ABSTRACT
In UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace (1992), the term ‘peace operations’ was seen to cover traditional peacekeeping, peace enforcement and post-conflict peacebuilding. Preventive diplomacy was a further category. All of these were interpreted as fulfilment of UN Charter provisions in the aftermath of near-universal international support for enforcement action to reverse Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1991, and the sudden flurry of non-forcible UN peace operations between 1989 and 1992 to manage transitions from war to peace in a number of long-standing conflicts on almost every continent. It seemed that a new era for UN-sanctioned – and, in the latter case, UN-managed – forcible and non-forcible peace operations had dawned. However, these distinctions have not corresponded to consistent or generally accepted conceptual categories in the evolution of international practice since then. Originally associated mainly with UN deployments, peace operations (or what purport
to be peace operations) today are now also conducted by or under the aegis of regional organizations (EU, AU, OSCE and OAS), sub-regional groupings (ECOWAS), politicomilitary alliances (NATO) and a variety of ad hoc coalitions led by militarily powerful states (Russia, the US, Britain, France, Nigeria and Australia). This has even at times encompassed a role for private military companies. In the literature, peace operations featured prominently in chapters on conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, peace enforcement and humanitarian intervention. As with Wittgenstein’s rope, which is a continuous whole although no single strand goes through the entire cord, no one definitional element runs consistently through the whole length. This chapter describes the nature of peace operations (history, functions, authorization,
spectrum of force and definition); peace operations and post-war peacebuilding; the measurement of success in peace operations; and possible future directions for peace operations.
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) listed 20 ‘UN Peacekeeping Deployments by Mission’ in October 2008 with 75,512 troops, 12,125 police
officers and 2,606 military observers (United Nations Department of Public Information 2009). When the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) produced its first Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006, its ‘data sections concentrated heavily on the United Nations’. In 2007, however, after criticism, the data set was expanded to include figures on EU, AU, NATO and ‘other operations’. This resulted in a further 30 ‘nonUN missions’, to give ‘a richer picture of the evolving international architecture for peace operations, within and beyond the UN’ (Center on International Cooperation 2007: ix; see also Center on International Cooperation 2008: vii; 137-94). It is this shift to include increasing numbers of non-UN missions in the definition of peace operations that causes most of the current difficulties. For example, the CIC list, and other peace operations lists such as those updated every
three months by the ZIF Center for International Peace Operations (Center for International Peace Operations 2008), include the 150,000-strong US-led Multinational Force in Iraq (MNF-I) and Russian-led forces in the ‘near-abroad’ on the one hand, and almost entirely civilian OSCE missions and small UN Peacebuilding and UN Special Representative missions on the other. Unlike the situation in the early 1990s, where a single mission like the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) could be seen as constituting a comprehensive peace operation in itself, in the more complicated and varied contemporary combinations several of the missions listed separately (together with others not listed) combine – often indeterminately – in a single undertaking, as in Iraq, where there is a noticeable imbalance between the contributions of MNF-I, NATO’s 162-strong Training Mission in Iraq (NTM-I), the UN’s 229-strong Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) and the EU’s small Rule of Law Mission in Iraq (EUJUST LEX).
