Michael von der Schulenburg
On 11 June 2014, the UN Secretary-General, speaking in the UN Security Council, expressed his concerns about what he perceived as unprecedented violence and complexity facing present UN peacekeeping operations around the world. He suggested a thorough review of all UN peace operations was necessary ; this paper is intended to make a contribution to this review.
The Secretary-General’s concerns were triggered by a number of recent setbacks in peacekeeping operations and by repeated attacks on UN peacekeeping operations that resulted in the deplorable deaths and injuries to a number of peacekeepers.2 He gave three problem areas as the reasons for this adverse situation: (i) UN peacekeeping was increasingly mandated to operate where there is no peace to keep; (ii) some UN peacekeeping operations are being authorized in the absence of clearly identifiable parties to the conflict or a viable political process and (iii) UN peacekeeping operations are increasingly operating in more complex environments that feature asymmetric and unconventional threats.
The Secretary-General was no doubt right in listing those three problem areas, but they are not the reasons for the difficulties that peacekeeping is facing today. This paper argues that the reason for these difficulties is that peacekeeping, a tool that had been developed to help end inter-state wars, is now been used to solve also intra-state conflicts. And although the operational environments in intra-state armed conflicts were now vastly different from those of inter-state wars, UN peacekeeping had never sufficiently been adjusted to enable it to deal with such new situations. Not only that, intra-state conflicts needed more complex responses than peacekeeping could offer.
The solution that the paper suggests, is to develop instead a comprehensive peacebuilding approach to enable the UN to intervene more effectively in fragile countries with intra-state conflicts. Such a comprehensive peacebuilding approach would not only have to continue to include important security components but go beyond this and include political, judicial, humanitarian and development components. Such a solution would have to involve the entire UN system. In this, peacekeeping would remain an important but in no way the only component of such comprehensive peacebuilding operations. So far, the fragmentation of the UN system and its different aims and operating principles prevented such an integrated approach.