ABSTRACT
In our discussion of how best to employ the military instrument for the ends of policy, no volume would be complete without an examination of peacekeeping, stabilization missions and humanitarian intervention. The first two types of operation can be conceptually located under Article 40 of the UN Charter, a little-quoted paragraph in Chapter VII which is better known for Article 41 on sanctions and Article 42 on use of military force against an identified enemy. Article 40 calls on parties to comply with ‘provisional measures [that are] without prejudice to the rights, claims, or position of the parties concerned’. An enemy is not identified and the action is not taken ‘against’ one or the other parties. From the third-party perspective, the goal is simply to check the undesired activity, to bring about a cessation of hostilities. Article 40 basically equates to ‘we don’t have a dog in the fight, we just want the killing to stop’. There are many qualifiers to this statement, to be sure, since in every situation state interest will be involved to a certain degree. Nonetheless, it captures the essential distinction between these missions and those where military force is used against an identified adversary. Humanitarian intervention, by contrast, is launched in clear support of one party over the other, and therefore better falls under Articles 41 and 42 of the Charter. This chapter discusses strategic thought pertaining to humanitarian intervention and
to those missions originally established as a provisional measure in relation to the local parties. It begins by discussing the emergence of peacekeeping and its accompanying principles, before examining the manner in which strategic thinking about peacekeeping, particularly its relationship to a new mission of peace-enforcement, evolved in the post-Cold War period. It goes on to discuss strategic thought on stabilization and reconstruction missions, before concluding with a look at the post-Cold War period’s theoretical, and to some degree practical, developments in humanitarian intervention.
The UN Charter provides for two basic means of addressing threats to international peace and security. Chapter VI, ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’, sets out diplomatic actions parties to a dispute should undertake, including negotiation, mediation and arbitration. If this does not resolve the dispute, then the UN Security Council has the power to act under Chapter VII, ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression’, recommending what measures should be undertaken under Articles 41 and 42. But the Cold War stand-off meant that the UN Security Council – by virtue of the veto held by each permanent member – did not agree on any Chapter VII actions.1 At the same time, a number of conflicts erupted
around the world that could not be resolved through Chapter VI means and required UN action to avoid broader hostilities. The result was the invention of peacekeeping as a sort of holding action that could contain the conflict and help create the conditions under which a long-term political solution could be found. Constituting more than the diplomatic action of Chapter VI, but less than the enforcement action of Chapter VII, peacekeeping famously falls under ‘Chapter Six and a Half ’. Peacekeeping thus emerged during the Cold War as a stop-gap measure to forestall
war between states so that a local conflict would not escalate to involve the superpowers. The first such circumstance was the war that broke out in Palestine in 1948 after Britain relinquished its mandate over Palestine and the state of Israel was proclaimed. After the United Nations negotiated an uneasy truce between Israel and its Arab neighbours, an observer mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), was established to supervise the ceasefire and later the Armistice Agreements signed in 1949. Although the political environment of UNTSO’s deployment has changed dramatically
over the decades, notably after the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, its tasks have remained quite constant, providing a useful theoretical baseline for understanding this particular use of military force for political ends. Observer missions are comprised of unarmed military observers and their role, as pointed out in a comprehensive compendium of peacekeeping missions published by the UN in the waning days of the Cold War, is to ‘act as go-betweens for the hostile parties and as the means by which isolated incidents could be contained and prevented from escalating into major conflicts’.2 Being unarmed, ‘[t]here was no element of enforcement in their functioning, although their very presence was something of a deterrent to violations of the truce’.3 Observer missions, of which there have been just over a dozen since 1948, operate with the consent of the parties and are dependent on the cooperation of the parties for their effectiveness. Israel, Britain and France’s attack on Egypt after the latter nationalized and closed
the Suez Canal in 1956 provided the impetus to make the observer mission concept more robust. After an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, a UN Emergency Force of lightly armed military personnel (infantry) were deployed to supervise the withdrawal of military forces and the reopening of the canal. This early mission, as well as the handful of other peacekeeping missions created during the Cold War, established the limited scope of what was later called ‘traditional’ peacekeeping. Tasks included monitoring a ceasefire, overseeing the withdrawal of military equipment and forces and patrolling the border between opposing forces. Over time, a set of three principles emerged by which such missions were to operate.
