While the UN Charter does not refer to ‘peacekeeping’ per se, the concept was developed based on its general principles and, in subsequent years, became a core activity of the UN peace agenda. After the launch of the first UN peacekeeping mission in the Middle East in 1948, by the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), peacekeeping gradually developed into one of the main UN peace and security tools to defuse complex threats to international peace and security. The ‘Blue Helmets’ of peacekeepers are perhaps the most recognizable emblem of UN peace work around the world.
The UN markedly redefined its approach to peace and security in the wake of the 1956 Suez crisis. With the UNSC paralysed, the UN General Assembly passed a landmark resolution (GA Res. 998) on 4 November 1956, authorizing then
Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, to raise and deploy a UN Emergency Force (UNEF), in order to erect a physical barrier between Egypt and Israel. While the UNEF was not intended to resolve conflicts, it responded in an exemplary manner to ease a tense situation during its decade-long operation. The impartial and neutral role of the UNEF thus became the prototype of UN peacekeeping missions during the Cold War era.
In 1960, the UN launched a large-scale peacekeeping effort in the Congo, involving as many as 20,000 military personnel. The ‘peace enforcement’ mission known as the United Nations Operation in the Congo (Opération des Nations Unies au Congo, or ONUC) faced physical limitations and constant attacks from local groups.
A total of 250 UN personnel died while serving on the ONUC mission,
including UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, whose plane crashed 1961 en route to ceasefire negotiations.1
Regardless, the UN continued to mandate peacekeeping missions during the Cold War. During this time, the UN undertook 18 missions including the Mission of the Representative of the Secretary-General in the Dominican Republic (DOMREP), the UN Security Force in West New Guinea (UNSF), the UN Yemen Observation Mission (UNYOM), the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), and several missions in the Middle East including UN Emergency Force II, UN Disengagement Observer Force and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Notwithstanding the limitations of the Cold War, peacekeepers contributed significantly to the cause of peace by defusing violent conflicts and creating situations conducive for negotiations between warring parties. In 1988, the UN peacekeeping forces were awarded the Nobel
1 Dag Hammarskjold was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously shortly after his death.
Peace Prize. According to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the forces represented
‘the manifest will of the community of nations’ and were granted the Peace Prize for their ‘decisive contribution’ to the resolution of conflicts across the world.
Indeed, the purpose and scope of UN peacekeeping operations expanded in manifold ways during the post-Cold War era with the emergence of post-conflict peacebuilding. This was a result of the post-bipolar consensus to provide a greater role for the UN to address the unprecedented rise in intrastate conflicts. The number of blue-helmeted soldiers soared from about 15,000 in 1991 to more than 76,000 in 1994, with new responsibilities and tasks entrusted to their role.
While the early peacekeeping operations served as a physical barrier between two warring parties, peacekeepers were now dealing with a number of civil war situations and supervising the post-conflict implementation of complex, multidimensional peace agreements. In many situations, the peacekeepers carried out various police and civilian functions to help cope with underlying conflict. Beyond the traditional role of monitoring ceasefires, today’s peacekeepers are employed to facilitate national dialogue and reconciliation; implement disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants; restore the rule of law and the protection of human rights; and conduct free and fair elections. As of today, 16 peacekeeping operations are ongoing on four continents under the aegis of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), with a staff of more than 118,000 military, police and civilian personnel. Led by
the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), UN peacekeeping is an instructive example of a UN entity transcending the provisions of the UN Charter to meet today’s complex challenges.
An Agenda for Peace affirmed peacebuilding as a key concern for the UN, and defined it as ‘the construction of a new environment’ to avoid the breakdown of peaceful conditions and prevent a recurrence of crisis, recognizing that ‘only sustained, cooperative work to deal with underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems can place an achieved peace on a durable foundation’ (UN, 1992). This marked a turning point in the UN approach to peace, together with a reorientation and
broadening of UN efforts to expand peacekeeping.
The idea of post-conflict peacebuilding was initially conceived as the final stage of a consecutive transition following preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping.
However, this sequential approach to peacebuilding proved less helpful in resolving intrastate conflicts. A series of tragic conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia exposed the fault lines in post-Cold War peacekeeping, and despite partial successes in East Timor, El Salvador, Kosovo and Mozambique, confidence in the UN’s role as a global peacekeeper began to recede in the mid-1990s.
In their analyses of the waning role of UN peacebuilding the Brahimi Report (UN, 2000) and the Report of the High‑level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (UN, 2004) identified deep-rooted challenges, suggesting the need for a more robust and realistic basis for a UN peacebuilding mandate. Aside from lacking a mandate and resources, peacebuilding efforts were fragmented (or ‘siloed’) and poorly coordinated between UN peacekeeping operations, political missions and the UN development system (Rosenthal et al., 2015: 11). The two reports also highlighted the need for closer cooperation between peacekeepers and peacebuilders to forge sustainable peace.
The growing realization that peacekeeping could not be sustained without building firm foundations for peace, was reflected in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,, the 2004 report of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel
on Threats, Challenges and Change. This paved the way for setting up a Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) in 2006 to ‘bring together the UN’s broad capacities and experience in conflict prevention, mediation, peacekeeping, respect for human rights, the rule of law, humanitarian assistance, reconstruction and long-term development’.
