ABSTRACT
Explaining the growth in number of peace operations, especially in the past 25 years, is the concern of many studies of multilateral security in contemporary world politics. According to the analysts, the number of peace operations has been pushed up by factors like the upsurge of violence in international, and especially internal, conflicts since the late 1970s (Call and Cousens 2008, Doyle and Sambanis 2006); the devolution of violence control to the United Nations that followed the end of the Soviet-American rivalry (Daniel, Taft, and Wiharta 2008); the policies of world economic institutions that negatively affected debtor countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Jakobsen 2002); Western states’ support of humanitarian actions and the implementation of the responsibility to protect principle (Andersson 2006, Bellamy 2009); and the increasing participation of regional organizations in multilateral security (Bellamy and Williams 2005b, Sidhu 2006, Wilson 2003). To further this study, the present chapter puts forward a new explanation. Assuming that multilateralism and the phenomenon of the peace operation are the recent outcome of the long-term process of building worldwide political institutions, this study argues that, in the medium-long term, the change in the number, mandate, and agency of peace operations is associated with the change in the political conditions of the world system. In particular, these conditions pertain to the competition for global leadership, and to the related actions of the states that share either the same or compatible orientations towards the existing structure of the government institutions of the world system. States bear the cost of participating in peace operations for various reasons. In the present analysis, these reasons are seen as tied to the features of the phase of the competition for leadership of the global system. Hence, the general hypothesis tested in this analysis is: the features of the phase of global political competition determine the form of peace operations to quell violent conflicts that are deployed by the United Nations and other actors such as the European Union and other regional organizations. During the contemporary period of world politics, these features have affected the practice of peacekeeping by changing the original function and tasks of peace missions, and promoting new actors as the organizers of peace and security operations. In the first section of this chapter, after a short review of the debate on the rise of regional actors in peacekeeping, it is argued that the emergence of minilateralism is key to understanding that the rise in importance of non-UN-led peace operations is
consistent with the global power competition. In the second section, the theory and research hypothesis of this analysis are presented. In the third, data are analysed, and the hypothesis is tested with positive results.
