Multidimensional Peacekeeping: A New Tool for Democracy

“Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it”, said Dag Hammarskjöld, one of the boldest and most admired UN Secretary Generals to date. From the launch of the first peacekeeping missions in the late 1940s until the end of the Cold War, peace operations’ role in conflict management had been limited to observing, mediating and using force to prevent hostilities: it was primarily a military duty. Due to the decrease in polarization during the 1990s with the end of the Cold War, a new concept of peacekeeping was shaped: multidimensional peacekeeping. The main difference that this shift brought was that the new missions included the implementation of peace agreements and other capacity-building measures. These new strategies were intended to improve peacebuilding and foster a more democratic post-conflict environment. 

UN Peacekeeping has been a key resource for conflict management and the restoration of peace and security across the world since the first Peacekeeping mission was launched in 1948 to supervise the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nevertheless, the shift towards constructing durable peace might seem slightly contradictory: the crises in Rwanda and Srebrenica, where UN peacekeeping was unable to prevent mass killings and genocide, are impossible to forget. As a consequence of these catastrophic failures, many studies have empirically investigated how UN missions work and how effective they are. Most scholars who have conducted in-depth analyses of peacekeeping agree that multidimensional peacekeeping yields more durable peace results. Since the 1990s, there have been more peacekeeping missions started by regional entities or ad hoc coalitions of states than by the United Nations. Despite the many times that these regional initiatives have been created, little academic attention has been devoted to their mandates and effectiveness, or lack thereof. Thus, I argue that a multidimensional approach should be taken by the other entities organizing peacekeeping missions in order to promote democratization and human security.

The past, present and future of peacekeeping

To find out which peacekeeping strategies work best, it is necessary to define what peace missions are, when they work and when they fail to promote peace. In a study conducted in 1988, Diehl explains how UN peacekeeping is effective in  halting hostilities if all parties agree to the missions’ deployment. He, moreover, finds no effect of mission mandate on the success of each mission. However, with the diversification of peacekeeping in the 1990s, Doyle and Sambanis’ work on the effectiveness of peacekeeping yielded different results. First, they found that peace enforcement missions have a positive effect on the halting of hostilities, which logically follows, given that military units act with a mandate to use force if necessary. But, more importantly, their study also found that multidimensional peacekeeping missions contribute to post-conflict participatory peace. Let’s explore their work in more depth.

Figure 1: Changing mandates of UN Peacekeeping Operations
Image Source: Di Salvatore, 2017

Doyle and Sambanis’ International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis (2000) is the most widely cited academic article on peacekeeping. According to their analysis, there are four types of peacekeeping missions. First, mediation or observer missions are mandated to monitor a truce and help negotiate peace through the presence of military and civil observers. Second, traditional peacekeeping includes the deployment of military units to facilitate a negotiated settlement (usually approved through Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter). In addition, peace enforcement missions are operations in which a military intervention is designed to impose public order by force, if needed (acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter). Finally, multidimensional peacekeeping missions are designed to implement a negotiated agreement including strategies for capacity expansion and institutional transformation. While observer, traditional and peace enforcement missions are focused on preventing violence, multidimensional missions try to build a more durable peace. Thus, multidimensional peacekeeping should yield higher levels of human security and democracy by strengthening essential institutions for any nation state, such as the police or the judiciary. Fortna, another key scholar on the study of peacekeeping, in 2008, wrote a book on peacekeeping effectiveness, and also found that multidimensional peace missions contribute to a more durable peace. This is consistent with the previously-discussed results: a mission whose mandate includes the rebuilding of state institutions should contribute to the improvement of peace and democracy.

