broken out of the domestic arena and become a crisis for the state itself, thus automatically involving the wider society of states (the ‘international’ component). A characteristic mark of (b) is militarisation beyond the capacity of state police forces to control. International-social conflicts are communal conflicts which become crises of the state. They typically cause massive human suffering and invite international intervention. A fuller name for this class of conflict would be ‘international-state-social’ conflict, because they operate at three levels, and thus require three levels of explanation: system level, state level and communal level. This in turn roughly corresponds to two broad approaches in conflict analysis: structural and relational. It is at state level, which mediates between the other two, that the critical dynamics are played out. An ISC is a crisis of the state, whether this takes the form of state-formation conflict (Bosnia), struggle for state control (Rwanda), or eventual state collapse (Somalia).
In relation to Azar’s work, we accept that the most useful unit of analysis in international-social conflict (ISC), as in protracted social conflict (PSC), is the communal group or identity group, whatever may be seen to be its base—race, religion, ethnicity, culture. But in this case we part company in also recognising the continuing potency of the state as the main organising principle in the international arena, not only as an extraneous causal or complicating factor, but also as intrinsic to the aspirations of the conflicting parties themselves. The communal group is the ‘social’ base in which the conflict is rooted; the state is the ‘international’ prize which is being fought for. Given the current international system, where sovereignty and all that goes with it is reserved for existing states, embattled disaffected communities are often in the end driven to aspire to statehood themselves—either independently or through amalgamation with neighbouring cognates. Even in a ‘failed’ or collapsed state like Somalia, the mainly Issaq Somaliland in the North claims independent statehood, while fluid and fragmented kinship and clan groups provide the basis for the implacable drive by ‘warlords’ to inherit and reconstruct the former post-colonial state. It is only sovereignty that is seen to guarantee the very needs identified by Azar and referred to above—security, recognition, access to sources of power. So it is that the struggle for power in the service of interest, characteristic of the ‘old’ thinking criticised by needs theorists, takes its place beside the drive for communal identity and recognition as integral to what defines international-social conflict.
There is no space here to provide empirical underpinning to the ISC concept, beyond remarking that in broad terms, using data -bases such as that provided by the Uppsala project, we group post-cold war conflicts into three categories. Type 1 conflicts are inter-state wars over control of strategic territory, borders and resources. On our count there were four type 1 conflicts between 1989 and 1993, and none in 1993. Type 2 conflicts are intra-state conflicts related to control of government or authority structures, fuelled by political, ideological or religious differences. There were 20 of these over the 1989-1993 period, including conflicts in Algeria, Cambodia, Haiti and Mozambique. The rough pattern here seems to be that ideological (class) conflict of the classic cold war kind is in decline (Cambodia), but religious conflict is on the increase (Algeria). All conflicts are at the same time political conflicts for power, some almost purely so (Haiti). Our focus here is on Type 3 conflicts, or ISCs, which covers the remainder of the data set. Of course these categories are not watertight. Type 3 conflicts may have some of the objectives and characteristics of type 1 conflicts (territorial acquisition) and of type 2 conflicts (religious or political programmes imposed upon government), but they are fundamentally about enduring identity groups which are organised to insist on the satisfaction of their needs, interests, and beliefs and which do challenge the integrity or stability of a state. When states, posed with such challenges, disintegrate a crisis not only of the state but also of the state system ensues. It is important for what follows to note that at any one time ISCs can in turn be broadly divided into: (a) those which seem to be at the threshold stage, such as in Zaire or Sierra Leone in 1993; (b) those which are already at the severe stage, of which there were 17 in 1993 and 1994; and (c) those whose overt phase is over or in abeyance and are at the settlement stage, such as in Croatia, Israel/ Palestine, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, South Africa in 1994. 14 The 17 severe ISCs in 1993-1994 were in Afghanistan, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bosnia/Hercegovina, Burundi, Russia/Chechnya, Georgia/Abkhazia, Indonesia/East Timor, Iraq (Kurds/Shi’a), Liberia, Myanmar, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan and Turkey (Kurds).
The type 3 conflicts concern us most in the analysis in this paper, because they represent a species of conflict which is already presenting severe challenges for the international community. Type 1 conflicts are clearly in decline, although we do not rule out the prospect that they might increase in significance in the future. As Holsti has pointed out, while the pursuit of economic, trade and territorial interests may not be a major generator of warfare in the future, major powers may well come to intervene increasingly if their economic interests are threatened by “turmoil, civil wars, and interstate wars in the third world ... ”. 15 In addition there are a large number of dormant border conflicts between states which could flare up in an international environment of economic depression and resource scarcity. States will move decisively to protect trade routes and resources threatened by any possible spill-over from international social conflict. Type 2 conflicts, driven by ideological, religious, and power-political dynamics, capture both the class-ideology conflicts characteristic of the cold war period, and the newer religious conflicts which some say will emerge as the furnace of global conflict post cold war. In general in this category it is true to say that the class-ideology conflicts are declining, and it is still uncertain how significant religion (Algeria, Egypt, Iran) will be as a conflict generator, while domestic revolutionary activity may well flare up again in Central and Latin America (Mexico, Peru, Colombia).
The concept of international-social conflict (type 3) is not intended to account for all armed conflicts. Rather it offers an analysis of a type of conflict which is increasing in frequency and it provides some explanation for why this kind of conflict becomes protracted and embittered, causes large-scale human suffering and poses the sternest test for the international community when the question of intervention is considered. Conflict causes are likely to remain complex and multi-faceted and the specific locations of the outbreak of conflict in the future are difficult to predict. Holsti’s profile of issues that have generated civil and international conflict between 1648 and 1989 nevertheless confirms the emerging significance of the ISC type:
“Despite all the rhetoric about global interdependence, the shrinking world, and the presumably unifying impact of technological innovations on social and economic life, a more primordial sentiment seeks to assert autonomy, separateness, uniqueness, cultural survival, and, ultimately, sovereignty. Since most of the states of the world are composed of multiple ethnic/language/ religious groups, we could expect the future international agenda to be crowded with cases of civil wars, wars of secession and the breakdown of multicommunal states—all with the possibility of foreign intervention.” 16
One of the main arguments in this paper is that the nature of these international-social conflicts needs to be understood in order to see both why they invite third party intervention and why it is so difficult for outsiders, including UN peacekeepers, to respond adequately. Three points can usefully be made here.
