From sunrise to sunset...a listing of the stations of UN peacekeeping operations

Soldiers from the UN peacekeeping forces in Bangui, the capital of Central Africa (Reuters)

United Nations peacekeeping operations are witnessing a severe decline for many reasons, including their ineffectiveness in handling the tasks assigned to them, and the divergent interests between the great powers.

The UN Security Council - in accordance with the United Nations Charter - is the body entrusted with maintaining international peace and security.

To fulfill this responsibility, this Council was given broad powers to impose sanctions and authorize the use of military force.

However, this basic perception of the United Nations as a key instrument for maintaining international peace and security often fell into the quagmire of great power conflicts during the Cold War.

Perhaps the scarcity of peacekeeping missions - during the first decades of the United Nations’ life - explains how the Cold War between the American and Soviet poles in the Security Council negatively affected the United Nations’ fulfillment of its responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, one of whose manifestations is peacekeeping missions.

However, since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping operations have multiplied, reaching more than 50, and they have witnessed ebbs and flows in terms of their number and ambition.

In the early years, these operations were modest, followed by huge others with great ambitions, some of which were successful, others were not, while others seemed stagnant to the point that some of them collapsed horribly, either because of bad decisions or external circumstances.

But at present it seems that the phase - which has been characterized by remarkable activity since the mid-2000s - is approaching its end.

The question remains: What can fill this void?

Facts and figures

Since the start of the first operation in 1948, the United Nations has conducted more than 70 peacekeeping operations in 50 countries and territories, involving more than a million military and civilian personnel, 4,300 of whom were killed while serving.

In the post-Cold War period, there were on average 15 active peacekeeping operations per year, reaching a peak of 20 peacekeeping missions in the mid-1990s.

During this period, approximately 70,000 military personnel were deployed each year.

The period of reduction began in the late 1990s, but returned to the rise in the first decade of the 21st century when many huge and ambitious operations were approved, which reached its maximum in 2015 with the deployment of more than 106,000 military personnel in 16 UN peacekeeping operations.

Currently, there are 12 active peacekeeping operations, including 6 in Africa, three in the Middle East, two in Europe, and one in Asia, with more than 75,000 military personnel and more than 13,000 civilians.

The current budget for peacekeeping operations for the current fiscal year (2023/2024) is $6.05 billion.

The UN Security Council was often paralyzed by major power disputes in the first decades of the organization’s life. From 1945 to 1990, only 18 peacekeeping operations were approved.

In this era, especially in its early years, operations were generally modest in size and mandate, as they included the participation of member states with military personnel to accomplish limited tasks, such as monitoring and reporting on the ceasefire, while excluding the possibility of these forces resorting to the use of force.

This type of limited-delegation operation was relatively inexpensive and required relatively few staff.

An example of this is the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), established in 1948, and the United Nations Military Observers in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), established in 1949.

Serious operations

Later, the United Nations began to move towards more dangerous operations, as the first armed peacekeeping operation to address the Suez Crisis (UNEFI) was deployed in Egypt in the 1950s, followed a few years later by a massive operation in the Republic of the Congo (UNEFI). ONUC to ensure the withdrawal of Belgian forces and the establishment of peace and stability.

The Congo operation demonstrated the dangers of delegating UN peacekeeping forces to enforce peace.

Although it lasted only 4 years, during which about 250 peacekeepers were killed, making it the fifth bloodiest operation in the history of the United Nations.

The international organization's losses culminated in the killing of its then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash during his visit to the Congo to inspect the UN mission.

The international organization's losses in Congo resulted in the reduction of peacekeeping operations for decades.

Until peacekeeping operations were launched in the late 1960s and 1970s in areas such as the Dominican Republic (DOMREP) and Yemen (UNYOM).

Despite the modest mandate of traditional peacekeeping operations, they have always been characterized by patience and perseverance.

For example, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization and the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, the two oldest UN peacekeeping operations, continue.

Perhaps this advantage of patience and perseverance reflects a deficiency at the same time, as their continuation reduces the incentives that push the parties to the conflict to negotiate a permanent solution.

In this context, we find that the six oldest peacekeeping missions are traditional peacekeeping operations for conflicts that have remained unresolved for decades, namely: the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, the United Nations Military Observer Team in India and Pakistan, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, and the United Nations Forces. To monitor the disengagement in the Golan, the UNIFIL force in Lebanon, and the United Nations Mission for Western Sahara (MINURSO).