Multidimensional peacekeeping in Cambodia: Why it worked

A practical example of how a multidimensional mission operates is the role of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), deployed from 1992 to 1993 and created following the 1991 Paris Peace Accords or Comprehensive Cambodian Peace Agreements – marking the official end of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. The UNTAC mission was endowed with a mandate including significant electoral, civil administrative, policing, human rights, repatriation, rehabilitation and reconstruction functions. The deployment of UNTAC had a positive impact because, according to Doyle Suntharalingam, they helped political opponents compete against the incumbent regime, repatriated refugees from camps and organized an election in a country with a shattered physical infrastructure, where more than 90% of the Cambodian population freely and safely voted despite threats from the government. As the authors stated, the successes of UNTAC can in large part be credited to the multidimensional character of the mandate. After the 1993 elections, the power-sharing government succeeded in having a very strong popular mandate, and  the reconstruction of the country could begin. 

The safety of Cambodians that was ensured by the presence of UNTAC when deciding who the Cambodian political leaders should be in 1993 exemplifies the importance of multidimensional missions, not only for democratization and for building a durable and sustainable peace, but also in order to put human security at the forefront of international concern. Thus, the review of the successes of multidimensional missions and their importance for human security leads us to analyze other peacekeeping missions. Do non-UN operations carried out by regional organizations or ad hoc coalitions of states apply as multidimensional mandates? Should they?

Non-UN Peacekeeping: Origins, evolution and mandates

Since the 1990s, the SIPRI Multilateral Peace Operations Database, which contains the most comprehensive collection of peacekeeping missions, has included more non-UN peace operations than UN ones. They classify the missions in three types according to who carries them out: UN, regional organizations, and ad hoc coalitions of states. Among the regional organizations who carry out peace missions, we can find the Arab League, the African Union, NATO, OSCE, the EU and ECOWAS, among others. Some examples of ad hoc coalitions of states include French missions in their former colonies, such as in Côte d’Ivoire or in Mali. Although these missions are now widely carried out, there is little academic work analyzing their mandates and effectiveness. If we catalogue all the regional and ad hoc missions to this date, we find the following stratification (Figure 2):

TYPE OF AD HOC AND REGIONAL MISSIONS
Mediation or observer missions	37.36%
Traditional peacekeeping	6.55%
Peace enforcement	7.3%
Multidimensional peacekeeping	48.78%

Figure 2: Types of ad hoc and regional missions
Image Source: author’s own creation

The prevalence of multidimensional peacekeeping (almost half of non-UN missions hold such a mandate) is consistent with the evolution towards these types of operations since the 1990s, the date from which most non-UN operations have taken place. The results also suggest that the success of UN multidimensional peacekeeping has been noticed by regional and ad hoc organizations, who have preferred this type of overarching mandate. Knowing that this widespread preference exists, the importance of analyzing the success of these missions in a comparative fashion is essential. 

Do multidimensional peacekeeping missions also work best when carried out by regional or ad hoc organizations? Theoretically, they should. If it is their mandate that increases their success, multidimensional peacekeeping missions should increase human security and promote democratization better than the other types of missions. However, it is unclear if this is true due to the lack of analysis of this issue. Moreover, the effectiveness of non-UN operations should be examined in comparison with UN peacekeeping. There is a possibility that they are as effective as UN missions due to their similar mandate, but there is also reason to believe that they might work less frequently – after all, the United Nations has widespread international support and near-universal membership, while regional organizations sometimes are seen as less legitimate (take the example of NATO), and their missions could be hampered by this issue. 

Critiques of UN Peacekeeping are well-founded. Different methods – such as the move towards robust peacekeeping in the 90s or the recent proposal for multidimensional peacekeeping – have been studied and evaluated as a means to improve the effectiveness of the missions. It is necessary to broaden these approaches to improve the human security of local populations. Due to the breadth of their mandate, multidimensional UN Peacekeeping methods have proven to be more effective in ensuring post-conflict democratization and human security. Missions by other regional actors have focused more on implementing multilateral strategies so that this success can be furthered in different realms. However, it is unclear whether these multilateral efforts have worked. Future analyses should examine the success of these regional missions in regards to their mandate and in comparison to UN missions.

Featured Image Source: The Global Observatory