First, international-social conflicts cannot easily be ignored by the international community. Whatever the temptation for those living in other regions to respond in the spirit of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 reported reaction to the Czech crisis (that it was a dispute “in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”), several factors characteristically combine to draw outsiders in. Following Marc Trachtenberg, we may distinguish two broad historical normative traditions of state intervention: (a) intervention to preserve the balance of power, and (b) intervention to uphold internationally accepted values (in the past, and, in some eyes still today, Western values). 17 This roughly corresponds with what Lori Fisler Damrosch has called the two “clusters of values” which underpin the UN Charter: (a) state system values, and (b) human rights values. 18 Each is invoked as an urgent reason for intervention in severe ISCs, which both threaten regional disorder, 19 and cause massive human suffering.20 For some informed commentators ‘wars of interest’ and ‘wars of conscience’ cannot be separated. These crises may not “immediately threaten national security”, nevertheless outsiders are drawn in not only “to help people because they are hungry and because if they are not fed they will die” but also because “countries which are racked by famine or civil war will be unsafe neighbours in the world village” 21
Second, international-social conflicts do not respond to the traditional methods of interstate conflict management, largely because most international-social conflicts have elements of both interstate and deep domestic divisions. Yet, even though they do not respond to traditional inter-state management, neither can they be resolved purely internally. For this reason they may require international intervention, which is a further reason why the term ‘international-social’ is preferable to other descriptions of this type of conflict. The complex conflict-related humanitarian emergencies which will inevitably result from such a pattern of conflict, involving large numbers of refugees and internally displaced people, as well as victims of war and famine, requires a new range of response from the international community. The existing international humanitarian system has been strained to the limit, 22 including multilateral military peacekeeping forces (UN peacekeeping operations covered 25 of the 90 conflicts active between 1989 and 1993) increasingly becoming involved in providing assistance and protection for a wide range of international aid agencies working in war zones. 23 Some humanitarian organisations oppose military involvement in humanitarian work because they fear that it jeopardises its non-political nature. Others concede that the need for relief and the chaos and insecurity prevailing in conflict zones justifies and requires the protection that military peacekeeping forces can provide.
Third, given the nature of ISCs, if peacekeepers are deployed, they are unavoidably caught up in both the structural and the relational dimensions of the conflict. It is as well for this to be understood at the outset. In general, in terms of the analysis outlined above, the overall aim of the interventions within which peacekeepers function is: (i) to prevent conflicts at the ‘threshold’ stage from becoming ‘severe’ ISCs; (ii) to move existing ‘severe’ ISCs on to the ‘settlement’ stage; and (iii) to prevent conflicts already at the ‘settlement’ stage from relapsing back into the ‘severe’ phase. Peacekeeping can (and in the 1990s does) play a significant role in all of these (despite the apparent terminological incompatibility implied in the name). Task (i) has not been traditional for peacekeepers, but is now quite widely advocated as an important option for the international community in collective conflict management (as, for example, in the case of the deployment of UNPROFOR III in Macedonia). Task (ii) is likely to involve peacekeepers in turbulent conflict situations where the distinction between consensual peacekeeping and non-consensual peace enforcement may be ambiguous and difficult to sustain. Task (iii) may appear more familiar from the perspective of ‘first generation’ peacekeeping, but, given the volatile nature of ISCs, is also likely to imply ‘second generation’ functions. Certainly, a conflict at the threshold and settlement stage can only be permanently prevented from collapsing forwards or backwards into a severe ISC if measures suitable for shifting the latter into the settlement stage are supplemented by further measures which address the underlying conflict causes. Here is a further reason why an adequate understanding of the structural and relational roots of ISCs is important. For example, in terms of structural causes, peacekeepers are deployed within a nexus which in one way or another affects the deep issues of: social heterogeneity; weakness of state institutions; economic underdevelopment; and cross-border politics. In terms of relational causes, peacekeepers are integrally affected by: intense relations of identity and interest (for example, the fact that there is no room in ISCs for political neutrality, impartiality or disinterestedness); by quantitative and qualitative asymmetries in relations of power (for example, the fact that both the use and non-use of coercion or force impacts on the dynamics of the struggle); by impassioned relations of belief (for example, the fact that, whatever interveners may think that they are doing, their actions will be variously interpreted, often in mutually incompatible ways, by the conflict parties); and by vicious relations of attitude and behaviour (for example, the fact that the unpredictable twists and turns of the conflict, including the formation and break-up of new alliances, may mean that the situation on the ground when a mission is launched bears little resemblance to the situation a few months later, and the role of interveners is materially altered accordingly).
We are now already enmeshed in some of the deeper issues raised at the critical interface between peacekeeping and conflict resolution. If peacekeepers take on these roles, such questions cannot be ducked and difficulties of this kind should be well understood from the beginning. But, before returning to consider some of the further implications of all this, we must first undertake a brief consideration of the contemporary debate about whether peacekeepers should be undertaking these kinds of tasks in the first place.
III: Changing interpretations: quick fixes, sunset clauses, or long hauls
Perhaps surprisingly, for an institution which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988, UN peacekeeping has not gone on to enjoy a uniformly good press. Former UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, General Sir Michael Rose, commenting on this, wrote:
“Sadly, in the 50th year of UN peacekeeping operations, the perceived failures and costs of the UN mission in former Yugoslavia, and recent experiences in Somalia, have led to widespread disillusionment. Yet if the world loses faith in peacekeeping, and responses to the new world disorder are limited to the extremes of total war or total peace, the world will become a more dangerous place. Rather than lose faith in the whole peace process, we need to analyse the changed operational circumstances and try to determine new doctrines for the future.” 24
In the debates about the changing nature of peacekeeping, three options for intervention are distinguished. Firstly persisting with peacekeeping, in such a way that the political, humanitarian and military components are better integrated. However, the counter case that the UN is a weak and inadequate institution for responding to contemporary conflict, has been strongly put and has gained considerable support, especially in the United States. We consider this debate below, looking especially at criticisms which suggest that military, political, and humanitarian objectives should not necessarily be inextricably combined. One strand of this argument suggests that civil wars, the context for so many UN operations, might best be left to their own dynamic. Only when they have played out and a victor emerges can political and humanitarian processes be deployed to assist in rebuilding the war damage. This argument leads to favouring the second option in international conflict, which is to withdraw or abstain from intervention. The third position is to accept the need for intervention, but to leave this within the province of more powerful actors than the UN. This leads to the argument for effective enforcement through military intervention which may be approved by the UN but which is conducted by strong states or a coalition of states. While we briefly consider below the cases made by those advocating either abstention (and a return to classical peacekeeping) or more vigorous enforcement (and the use of combat ready peace enforcement deployments), our main concern in this part is to consider some of the literature which suggests that the middle option is indeed valid and sustainable.
