Multidimensional and Integrated Peace Operations: Trends and Challenges

By Shepard Forman
Beijing, March 26-27, 2007

Panel I- International Peace Operations:  Trends and Challenges

(For Panel on the Peacekeeping-Peacebuilding Interface click here)

Ministers, Directors General and honored guests:  I am particularly delighted to have been invited to participate in this important conference and want to thank our Chinese and Norwegian hosts for their generous and warm welcome.  I first came to a very different China in 1985 as part of the Ford Foundation's initial visiting delegation and again in the early 1990s as Director of the Foundation's International Affairs program. During that first visit I was accompanied by my wife, who was born to Russian Jewish parents in Tientsin and raised in that fine city, now Tianjin, until 1954, when at the age of 13, her family emigrated to Brazil.  New York University, which hosts our Center on International Cooperation, has recently opened a campus in Shanghai, in close cooperation with the East China Normal University, so that I can boast personal, professional and institutional ties to this extraordinary country.

My task this morning is to address trends and challenges in international peace operations.  My remarks, which will largely be based on the Center's Annual Review of Peace Operations, will be divided into these two categories:  trends and challenges. The publication itself offers considerable more data and analysis than I am able to highlight here this morning, and I hope you will take away with you copies of the 2nd Annual Review, which are available at the back of the room, and will send us your comments as we prepare the next review. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Governments of Norway, Sweden, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom for supporting the production of the Annual Review, and the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations for their close collaboration. Before proceeding, I would also note, that while the focus here is in trends and macro-challenges, the real challenge to peacekeeping and peacebuilding is embedded within the political context of each conflict. 

Let me begin with the macro trends, to the extent that these can be identified within brief, annual points of reference. We are all readily familiar with the overall evolution of UN peacekeeping from monitoring ceasefires, to multidimensional peacekeeping, including a range of policing and civilian functions, to peace enforcement. What is less familiar to us are the shifting peace operations fortunes of the UN itself, the diverse roles of other actors in relation to the UN, and the multifaceted challenges of multidimensional peacekeeping. Let me address each of these in turn, beginning with four trends.

- Trend #1: The shifting role of the United Nations. After a significant decline in UN peacekeeping operations in the mid-1990s, following the crises in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the UN has once again become a significant player, currently deploying more than 80 thousand blue-helmeted soldiers in some 18 missions around the world, a more than 4-fold increase in UN troop deployments since 2000.  3/4th of these deployments are in Africa, and – significantly -- 52% of the troops deployed there originate from Central and South Asia, a small group of whose countries provide a full 43% of troop contributions overall.

This compares to nearly equal amounts of troops deployed in some 30 non-UN missions, 66% of which, however, are NATO forces operating in the Balkans and, more recently, in Afghanistan.  
   
- Trend #2: Involves the increasing engagement of other actors --  such as NATO, the European Union, the African Union and coalitions of the willing – including so-called "out of area" operations such as NATO in Afghanistan and the EU in the DRC.  While Regional Organizations' troop deployments fell by more than ½ to roughly 50,000 in 2005, a rapid increase in non-UN deployments occurred in 2006, largely related to NATO deployments in Afghanistan.  Nearly 75,000 non-UN troops were deployed throughout the world this past year, albeit 79% of them in Central and South Asia or in Europe.  The bottom line: troop levels for UN and NATO operations are rising; for ROs seem to be far fewer numbers, but lots of operations.

- Trend #3: These diverse deployments have lead to a  broad sub-category generally dubbed  "hybrid operations", most notably the UN, NATO, EU's support to the African Union in Sudan, the EU's deployment within and alongside UNIFIL in Lebanon, and the EU's and UN's coordinated effort in the DRC. But these still-to-be understood hybrid operations also extend to complex relations between coalitions of the willing and the UN, as in the Australian-led force in Timor-Leste, or the relationship between coalition and NATO forces and the UN mission in Afghanistan. While theoretically offering complementary capacities in field operations, the very ‘hybrid’ nature of these operations raises important questions regarding command and control, coherence and coordination, and the legitimating role of the UN.