First, peacekeeping missions were only to be established with the full consent of the parties. This was necessary since a peacekeeping operation was not equipped or mandated as an enforcement operation and was dependent for its success on the cooperation of the parties. Second, peacekeeping troops were to use force only in self-defence. This was a step beyond observer missions which (being unarmed) use no force at all, but by no means did/do they have an actual ‘warfighting’ capability. Third, peacekeepers were to operate impartially with respect to the conflict at hand. Echoing Article 40 of the UN Charter, they were to act without prejudice to the claims or positions of the parties to the conflict. These three peacekeeping principles were first formally captured in a 1973 report to the UN Security Council pertaining to the second UN Emergency Force. They are what define a peacekeeping operation; that is to say, if consent of the parties, impartiality and use of force in self-defence are not present, then it is not a peacekeeping
operation – and troops cannot be armed as though it is such a mission. This reality was not fully understood in the early days of the post-Cold War era. The end of the superpower stand-off removed many of the political obstacles that
had previously limited the scope of peacekeeping. With the UN mission in Namibia in 1989-1990 the UN moved beyond monitoring ceasefires and containing hostilities to include in its peacekeeping tasks overseeing free and fair elections and implementing a peace plan. The success of this mission helped promote an activist agenda on the part of the international community, enabled by the thawed relations between East and West. And there was no shortage of places to which to turn their attention – the Cold War thaw also prompted the outbreak of conflict in many areas of the world. Notable among these was the break-up of the former Yugoslavia into its constitutive six republics, and the raging civil war that resulted from the fact that the republic borders did not line up neatly with the location of ethnic groups. Most precarious was Bosnia, made up of Bosnian Croats supported by neighbouring Croatia, Bosnian Serbs supported by neighbouring Serbia, and Bosnian Muslims who enjoyed no nearby support. The UN mission deployed in response to the growing carnage in the summer of 1992, the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), was tasked with ensuring Bosnian Muslims received humanitarian aid and, later, with protecting them in so-called ‘safe areas’. Billed as a peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR was originally established under
Chapter VI of the UN Charter. The troops were lightly armed and committed to carrying out their mission impartially, and the force itself was not deployed until a ceasefire had been agreed among the parties. But problems quickly emerged. It was not possible to carry out an impartial delivery of humanitarian aid to the Muslims because the Bosnian Serbs deemed this as evidence of the international community taking sides. Therefore the Serbs targeted not just the Muslims but the international peacekeepers. Meanwhile, securing consent and a ceasefire among non-state actors was revealed to be very different from working with state actors. Even if faction leaders agreed to the ceasefire, it was not always the case they could control the activities of their forces. The result was dozens of negotiated and broken ceasefires. And finally, when the Serbs blocked humanitarian aid and threatened the safe havens, the peacekeepers were necessarily instructed to use force beyond self-defence, authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. From 1973 onward, in addition to its literal meaning, ‘the use of force in self-defence’
had been taken to mean using force when peacekeepers were being prevented by armed persons from fulfilling their mandate, such as soldiers preventing a UN convoy from getting through a roadblock. But, notes Marrack Goulding, one of the early post-Cold War thinkers in this area, the wider understanding of self-defence was rarely put into practice during the Cold War. ‘This reluctance was based on sound calculations related to impartiality, to their reliance on the continued cooperation of the parties, and to the fact that the force’s level of armament was based on the assumption that the parties would comply with their commitments.’4 In Bosnia such reluctance was set aside because it simply was not possible to fulfil the humanitarian assistance and safe-haven mandates without going beyond the use of force in self-defence. Hesitant and circumscribed at first, this move culminated in NATO’s application of precision airpower against Serbian positions in 1994 and 1995, paving the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Over the course of three years the attempt to stick to traditional peacekeeping concepts while operating in new peacekeeping circumstances proved to be untenable (see Box 6.1).