Critiques of peacekeeping: withdraw, or enforce?
The argument that impartial and limited intervention in post Cold War civil wars is a “destructive misconception” and a “delusion” is cogently put by Richard K. Betts. 25 In Bosnia the attempt at limited and impartial intervention resulted, he argues, in abetting “slow-motion savagery”. In effect the result of the UN presence on the ground was that the interveners refused to let either side, Bosnian government or Bosnian Serbs, win.
“If outsiders such as the United States or the United Nations are faced with demands for peace in wars where passions have not burned out, they can avoid the costs and risks that go with entanglement by refusing the mandate — staying aloof and letting the locals fight it out. Or they can jump in and help one of the contenders fight to defeat the other ... ” 26
The clearest options are, for Betts, either not to intervene at all, or alternatively to enforce a solution. The enforcement option, he concludes ..“is a tall order, seldom with many supporters, and it is hard to think of cases where it actually works”. 27 The option of persisting with peacekeeping in civil wars, is a course of action which leads to “compromises that kill”. 28
Disillusionment with the experience of UN peacekeeping has led others to advocate abandoning peacekeeping, except in its limited and classical pre-1988 form, in favour of regional and great power conflict management. This attitude is evidenced in recent American policy towards peacekeeping. The experience of the United States in Somalia, from which it withdrew when 18 American Rangers were killed there in October 1993, led to changes in the attitude of the Clinton administration to UN peacekeeping. President Clinton came into office with a foreign policy characterised by what his officials called “aggressive multilateralism”, with talk of increasing US support for peacekeeping. According to David Rieff, this optimism about what UN peacekeeping could achieve was shared by the British and French governments, and by some in the UN Secretariat, whose “infatuation with peacekeeping as an almost infinitely plastic panacea for the world’s conflicts is summed up in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s astonishingly sanguine policy statement on preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, Agenda for Peace...”. 29 According to Rieff such optimism as far as peacekeeping is concerned was profoundly misplaced. Rieff presents the case against peacekeeping as a tool capable of having any impact on intrastate conflict. The high morality of the Agenda for Peace is, he claims, belied by the miserable failure in Bosnia. His case against UN actions and policy in this conflict is worth examining carefully, since it makes the case for enforcement. The UN took refuge in the idea that its mission was humanitarian, a position which allowed the organisation both to claim that what went wrong was both the fault of everyone but the UN; and to avoid examining the political effects of its self-proclaimed impartial intervention. The main effect of their presence has been to forestall outside military intervention on behalf of the Bosnians—an intervention which would have been a more effective protection of the peoples of a recognised multiethnic state against aggression.
“If UN peacekeeping is helpless in Bosnia, an inappropriate vehicle for protecting Tutsis in Rwanda, and so on—and if the practitioners of peacekeeping do not believe it can be transformed — then the question that needs to be asked is why peacekeeping is need at all, or, at least, why its activities should not be radically scaled back.” 30
In this scenario what follows is not abstention or withdrawal from conflicts, but enforcement where intervention will be conducted by the great powers pursuing interests in their own regions. It is, therefore, in this view, likely that peacekeeping and humanitarian aid “will become the exclusive province of regional hegemons and the G-7 countries plus the Russian Federation ...”. The role for UN peacekeeping will be located in the post-conflict phase, after the military situation has been stabilised. The American influence to rein back peacekeeping was indicated by the issuing of Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD 25) in May 1994, which specified a cautious and limited commitment to peacekeeping operations.
The defence of peacekeeping: persist and reform
The lessons to be learned from both the Bosnian and Somali situations is that, faced with the violence, confusion, and complexity of contemporary conflict, the international community is only beginning to learn how to respond. None of the options for responding to post cold war conflicts considered here are free of problems or dilemmas: Bosnia, through to 30th August 1995, is an example of an attempt at an essentially non-forcible though complex peacekeeping operation: Somalia with UNOSOM I started out in this way but became an enforcement operation. Sweeping condemnations of both are easy to make, implying as they do that there are clear cut and manifestly superior alternatives. The danger here is that moods are likely to swing violently under the impulse of the most recent experience. It is all too easy to criticise every option that has been tried, blaming the use of too much force in Somalia and too little force in Bosnia and Rwanda. Certainly the temptation to dismiss peacekeeping hastily as an option runs the risk of closing off the middle ground between enforcement and abstention when it is by no means clear that enforcement delivers either quick or neat solutions, or that abstention is morally acceptable or politically wise.
The future of peacekeeping as a middle ground option between abstention and enforcement will depend on the capability and willingness to reform and strengthen peacekeeping, and to reconceptualise its role in conflict transformation. The abstention and enforcement options depend on the validity of a particular conceptualisation of conflict. Betts based his critique of impartial intervention in civil wars on the argument that those who advocate it have a misconceived notion of the nature of war. Wars start when people perceive that there is more to gain by fighting than by conceding, and once they start compromise becomes even harder. Wars end when one side wins, or both perceive that they have more to lose than to gain by carrying on.
For this reason well intentioned intervention in the early stages of a civil war may well do more harm than good. However there is an alternative conceptualisation from the field of conflict resolution which suggests that comprehensive intervention involving the UN, regional organisations, and non-governmental organisations, and more effectively linking the political military and humanitarian components of peacekeeping, is crucial if the international community is to have any prospect of assisting communities trapped in the horror of civil war.
Although a large number of obvious operational and financial difficulties remain to be addressed, there is growing support for the view that Rose expressed in the quote above, that we need to map out a middle ground between what he calls “total peace” and “total war” and to understand and apply new doctrines and theories capable of supporting peace initiatives and humanitarian standards in civil wars. The need for such an approach in post cold war conflict has been well put by Mackinlay, who warned against attitudes in the American military which favoured the use of “decisive force” in future UN operations as a response to severe intercommunal violence:
“The social damage of intercommunal violence on the scale of Bosnia, Angola, or Somalia is so deep and divisive that .......... (these conflicts) will require healing processes that are measured in decades not months ..... Not only is the long term approach more realistic, it is cheaper, more humane, and internationally stabilising than allowing intercommunal violence to flourish in an abhorrent and threatening manner ...... in these circumstances the use of decisive force on an overwhelming scale that initially subdues and marginalises any factions that may oppose the peace is not an option .... The history of intervention shows that the intrusive arrival of a powerful and aggressive third-party force, particularly one that comprises largely foreign troops, will incite an equally determined and aggressive reaction and rejection by local people”. (Mackinlay, no date, 29-50.)
