ABSTRACT
In order to respond to the challenge of state failure, the goal of UN operations evolved from keeping to building peace. Peacebuilding’s assumption is that unstable areas can be pacified through the externally led construction of liberal democratic institutions. However, this takes the UN very far from its Cold War function. Peacekeeping came into existence to limit violent conflict and to manage the process of decolonization, but especially to ease tensions between the Eastern and the Western blocs. It evolved into a regulatory system with limited scope and objectives (Hill and Malik 1996: 17), including missions of military observation and truce supervision. Mandates and principles of engagement were restricted to the bounds of the ‘holy trinity’, that is, consent, impartiality, and minimal use of force (Bellamy, Williams and Griffins 2004, Diehl 2008). The end of the Cold War partially lifted the constraints on the evolution of peacekeeping and on the role of the United Nations in conflict and post-conflict management, allowing for the expansion of the UN agenda and its means of action. From this point on, peacekeeping came to be seen as the appropriate solution to a much wider range of security problems (cf. Lipson 2007b). This brought a reinterpretation of ‘threats to peace and security’ (Chapter VII), and a greater involvement of the United Nations Security Council in international security. As a result, the concept of peacekeeping evolved in several directions: while maintaining some of its traditional functions, the UN developed new activities such as the monitoring and organization of elections, the supervision of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration processes, and the building of state capacities (Diehl 2008, 8-9). This expansion of activities associated with a multidimensional view of peace, formed the ‘conceptual, operational, and political basis for U.N. transitional administration’ (Ford and Oppenheim 2008: 67). The generic concept of peacebuilding was introduced by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace to designate a growing category of UN activities that aim at supporting ‘structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’, which involve the construction of ‘new political, economic and social environments’ (II, 21). The UN was in fact starting a business of institutions’ rejuvenation and capacity building, derogating considerably from its founding
principles. The ambition was to restore a positive peace (Richmond 2004b) in post-conflict societies by building an institutional framework that included security apparatuses to restore order, administrative capabilities to deliver services to the population and manage resources adequately, and judiciary systems to foster the rule of law.