The establishment of the Peacebuilding Support Office and the Peacebuilding Fund supplemented the Commission, which combined came to be known as the UN Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA). The PBA was intended to serve as a dedicated institutional mechanism to assist countries in laying the foundations for sustainable peace and development. In 2010, however, a review of the PBA commissioned by the UN General Assembly acknowledged that the ‘threshold of success’ was yet to be achieved and that an ‘overall vision’ was lacking.
UN peacebuilding: critical perspectives
After the 1992 publication of An Agenda for Peace, peace researchers turned their critical attention to the concept of peacebuilding. Many felt that the emerging UN mandate for peacebuilding was grounded in the resurgence of liberal internationalism and the idea of a democratic transition to peace (Bertram, 1995; Heathershaw, 2008).
This idea was supported by development research promoting good governance to remedy fragile states, coupled with peace research asserting that democracies are unlikely to go to war against each other (Gleditsch and Hegre, 1997). Together, research on ‘liberal peace’ provided arguments in favour of economic development
and democratization as the pathway to a prosperous, peaceful world.
As the ‘liberal peace’ agenda took hold, researchers started to raise questions focusing on the underpinnings of contemporary ideas about peacebuilding in liberal ideology, as well as the organization of multilateral peacebuilding institutions,
mechanisms and frameworks. These critiques centred on the peacebuilding potential of
the twin tenets of the ‘liberal peace’ project: democratization and economic
liberalization (Boyce, 1996, 2002; Luckham, 2005; Luckham, Goetz and Kaldor, 2003;
Mansfield and Snyder, 2005; Paris, 2002, 2004). As described by Neclâ Tschirgi (2004:
4–5), the liberal peacebuilding ‘template’ was based on the premise that fundamental social ‘engineering’ of conflict-prone societies is essential to prevent their relapse into conflict. This view was typically applied to the aftermath of civil war, starting with the signing of a mediated peace agreement and involving financial aid from the
international donor community and assistance from multilateral agencies.
Peacebuilding assistance was developed as a package of standard remedies to be applied in different contexts across the world (Tschirgi, 2004), involving the creation of an interim or transitional government; the drafting of a constitution; the development of new or revised election systems; judiciary and security sector reform (SSR); the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of ex-combatants (DDR); post-conflict reconstruction schemes; gender equality measures; repatriation programmes
for refugees; truth commissions and war crimes tribunals.
The conceptual framework of ‘integrated’ post-conflict reconstruction has been critiqued from a range of perspectives. Most prominent is the contention that the new model of peacebuilding represented a hegemonic application of Western ideas and practices, applied rather condescendingly and without exploring other suitable modes of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2006: 144). In the words of Oliver Richmond (2004: 91):
‘The question of what peace might be expected to look like from the inside is given less credence than the way the international community and its organizers and actors desire to see it from the outside’. According to Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond
(2013: 764) this ‘tension is also visible in contradictions between local and international perspectives of what peace is and how it may be achieved. These contradictions lie in the international structure, its historical evolution, in power, understandings of rights, representation, norms, law and society’.
Writing on market liberalism and peacebuilding, researchers such as James Boyce (1996, 2002) and Roland Paris (2002, 2004) challenged the donor-driven preference for marketization, arguing that economic liberalization is ill-suited and counterproductive to post-conflict peacebuilding due to the potentially destabilizing effects of economic and political competition in fragile societies. Regarding the notion of democratic peace, scholars such as Robin Luckham (2005: 36) warned that ‘democracy is not the infallible solution to a conflict that it is often supposed to be’, cautioning that democracies have their own unique set of problems when determining responses to internal conflict.
Despite the long-term effects of conflict, political violence may be a tempting option within the short time span of an election. As Luckham (ibid) points out, ‘it cannot be taken for granted that democracy will be sustainable, that it will support rather than get in the way of reconstruction, or that it will foster conflict resolution’.
Researchers also describe numerous cases of civil war and devastating internal conflict in democracies, further challenging the equation of peace and
democratization (Collier and Hoeffler, 2000; Collier et al., 2003). Bidisha Biswas (2006: 46) refers to the case of Sri Lanka, arguing that in countries where ‘war coexists with stable, democratic institutions, conflict management becomes a
complex process of balancing competing demands within the government’. For other democracies to avoid the same pitfalls, new and innovative approaches to
peacebuilding should be encouraged, replacing narrow military solutions with non-coercive interventions designed to more comprehensively address
complex environments.
Critiques of the ‘interventionist’ approach to peacebuilding are reflected in a range of debates, covering ethical and legal questions about the use of armed forces in peacebuilding missions, dilemmas associated with top-down ‘social engineering’
in peacebuilding, challenges of enforcing gender equality through women’s participation in peacebuilding and peace processes, and the ‘culture critique’ of the indiscriminate application of Western assumptions about conflict resolution to societies around the world.