It is important therefore to persist with the middle ground option between withdrawal and enforcement. We begin this defence of the middle ground with some discussion of recent literature which suggests that the failure of peacekeeping was nowhere near as abject as some of its critics have argued.
Reflecting on the general expansion of peacekeeping post 1988, and on his own experience within UNPROFOR, Cedric Thornberry described a number of concrete situations where “humanitarian personnel” (peacekeepers and UNHCR and ICRC staff) were faced with difficult problems in hostile environments. Underlying all these dilemmas is the issue faced by all the agencies involved in the humanitarian enterprise, that is
“... what are international peace and humanitarian personnel to do in the absence of the parties’ consent, or in an environment of qualified consent? UNHCR and ICRC have at various times indicated that force is not the answer; one cannot achieve humanitarian goals by fighting one’s way through. If withdrawal, also, is not an alternative how does one function in the dangerous shifting sands in the middle? (Neither flight, nor paralysed rumination, being acceptable options.). 31
Each case required negotiation and compromise to produce a practical and defensible solution in advancing humanitarian objectives: he comments that it was “ rare to find a morally perfect solution to the kind of dilemma habitually met in the actuality of humanitarian action”. Out of a series of decisions made in relation to specific difficulties in Bihac, or Mostar, or Sarajevo, choices were made by peacekeeping and aid agency personnel in the pursuit of even minimal humanitarian standards, and the cumulative effect of these was, again minimally, the saving of life and the mitigation of suffering. To move from this level of impact to outright conflict resolution will require a long learning curve: we deal with what this learning curve might involve in our concluding section.
There is also evidence that more, not less, peacekeeping would have had a positive effect on conflicts in for example Angola and Rwanda. For Angola, Margaret Anstee (from February 1992 to July 1993 the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative there) was critical of the low key approach there in that the resources made available to UNAVEM II were inadequate, even for a mandate which she regarded as already too limited, involving observation and verification, rather than the implementation, of the Bicese Peace Accords of May 1991. Initially this mandate involved the demobilisation and disarming of the two conflicting parties, and it was extended in March 1992 to cover observation and verification of the elections of September 1992. At its fullest deployment, UN international personnel in Angola numbered c. 1,000; the Namibia operation, regarded as a success, had around 8,000 UN personnel for a population and an electorate less than one sixth the size of Angola’s. When she arrived in Angola in February 1992 Anstee expressed alarm at the discrepancy between the complexity of the task and the resources available and was told that what was wanted by the international community was “a small and manageable operation”; in her colourful phrase, she claimed that she had been asked “to fly a 747 but had been given the fuel only for a DC3”. 32 Perhaps inevitably the civil war broke out again late in 1992. Anstee’s ‘lessons learned’ are illuminating:
“what can be done in these tragic and forbidding circumstances? The counsel of despair espoused by some is that the two sides should be left to slog it out until a solution is found. Such an approach seems to me to be quite indefensible as it prolongs intolerable suffering for a people who have undergone untold agony for many decades .... The international community and the United Nations have a responsibility and they also have an interest in trying to break the deadlock. This is not only because Angola is important geopolitically and economically, but also because the credibility of UN peacekeeping is at stake..” 33
For Anstee, then, something in between the two extremes of maximalist intervention and the minimalist approach opted for in Angola under UNAVEM II is the desirable way forward, not only to protect the reputation of the UN and of peacekeeping, but more importantly to send the right message to endeavours around the world generally where the UN and the international community are engaged in assisting the resolution of internal conflicts, the transition to democracy, the building of civil and economic society and respect for human rights.
In Rwanda a study by OXFAM argued that a properly equipped and quickly deployed peacekeeping force could have prevented the genocidal violence which broke out in the summer of 1994. The fact that this did not happen was not the fault of the UN, which wished to take such action, but was the responsibility of powerful states on the Security Council which opposed the commitment. 34 Nevertheless the decision under UNSCR 912 to reduce the UNAMIR force in Rwanda from 1,700 to 270 personnel, at a time when massacres of Tutsi by Hutu erupted in the capital Kigali, was deplored by the OAU Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim, who said that it would be interpreted as a “lack of sufficient concern for African tragic situations.” 35 This type of criticism, related to concern about the consistency, degree, and impartiality of international response to suffering goes to the heart of the debate about humanitarian intervention and conflict resolution by the UN.
Therefore, despite the general case we can make for strengthening the middle ground intervention options, there are very real problems in the way of such a development. Firstly, despite the apparent liberation of a new humanitarian era from 1992, the UN does not have any effective standing capacity to implement such comprehensive intervention; secondly it does not have an agreed and universal set of criteria for non-coercive military humanitarian intervention; and thirdly there remains to be developed a clearer political definition of peacekeeping as a part of a broader conflict resolution process. The objectives of such a process are to move from peacekeeping in a situation of conflict, to post conflict peacebuilding. For this to happen, (and some might well argue that it should not: that peacekeeping should only deployed after political agreements to make peace have been made by the main parties to a conflict), then the military doctrine which has been developed recently to redefine the nature of peacekeeping needs to be brought into some form of communication with the knowledge field of conflict resolution. For the remainder of this article, then, we discuss this issue, having first devoted some time to an examination of the need for an agreed and universal set of criteria for non-coercive military humanitarian intervention. We do not comment here on the first type of difficulty mentioned above, the development of effective capacity within the UN system to support comprehensive intervention. Our argument is that such capacity is likely to be needed because of the prevalence of a type of post Cold War conflict which will manifest itself as civil war and state collapse, in which the basic human needs and rights of mass populations will be at risk. Whether or not the member states of the UN will respond to provide effective capacity is an important question which we nevertheless avoid addressing here: if the case is made convincingly for a capability for comprehensive intervention in conflict related humanitarian emergencies, then it is a matter of political will to provide resources and capabilities.
IV: Peacekeeping and conflict resolution: reflections on the relationship
One of the striking features or recent analyses by practitioners of peacekeeping has been the frequency with which reference is made to the relevance of conflict resolution. Conversely it has become more common for conflict resolution theorists to refer to peacekeeping as an important instrument of positive conflict transformation. We consider each of these points in turn.
Peacekeeping as conflict resolution
A challenge for peacekeeping as a mode of non-forcible military intervention is to develop a UN joint doctrine or operational concept of how the new peacekeeping should function in the semi-permissive or non-consensual environments in which they have increasingly been called to operate since 1988. While specific analysts within peacekeeping have begun to discuss what form this might take, and while some defence ministries have elaborated their own doctrine, (for example the wider peacekeeping idea of the British Army), this has yet to be translated into a generally agreed doctrine for UN multilateral peacekeeping forces.