With the end of the Cold War, the decline in the intensity of conflict within the Security Council was reflected in the establishment of many operations.

In 1989, there were 10 active UN peacekeeping operations around the world, double the average number in previous decades.

Since 1990 there have been 15 peacekeeping operations active simultaneously.

Before 1992, the United Nations had not deployed more than 30,000 peacekeeping soldiers at one time.

Since then, more than 65,000 regular soldiers have been deployed to UN peacekeeping operations annually.

Complex tasks and failures

At the same time, the nature of UN peacekeeping operations has shifted from traditional tasks, such as monitoring ceasefires, to more complex tasks, such as enforcing peace in unstable environments, stopping wars within countries, building institutions, promoting human rights, and disarming combatants.

This led to a significant increase in operations, peacekeeping forces and expenditures.

In addition, the willingness to deploy operations in dangerous situations - where there is no peace to maintain - has led to international peacekeeping forces being exhausted, as happened in Somalia in 1993, or being unable to protect civilians, leading to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. UNOMUR and in the former Yugoslavia in 1995.

These devastating failures have prompted the Security Council to assess what went wrong and make recommendations on how to avoid them with more planning and a more realistic mandate, based on the recognition that peacekeeping forces are not primarily combatants.

However, unstable conditions once again prompted the Security Council to intensify peacekeeping operations, establishing missions in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Congo, Haiti, Mali, South Sudan, Sudan and elsewhere.

This increased the number of operations to an average of 15 active operations annually, and the number of personnel working in these operations increased to more than 106,000 military personnel in 16 operations in 2015.

But the record of UN peacekeeping operations includes few successes in countries such as Ivory Coast and Liberia, and many failures in Somalia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and South Sudan.

Haiti has remained a failed state even after six peacekeeping operations were deployed nearly a quarter century ago, whose primary mission was to restore stability, establish democratic governance, and promote human rights.

Peacekeeping is in decline

Since 2015, interest in peacekeeping operations has declined, as there are currently 12 active peacekeeping operations involving about 75,000 military personnel.

This number will witness a significant decline after the Security Council ended the decade-long operation in Mali at the request of its government, and the peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to end in 2024 at the request of the government.

The two missions are among the largest United Nations missions, as they include more than 27,000 military personnel.

The Security Council was able to extend the mandates of peacekeeping operations despite heightened geopolitical tensions among permanent members in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Long-term operations such as the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization are likely to continue.

Likewise, the mission in Kosovo has Russian support, and recent tensions between Kosovo and Serbia make it unlikely that other Security Council members will push for its end.

However, these operations remain relatively small in scale, politically uncontroversial, and financially inexpensive, and therefore not suitable for measurement.

The recent escalation of political conflict within the Security Council between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other has led to the Security Council failing to extend the humanitarian operation to Syria due to the Russian veto.

In addition, Russian relations with African governments through the Wagner Group have complicated the environment in which UN peacekeeping missions operate, resulting (among other things) in Mali's request to end the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

The UN peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and South Sudan (UNMISS) are also facing increasing difficulties, as peacekeeping forces have been accused of failing to protect civilians in the Republic of Central Africa and South Sudan by failing to prevent chaos and violence in either country.

In the same context, anti-UN demonstrations in the Central African Republic, “likely instigated by the Wagner Group, may lead to similar calls from Bangui to end the process.”

If the situation in southern Lebanon deteriorates, Israel or the United States will likely demand that UNIFIL's mission be reduced or terminated in the near future, especially if its mandate cannot be increased to address current security concerns due to opposition from Russia or China.

The willingness to agree to new UN operations is clearly declining, despite the conflicts and unstable situations in Ethiopia, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere.

Regional alternatives

However, alternatives exist to fill this growing peacekeeping void.

For example, the United States pressured Kenya to lead a non-UN multinational force to help stabilize Haiti.

In the summer of 2023, the Security Council discussed options for UN support for African Union peacekeeping missions.

Aside from the availability of the political will of the active international powers to approve this approach, reaching an agreement on the distribution of costs and the establishment of oversight mechanisms for training and discipline will be extremely difficult.

Currently, it seems likely that United Nations peacekeeping operations will decline to levels not seen since the Cold War, with their mission limited to supervising long-term, low-risk, low-cost operations that are not fraught with political controversy, but that do not contribute to resolving the conflicts for which they were created.

Source: Al Jazeera