The scholarly debate on ‘new wars’ questions international peacebuilding practices and theoretical approaches in important ways. David Keen (2008) highlights the problems faced by many peacebuilding organizations working in conflict zones, including the self-fulfilling nature of aid, organizational
agenda-setting that ensures ‘success’, and the tendency to overlook abuses by those in power to bolster allegiances and access. Writing on the links between protracted conflicts and the structure and practice of development aid, Olympio Barbanti (2006) argues that development practitioners tend to overlook conflict scenarios that are present prior to interventions, and disregard the potential of development intervention to aggravate conflict. When aid programmes also fail to address
underlying social triggers of conflict, aid delivery must be recognized as an important contributor to conflict.
In response to repeated failures to produce peace through military operations, serious questions have been raised about the ethical and legal consequences of military intervention on humanitarian grounds, and difficulties in differentiating between a humanitarian intervention and an operation to achieve regime change. Writing on the securitization of the peace agenda, Tschirgi (2004: 17–18) argues that the term
‘peacebuilding’ has been conflated with a new post-9/11 discourse of ‘nation-building’,
‘regime change’ and ‘stabilization’, driven by the national security interests of dominant external actors, with the United States as the ‘critical player’. Robin Luckham (2005:
17–18) argues that this new interventionism is marked by a ‘developmentalization of
security’, as security and military experts find themselves called to implement development-based peacebuilding missions.
There is a wealth of well-researched evidence to show how measures to introduce market liberalization and democratization have, at times, fanned the flames of conflict, presenting a serious challenge to the ‘liberal peace’ agenda. The regional quarterly reviews carried out under UN Secretary-General’s ‘Human Rights Up Front Policy’
in countries with conflict-preventive dimensions are tempered by the critique of liberal peacebuilding, ranging from the questioning of ‘emancipatory’ humanitarian
intervention and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P), to calls for local ownership and participation in peace processes.
A corresponding trend in the applied peacebuilding literature was dominated by case studies of ‘post-conflict’ scenarios where the international community
and multilateral agencies were involved in ‘state-building’ as a part of post-conflict reconstruction, especially after the limited success of such exercises in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan to the Balkans, East Timor, Iraq, Liberia, Nepal and Sierra Leone.
Generally projected as a discourse of ‘universal norms’ of democracy, the free market economy, human rights, the rule of law and development, the ‘liberal peace’ framework tends to conflate different trajectories to peace, including the victor’s peace involving a hegemonic power, constitutional or democratic peace, institutional peace supported by the UN, and civil peace based on the collaboration of local civil societies
in preventing war and conflict. This results in greater confusion, rather than clarity, around the concept of peace.
Of late, the top-down model of peacebuilding has come under increasing criticism.
A burgeoning post-millennial body of research raised doubts about the contemporary liberal peacebuilding recipe, generating numerous ‘lessons learned’ and ‘best practices’.
According to Lederach, modern peacebuilding needs to go beyond top-down statist diplomacy and focus on reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships (Graf, Kramer and Nicolescou, 2007). Peacebuilding in its expanded version is defined as a
‘comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships’ (Lederach, 1997: 20). Peacebuilding activities may, therefore, contribute either to ending or avoiding armed conflict, and ‘may be carried out during armed conflict, in its wake, or as an attempt to prevent an anticipated armed conflict from starting’ (Smith, 2004: 20). Thus, peacebuilding may involve ‘working around conflict’, ‘working in conflict’ and ‘working on conflict’, where it is feasible (Kievelitz, Kruk and Frieters, 2003: 8).
Notwithstanding the expanding horizons of peacebuilding, some researchers still prefer ‘conflict transformation’ as a more comprehensive strategy of transforming a society towards peace (Lederach, 1997; Graf et al., 2007). As Hugh Miall (2004) points out, transformation towards peace requires more than the identification of win-win outcomes that benefit conflicting parties. Conflict transformation requires a process of engagement, transforming the relationships, interests, discourses and, if necessary, the very constitution of a society that supports the continuation of violent conflict.
This suggests ‘a comprehensive and wide-ranging approach, emphasizing support for groups within the society in conflict rather than for the mediation of outsiders’
(Miall, 2004: 14).
There is thus an increasing consensus that peacebuilding works best as a
transformative process involving stakeholders from ‘below’ within local institutions and civil society. Top-down approaches relying on exogenous methodology do not engender sustainable peace, as they tend to erode the peacebuilding capacities of local institutions and civil society. The discontent with the liberal peacebuilding discourse has led researchers, as well as practitioners, to turn to alternative peacebuilding concepts, including multi-track peacebuilding, to produce more inclusive and sustainable political transitions (Galvanek and Planta, 2017: 18). Some have highlighted the importance of blending the top-down implementation of peace accords with bottom-up processes to heal societal divisions and engender societal ownership of the agreement (Prendergast and Plumb, 2002). Cautioning against a ‘one-size-fits-all version of peacebuilding’, the Utsteil study emphasizes the importance of tailoring each intervention to the requirements of the situation, while simultaneously improving overall strategic collaboration by standardizing peacebuilding planning mechanisms (Smith, 2004).
These recommendations were echoed in the report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (UN, 2004).