There has already been a humanitarianisation of the military as peacekeeping operations have taken on humanitarian mandates and have progressively got drawn into serving in a variety of humanitarian roles. Difficult questions remain about this fusing of military, humanitarian, and political objectives. Most difficult of all is the degree to which peacekeeping should move beyond the classic guiding principles of the early interposition missions: impartiality, consent, and non-use of force. The strain and confusion created by struggling with these problems has created a peacekeeping fatigue, as disillusionment spreads about the inadequacies of peacekeeping in Bosnia and Somalia, and the failure to deploy effectively in Rwanda, or to deploy at all in, for example, the Sudan. These are the kinds of conflicts which cause the greatest threat to peace and cause the greatest human misery. Without a clear doctrine providing guidance for peacekeeping intervention in ISCs or civil wars, and the reforms and resources which need to follow such a definition, the fatigue will spread and the intervention options will shrink to non-intervention on the one hand, or coercive military enforcement (with few supporters) on the other. The emerging debate about the lessons learned from Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, and the implications of these lessons for the principles of peacekeeping is therefore a crucial one.
One of the most comprehensive statements about the new peacekeeping is based on British Army experience and appears in its British Army Field Manual on Wider Peacekeeping. 37 The manual defines peacekeeping as “operations carried out with the consent of the belligerent parties in support of efforts to achieve or maintain peace in order to promote security and sustain life in areas of potential or actual conflict” . Wider peacekeeping is used to describe “the wider aspects of peacekeeping operations carried out with the consent of the belligerent parties but in an environment that may be volatile”. 38 Despite the post Cold War conflict experience of Somalia and Bosnia especially, the manual insists on the retention of the principle of consent and on a clear separation between peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Peacekeeping requires consent, peace enforcement does not. A distinction is made between the tactical-field operations level where consent may be partial, subject to change and poorly defined. At the operational (theatre) level consent comes from formal agreements by recognised parties and is relatively stable. Particularly at the tactical level consent does not mean seeking universal approval for every action taken, but it does involve “a general public attitude that tolerates a peacekeeping presence and represents a quorum of co-operation”. This definition has implications for the degree to which force can be used in an operation which is essentially non-forcible. Force can be used where local opinion supports its use against banditry or looting for example. It may also be used in a way which Dobbie describes as “breaching the tactical edge of the consent divide”, and gives as an example the shooting down of three Serb aircraft which violated the Bosnian no-fly zone in April 1994. It is only when force is used in a way which “breaches the tactical and operational levels of consent” that wider peacekeeping lurches into peace enforcement. 39
In the classic principles of peacekeeping, consent is probably the cornerstone. With consent, the principles of impartiality and the non-use of force are easier to apply. Without consent from all belligerents, they become problematic. For Mackinlay both UN specialists and academics have failed to realise that the Cold war peacekeeper was not equipped to deal with internal conflicts, where consent is challenged, and that neither the UN nor UN peacekeepers have sufficient knowledge to deal with intercommunal conflict. This deficiency has been addressed recently with the British, American, French, Dutch, and Australian militaries producing their own field manuals which according to Mackinlay identified an area between traditional peacekeeping and enforcement. 39 Above all the issue of co-ordination is paramount. The military component is required to operate effectively with the civil and humanitarian components, and the key task of the military “will be to create the conditions for others to succeed”. 40 For the military to be able to do this Mackinlay defines a mid-level operational concept different from traditional peacekeeping, which utilised a low level operational concept. These mid-level operations he refers to as Second Generation Multinational Operations, a concept of peacekeeping similar to the wider peacekeeping of the British Army, and similar also to Second Generation Peace Operations used in the Australian context. 41 All these terms are attempts to define the new contexts in which peacekeeping forces are now deployed in ... “messy, value based intra-state conflicts”. 42
In this redefinition a distinction has emerged between American views and Euro-Australian approaches to peacekeeping which defines when that threshold is crossed, that is the point at which peacekeeping becomes enforcement. This emerges most clearly in American doctrine on peace support operations. 44 While accepting the principles and concept of peacekeeping, and the need to maintain a clear distinction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement, senior US Army staff, Mackinlay suggests, “are intuitively uncomfortable with being subordinated to a mission that cannot rely on the use of overwhelming force to achieve its ultimate success”. This discomfort showed up clearly in the tensions between the European and Australian contingents in UNOSOM II on the one hand, and the Americans on the other.44
In the debate about reconceptualising peacekeeping doctrine, and including the approach of those who wish to develop more muscular forms to deal with what we have called ISCs, great care is taken to preserve the separation between consent based peacekeeping and coercion based peace enforcement. When John Mackinlay visited Somalia in May/June 1993 he found near unanimity at battalion level that ‘overwhelming use of force’ did not work in these conditions and that the success of peacekeeping as a humanitarian enterprise depended upon fostering local co-operation. The same conclusion emerged from Australian observations about the experience of their battalion force deployed within Operation Restore Hope (Operation Solace) in the area of Baidoa.