Trend #4: Starting in the mid-1990s, operations have become increasingly multidimensional involving a broad range of security, including policing, and civilian components, with civilian personnel far outnumbering military personnel in a number of cases.  From Kosovo to Timor-Leste, helping local actors to build effective and legitimate public institutions as the most certain guarantors of sustainable peace and security, has become the hallmark of UN and bilateral engagement. This raises a whole new level of political and capacity issues which we will discuss later and again tomorrow.  

Challenges - Let me suggest five challenges made evident by these three trends.    

1. First is the question of the sustainability of these troop levels.  Even with the participation of important more recent troop contributing countries, notably China, Indonesia and Turkey, and the stepped up roles of others, such as Brazil in Haiti, there are serious worries about the UN's capacities to continue to raise sufficient numbers of troops and the finances necessary to equip and maintain them. Accounting for rotations, personnel estimates run to 140 thousand as the numbers required to maintain current troop levels in the field. Presently, fewer than 20 troop contributing countries provide the mainstay of international peacekeeping, far outnumbered by the number of countries in which conflicts unfortunately continue to occur.  A full 45% of UN military personnel came from just 4 countries – Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal. This challenge is not limited to the UN as troops for EU, AU and NATO-led operations are often drawn from a small pool of countries.

2. Second, related to the question of sufficient troop mobilization is the risk of triage, especially in the context of the "Global War on Terrorism" in which some theatres of operation are likely to be privileged at the expense of others. It is not inconsequential that previous concerns about the absence of Western troops in UN peace operations have been mitigated by EU and NATO deployments in Afghanistan and Lebanon, albeit with some recent additions in Africa. Only 14% of all UN troops originate from the EU, but 80% of UN forces in the Middle East come from European countries.  79% of non-UN military personnel are deployed in Central and South Asia and Europe; only16% in Africa. 

3. Third, the Annual Review points up a serious matter of real and potential disparities in operations in different cases, particularly as regards logistical and financial support, materiel, and rules of engagement. As previously mentioned, additional questions arise as to coordination, command and control in hybrid arrangements.  With regard to the latter more coherent planning, training and coordinating mechanisms are needed, both at headquarters and in the field. However, there are serious institutional capacity issues at play. The UN manages its 20 plus operations and 80,000 military personnel – not to speak of thousands of civilian cadres -- with just over 500 headquarters personnel; the AU with fewer than 20;

4. Fourth, the Review also notes a possible rise in objections to peace operations, either on the part of host states, as in the case of Darfur, or on the part of partisan political interests or segments of national populations as in Timor-Leste. Two issues are at stake here: 1) the collision between the responsibility to protect and the principle of national sovereignty; and 2) the perceived politicization of peacekeeping forces. How to insulate peacekeepers from local political machinations is a major challenge to the UN and, most particularly, to the Security-Council as it defines, structures, and approves missions. The political complexities are potentially greater in hybrid missions where diverse and sometimes divergent national interests come directly into play.

5. Finally, this brings us to the question of the increasingly obvious, but difficult link between peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peacebuilding. This is the subject of the panel I will participate in tomorrow morning, and so I will only point to a couple of issues now. This linkage is not merely a matter of timing or mission duration or the assignment and execution of tasks, but one of the prioritization and allocation of human and financial resources across a range of need from humanitarian relief, security sector and judicial reform, to economic development and job creation. It is a matter of how military personnel and, particularly, military command relate to the civilian components of missions and how the military view their role within an extended period of peace consolidation, perhaps for years after the fighting has stopped. Most importantly, it is a question of the relation between external and local political, military and civil constituencies. Along each of these dimensions, it is a quintessentially political question which needs far greater attention than it has received in the past, and which can in the end determine the long-term success or failure of peace operations.