“By opening up dialogue with the reasonable members of the Somali community in Baidoa, the Australians were able in a small but effective way to focus on the human rights question and address it with the means to hand—tangibly through the courts and the auxiliary force, intangibly by listening to all comers, especially the weakest members of society... The Australian Army always took time to explain to the clan elders or the NGOs involved, why it had to postpone or deny a request for assistance....” 45
There are approaches now by people who are experienced practitioners of military peacekeeping to combine their analyses with insights from academic conflict resolution. Three examples are of particular interest and relevance here. Firstly it is noticeable how much of the peacekeeping doctrine of the British Army, elaborated in Wider Peacekeeping, is suffused with the language of conflict resolution. Here, the managing of consent, (based on the principles of impartiality, legitimacy, mutual respect, minimum force, credibility, and transparency) is also related to the techniques of promoting good communication, of negotiation and mediation, and of positive approaches to community relations through an active civil affairs programme which is amply resourced to win “hearts and minds”. A second example is in the work of David Last, a Canadian officer with experience in the UNFICYP and UNPROFOR operations. Last set out firstly to review the contribution of peacekeeping to conflict resolution as practised in the past; secondly he wished to identify “what new techniques may be used to help peacekeepers work more actively with civilians to eliminate violent conflict”: his general proposition is worth noting, that
“To argue by analogy, I believe the situation of peacekeepers today is much like the situation of commanders on the Western Front in 1916, who were bogged down in defensive operations. To push the analogy somewhat, new tools of war were becoming available to commanders in 1916 that would permit them to take the offensive if they could only adjust their thinking about how to use their forces. In the same way, new techniques of peacekeeping, taken from conflict resolution theory and civilian experience, now permit peacekeepers to take the offensive to restore peace.” 46
A third example is provided by Alao and Mackinlay’s analysis of the UN operation in Liberia, in which they provide a number of significant observations relevant not only to the situation in Liberia, but also to the way in which UN activity in peace processes in general (and the role of peacekeeping forces in such processes) is conducted. 47 They pointed out that the Cotonou Agreement, which provided the framework for an agreed peace process to end the civil war in Liberia in 1994, was based on a formula from other intercommunal conflict resolution attempts, going back to the original formula embodied in the Zimbabwe Independence Agreement of 1979: “in essence the concept is to freeze hostilities by a ceasefire, reduce the capacity of the factions to continue fighting by regrouping them into cantonment sites, impose arms embargoes, resettle the displaced elements of the population and in the relative calm achieved by these measures conduct an election”. 48 In Liberia a plan was launched to get to the point of elections which was based on progress in distinct but interdependent stages of disarmament, demobilisation, and economic restoration. The return of refugees depended on some prospect of individual security; but such security depended on disarmament and the reduction of the power of the armed factions; this could not happen without some economic prospects for the disarmed fighter, but individual economic security itself depended on a revived economy, which itself could not happen without some level of security to encourage economic investment and activity. The UNOMIL operation plan was, according to Mackinlay and Alao, well conceived in that there was good provision for the rehabilitation of each fighter and programmes existed at community and village levels to encourage resettlement and reconciliation. However, partly because of the unsatisfactory relationship between ECOMOG (the regional peacekeeping force) and UNOMIL there was a failure to coordinate the security and disarmament efforts with the related humanitarian/reconstruction objectives. The result was, following conventional thinking among UN officials and diplomats, to invest too much into the value of disarmament per se, because “(u)nless faction fighters have reasonable expectations of employment, shelter, a community structure, and personal security, they will probably retain their weapons and remain part of a local gang”. 49 Too much was left to the interim authority, which was too weak to apply the interlinked disarmament, demobilisation, and reconstruction objectives. Given this weakness, there needed to be a much stronger executive capability within UNOMIL to drive the process forward. Despite the quality of its staff, UNOMIL never had the numerical presence to have such a decisive impact and in the absence of such direction the peace process stalled disastrously. For our purposes the part of Alao and Mackinlay’s conclusion which is worth highlighting is their suggestion that the general gearing of the efforts of the international community and its various agencies to short term perspectives, and the lack of thinking about sustaining long term conflict resolution, means that in these kinds of conflicts “relief providers and peace process supervisors .... now face challenges which no longer respond to tried UN peace formulas”. 50 It is not then that peacekeeping has failed in any fundamental sense; the failure is one of general understanding about how the international community should react to and organise itself in a humanitarian disaster of this kind.
Conflict Resolution as Peacekeeping
According to Richard Rinaldo of the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, where the US Army manual FM 100-23: Peace Operations was prepared, “the goal of peace operations is not military victory. The conflict is the enemy, rather than specific enemy forces”. 51 Similarly Canadian General Clayton Beattie argues that training for peacekeeping should differ considerably from conventional military combat training, because:
“It involves the psychological change from an adversary to a pacific role; from confrontation to third party interposition. In peacekeeping there is no enemy: the object is to avoid hostilities, to improve communication between the parties, and to advance the process of reconciliation. This necessitates a full understanding of the causes of the conflict—political, military, and economic—as well as the social and cultural environment. It demands a fair-minded and impartial approach while operating in an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion among the protagonists, often under difficult and provocative conditions.” 52
These two main requirements, to understand the nature of the conflict, and to understand the responsibilities of the third party role, coincide with the long standing aims of conflict resolution research. Inspired by earlier conflict theorists, including Quincy Wright and Lewis Richardson in the 1920s and 1930s, Kenneth Boulding, who with Norman Angell coined the term ‘conflict resolution’ in the 1950s, described the new discipline as one which combined the analytic-descriptive science of ‘polemologie’ (conflict study) with the ‘minimum normativeness’ of positive conflict management (the theory and practice of peaceful resolution). 53
UN peacekeeping and conflict resolution as a distinct discipline are not only closely related conceptually, but originate in the same historical period. The Hammarskjold-Pearson principles for the United Nations Emergency Force I (UNEF I, 1956-67) were seminal for the former, and the founding of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957 may be seen as the formal initiation of the latter.
For these reasons we suggest in conclusion that peacekeeping doctrine and conflict resolution theory have points of contact which can be beneficially developed to provide the refinement of technique if this middle option is to persist. Our argument has been that it should, and while we recognise the enormity of the step and the complexity of the task we follow the view of many in the field of humanitarian assistance that there is an urgent need to rethink the concepts we use to describe and explain conflict related humanitarian disasters. 54 What can the academic area of conflict resolution contribute to this?
Stephen Ryan argues that there has not been a very fruitful relationship between peace and conflict research and peacekeeping. With only a few exceptions (Galtung, Harbottle, Fisher) there has been little analysis of peacekeeping in the conflict analysis and conflict resolution literature. Conversely the academic literature on peacekeeping rarely refers to peace and conflict theory. 55 This is now changing, as we review below, partly in response to the call, also made by Ryan, of the need to go beyond the pragmatic approach which has been typical of the history of peacekeeping operations. Alan James warned against looking for an underlying cause to explain the upsurge in new peacekeeping operations since 1988, arguing that “(p)eacekeeping is ...chiefly the reflection of specific political circumstances, of a decision, in the light of the facts of the individual case, that third party aid should be employed to help to defuse a crisis, stabilise a situation, or move towards a settlement”. 56 We have argued above that new patterns and types of conflict suggest that such cautious pragmatism may need to be exercised alongside, or within, a radical revision of the principles and processes which determine how humanitarian intervention, and peacekeeping as its military arm, should take place. Where it has been touched upon in the conflict resolution literature, peacekeeping has been seen as a device of an older form of conflict management, conflict containment, or conflict suppression, dealing within symptoms and not concerned with fundamental resolution. In general in the work of new conflict theorists, therefore, certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, the stress was placed on discovering new processes of resolution, especially developed from the theory of problem solving in international relations, or from theories of mediation, and peacekeeping was not seen to have a part play in this. Signs of changes in this way of thinking came when Bercovitch et. al. and Fisher and Keashly began to define conflict resolution as a process involving the use of different forms of intervention at different stages of conflict escalation and de-escalation. Within this broader process, (based on ideas of contingency and complementarity), peacekeeping was seen to have a part to play, in that it was claimed as one of the peaceful intervention strategies whose long term goal was not conflict containment but resolution. 57 This idea was developed later by Fetherston who argued that because of the historical origins of peacekeeping as an ad hoc adaptation to specific international crises, writing about peacekeeping has tended to be functional and descriptive rather than conceptual. Traditional definitions of peacekeeping have tended to be narrow and have failed in particular to address the question of how peacekeeping can be related to the processes of peacemaking and peacebuilding. They have also, correspondingly, neglected to relate the techniques of peacekeeping to broader models of third party peacemaking linked to the concept of positive peace rather than to negative peace (the containment of hostilities). 58
Yet the reality of what peacekeepers do on the ground, especially in the internal conflicts in which they have been deployed post 1988, means that they are engaged de facto, in many missions, in peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding activities at the micro level; traditional peacekeeping continues in the monitoring and implementation of ceasefires, and in the demobilisation and disarmament of rival factions etc; peacemaking exists in the negotiations and mediation in which peacekeepers become involved in a variety of efforts to implement mandates and in the various tasks of political reconstruction in which they have become involved; in the process of delivering humanitarian aid they become part of a broader enterprise with a variety of agencies of the international community involved in the economic and political reconstruction which is peacebuilding. It may be that the record of peacekeepers, in terms of how well they carry out this work, is open to criticism and that military personnel, trained for combat, have a great deal to learn about working in conflict environments as impartial interveners. But this is true for the whole collection of groups, agencies and institutions which we call the international community.
One common lesson is that violent civil wars are not amenable to quick fix solutions or to surgical strikes by military forces. In the case of former Yugoslavia, the DG 1A of the European Union has judged that conflict resolution there involves long term tasks; that military stabilisation taking 1-2 years will need to be paralleled by a process of infrastructural reconstruction (taking ten years); and by a process of reconciliation taking more than a generation. While peacekeeping forces will be most relevant to the task of military stabilisation, they also have a role to play in reconstruction. In general there is now a greater recognition that peacekeeping should have a place within a broader model of conflict resolution. The details of how peacekeeping should function in such a model are still to be elaborated, and there is a need now, as Fetherston suggests, to carry out a programme of empirical research in order to build up a contingency model of peacekeeping which would enable greater understanding of how forces can be prepared and configured, to meet the challenges of the particular conflict for which they are deployed. 59
Conclusion: slaying the dragon
Peacekeeping has, therefore, been taken into the fold of conflict resolution thinking. It may not feel fully comfortable there, preferring a more modest place at the table of international relations and its fare of containing interstate conflict. In any event, there is a debate to be had about the nature of UN peacekeeping, which will be of central significance for emerging policies of managing international conflict and for the training and preparation of forces to do this. On the one hand, there is an international constituency which is working towards a re-evaluation of the idea of international community, where the UN becomes the main focal point for implementing the humanitarian values embodied in the UN Charter. On the other side are those who wish to proceed more cautiously, seeing international peace and security linked rather to nation state interests, security communities and balances of power. From this perspective peacekeeping has a modest but important role to play.
We summarised elsewhere the ways in which conflict and conflict resolution theory has approached this challenge of the conquest of violent conflict, and suggested that there were areas of work which were of relevance for the refinement of the techniques and processes of peacekeeping. 60 These include a tradition of research which has:
All of this suggests that peacekeeping and conflict resolution are beginning to speak the same language. It is, for example, in the British Army’s Wider Peacekeeping, that Shakespeare is invoked: “A peace is of the nature of a conquest: for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser”. 69 This could not be bettered as an expression of the aspirations of conflict resolution. The territory is indeed largely uncharted, and there are many dragons still untamed, but we look forward to developing, with the practitioners of peacekeeping, greater understanding of these issues.
Endnotes
Note 1: Peacekeeping in International Politics, International Institute for Strategic Studies and Macmillan Press, London, 1990. Back.
Note 2: W. Durch (ed.), The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping: Case Studies and Comparative Analysis, Macmillan, London 1994. Back.
Note 3: C. Thornberry, “Peacekeepers, Humanitarian Aid, and Civil Conflicts”, Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, September 1995, p.2. Back.
Note 4: H. Slim, “Military Humanitarianism and the New Peacekeeping: An Agenda for Peace?”, Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, September 1995. Back.
Note 5: See O. Ramsbotham and T. Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict: A Reconceptualisation, Polity Press Cambridge 1996, Ch.4. Back. Note 6: A. James, 1990, p. 370. Back.
Note 7: For a comprehensive typology up to the end of the cold war period see K. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order: 1648-1989, CUP, Cambridge, 1991. Back.
Note 8: P. Wallensteen and K. Axell, “Conflict resolution and the end of the cold war”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 31, 3, 1994, pp. 335-336 Back..
Note 9: E. Azar, The Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory and Cases, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1990. Back.
Note 10: Azar, 1990, p. 10. Back. Note 11: J. Burton, Resolving Deep Rooted Conflict: A Handbook, Lanham, Md. University Press of America, 1987. Back.
Note 12: L. Kriesberg et. al., Intractable Conflicts and their Transformation, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1989. Back.
Note 13: O. Ramsbotham and T. Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention, Chap. 3. Back.
Note 14: Before the threshold stage is the latent stage, which is that of potential ISCs. After the settlement stage comes the resolved stage, when the underlying structural and relational roots of the conflict have been successfully addressed. Back.
Note 15: K.Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648-1989, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 317. Back.
Note 16: Holsti, 1991, p. 323. Back.
Note 17: M. Trachtenberg, Intervention in historical perspective. In Reed, L. and Kaysen, C. (eds) Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention, Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993, pp. 15-36 at p.25. Back.
Note 18: L. Damrosch, Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993, p.93. Back.
Note 19: For example, through spread of weaponry, economic dislocation, links with terrorism and international crime, floods of refugees, as well as ‘spill-over’ into regional politics. Back.
Note 20: Whereas in World War 1 some 5% of casualties were civilians, in ISCs it is ‘normally about 80%—most of them women and children’, Grant. J. 1992: The State of the World’s Children. New York: UNICEF, p.26. Whereas when UNHCR was set up in 1950/51 the main cause of the exodus of refugees was repressive government, now it is ‘the product of vicious internal conflicts’, Ogata, S. 1993: The State of the World’s Refugees. New York: Penguin, p.iii. Back.
Note 21: Hurd, D. 1992: Speech at RUSI, 13 October. ACDQR. Back.
Note 22: Although, as John Seaman notes, at the moment the international ‘system’ of humanitarian relief “is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a system at all. The term is applied to a large number of organisations and individuals which, although they declare similar objectives, operate within vastly different financial, political, organisational and technical constraints”, ‘The international system of humanitarian relief in the “New World Order”’ in J. Harriss (ed.), The Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, London, pp. 17-31 at p.17. Back.
Note 23: For example, 10 of the 12 UN peacekeeping operations intitiated since 1991 and still in operation at the end of 1994 included major humanitarian functions, all of them in internal wars of one sort or another. Seven were in type 3 ISCs (UNAVEM, UNPROFOR, UNOSOM, UNOMIG, UNOMIL, UNAMIR, UNMOT). Three were in type 2 conflicts (ONUSAL, ONUMOZ, UNMIH). The two PKOs with no significant humanitarian component were in response to the two type 1 conflicts (UNIKOM, MINURSO). Back.
Note 24: quoted in Slim, 1995. Back.
Note 25: R. Betts, “The delusion of impartial intervention”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, 6, 1994, pp. 20-33. Back.
Note 26: Betts 1994, p. 28. Back.
Note 27: Betts 1994 , p. 29. Back.
Note 28: Betts 1994, p. 24. Back.
Note 29: D. Rieff, “The illusions of peacekeeping”, World Policy Journal, Vol. 11, 3, 1994, pp. 1-18, at p. 4. Back.
Note 30: Rieff , 1994, p. 13. Back.
Note 31: C. Thornberry, “Peacekeepers, Humanitarian Aid, and Civil Conflicts”, Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 15 September 1995. Back.
Note 32: M.J. Anstee, “Angola: The Forgotten Tragedy: A Test Case for U.N. Peacekeeping”, International Relations, Vol. IX, 6, December 1993, p 495-511; quotes here on p. 498. Back.
Note 33: Anstee, 1993, p. 503. Back.
Note 34: G. Vassal-Adams, Rwanda: An Agenda for International Action, Oxford, Oxfam, 1994, pp. 55-61. Back.
Note 35: Vassal Adams 1994, p. 36. Back.
Note 36: C. Dobbie, “A concept for post cold war peacekeeping”, Survival, Vol. 36, 3, 1994, pp. 121-148; Wider Peacekeeping, (Army Field manual Vol. 5, Operations Other Than War, Part 2), HMSO, London, 1995. Back.
Note 37: Dobbie 1994, p. 122. Back.
Note 38: Dobbie, 1994, p. 136. Back.
Note 39: J. Mackinlay , “Improving multifunctional forces”, Survival, Vol. 36, 3, 1994, pp. 150-174, at p. 156. Back.
Note 40: Mackinlay, 1994, p. 158 Back.
Note 41: H. Smith, (ed.), Peacekeeping: Challenges for the Future, Canberra, Australian Defence Studies Centre 1993. Back.
Note 42: Smith, 1993, p. 32. Back.
Note 43: US Army FM 100-23: Peace Operations, Washinton DC, HQ Department of the Army, 1994. Back.
Note 44: Mackinlay 1994, p. 155 Back.
Note 45: Kieseker in Smith (ed.), 1993, p. 72 Back.
Note 46: D.M. Last, “Peacekeeping Doctrine and Conflict Resolution Techniques”, Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 22, 2, 1995, pp. 187-210. Back.
Note 47: A. Alao and J. Mackinlay, Liberia 1994: ECOMOG and UNOMIL—Response to a complex emergency, Occasional Paper Series, United Nations University, New York, 1994. Back.
Note 48: Alao and Mackinlay, p. 24. Back.
Note 51: Defense News, March 21-27, 1994, p. 8. Back.
Note 52: In H. Wiseman (ed.), Peacekeeping: Appraisals and Proposals, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1983, p. 209. Back.
Note 53: K. Boulding, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, 2, 1978, p. 343. Back.
Note 54: See J. Macrae and A. Zwi (eds.), War and Hunger: Rethinking Interantional Responses to Complex Emergencies, Zed Press and Save the Children Fund, London, 1994. Back.
Note 55: “The theory of conflict resolution and the practice of peacekeeping”, paper presented at BISA Conference University of Southampton 1995, and at INCORE Conference Limerick. Back.
Note 56: Alan James, Peacekeeping in International Politics, p. 366. Back.
Note 57: See J. Bercovitch et. al., “Some conceptual issues and empirical trends in the study of successful mediation in interantional relations”, Journal of Peace Research, 28, 1, 1991, pp. 7-17; and R.J. Fisher and L. Keashly, “The potential complementarity of mediation and consultation within a contingency model of third party intervention”, Journal of Peace Research, 28,1, 1991, pp. 29-42. Back.
Note 58: A.B. Fetherston, Towards a Theory of United Nations Peacekeeping, Macmillan, London, 1994, especially the discussion in Chapter 5. Back.
Note 59: See Fetherston, 1994, p. 231: and P. Diehl, International Peacekeeping, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1993. Back.
Note 60: “UNPROFOR: Some observations from a conflict resolution perspective", International Peacekeeping, Vol. 1, 2, 1994, especially pp. 189-203 Back.
Note 61: E. Azar, The Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory and Cases, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1990. Also O. Ramsbotham and T. Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict: A Reconceptualisation, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996. Back.
Note 62: Fisher and Keashly, op.cit., 1991. Back.
Note 63: K. Boulding, Three Faces of Power, London, Sage, 1989. Also T. Woodhouse, ”Improving the Good Instrument: Active Mediation and Conflict Resolution in the New World Order”, Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, University of Western Australia, Occasional Paper 24, 1992. Back.
Note 64: J. Burton (ed.), Conflict: Human Needs Theory, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990. Back.
Note 65: M. Deutsch, “Subjective Features of Conflict Resolution: Psychological, Social, and Cultural Influences”, in R. Vayrynen, (ed.), New Directions in Conflict Theory: Conflict Resolution and Conflict Transformation, London, Sage, 1991. Back.
Note 66: Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, Humanitarian Intervention, 1996. Back.
Note 67: K. Avruch, P. Black, J. Scimecca, Conflict Resolution: Cross Cultural Perspectives, London, Greenwood Press, 1991. Back.
Note 68: See Fetherston, 1994, Chs 7 and 8; also J.P. Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1995. Back.
Note 69: Wider Peacekeeping, 1995. Back.
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