A BRIEF CRITICAL REVIEW ON SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF

UN PEACE AND SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

BY MEKONNEN ASSEFA BELAY

Resulting from the devastation of the Second World War, The United Nations came

into being in 1945. The core purpose for its establishment was maintaining

international peace and security by preventing conflict, helping those parties who

were in conflict to make peace, as well as safeguarding and keeping peace to create

conducive environment that can allow sustainable peace to flourish which was its

early predecessor, League of Nations failed to do so. In my point of view, although

it has been playing a significant role for international peace and security since its

establishment, I believe it had countless failures in safeguarding and maintaining

international peace and security.

The purpose of This paper is to critically examine the successes and failures of United

Nations on conflict resolution, maintaining security and restoring sustainable peace in

any corner of the world as to forward my piece of idea on how to improve the global UN

peace and security architecture that could help to achieve its early establishment

objectives as well.

1. Successes of UN.

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As I tried to mansion earlier, the very reason that brought the UN in to existence was,

according to its charter, the need to establishment, promotion and maintenance of

international peace and security by avoiding any threat to the peace, breach of the peace,

or act of aggression that lead to inter and intrastate conflict to make our world peaceful

for human well being. To achieve this objective, the UN Charter clearly stipulated on

Article 24 that, “In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its

Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of

international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this

responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf”. I believe that UN had a great

success in conflict prevention and restoration of peace through the mechanism of Peace

building, preventive diplomacy, preventive disarmament, preventive genocide, and

deployment of the peacekeeping force.

1.1. Successes in Peacebuilding and peacekeeping

Though it has not been able to keep our world free from war and conflict as stipulated on

its objective, I believe that international peace is always the greatest concern of UN

security architecture. Based on Article 33 of the charter, it has been trying to seek a

solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement,

and through the deployment of the peacekeeping mission in hotspot and conflicted areas

for the past 70 years.

In the 1990s an increase in intra-state conflict generated a growth in focus by the

international community on peacebuilding. According to an article published by UN, The

concept of peace building was introduced in 1992 by former UN Secretary-General

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Boutros Boutros-Ghali in order to address root causes of conflict, ensure national

reconciliation, and to move the country towards recovery, reconstruction, and

development.

Since 1948, the peacekeeping effort of UN peace security architecture has helped to end

conflict by conducting various peacekipping operations in different part of the world. In

its peacekeeping effort, according to the account of Leandrit & Nagel (2013), the UN

plays an important role in relation to different aspects of crisis intervention and political

tensions and the UN’s authority is very important in different aspects of addressing and

resolving conflicts to managing the consequences of those conflicts (Leandrit I. Mehmeti

& Rebekah Nagel, 2013). This UN peacekeeping effort helped to provide basic security,

respond to crises and supported have supported to end inter-communal and interstate

conflict that resulted peaceful political transition as well as building institutions.

According to the report of United Nations Peacekeeping operation, currently, UN has

deployed nearly 111,000 peacekeeping forces to conduct its peacekeeping operation in 14

countries around the world (UN Peacekeeping Operations, 2018). Among this 14

countries in which UN peacekeeping forces are operating, 7 in Africa, countries, 3 in

middle east, one in Latin America (Haiti), and 1 in Europe (Cyprus).

I believe this global peacekeeping operations and peacebuilding assistance through

peacekeeping forces as well as diplomatic negotiation and intervention effort has

contributed a lot in restoring peace and avoiding conflict. With this effort of UN, may

conflicts have been reconciled; the life of many peoples have saved from catastrophic

disaster in many countries. If the UN would have not been exerted its diplomatic effort

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and peacekeeping mission, the number of people dying and the socio-economic

devastation would have been tripled.

1.2. Successes in the Genocide Trial

The UN effort in charging genocide criminals of Rwanda as well as the former president

of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and this precedence has

served as a catalyst to raise awareness of the causes and dynamics of genocide, as well as

create alerting relevant actors to the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and

crimes against humanity. According to UN press releases on August 1991, this success

accounted by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan speech on 30 August for Non-

Aligned Summit in South Africa as follows "The success of this court in prosecuting

genocide is a historic milestone and a defining example of the ability of the United

Nations to create institutions which fulfill the highest aspirations of mankind." (UN Press

Release, 31 Aug. 1998).

1.3. Bringing Human Security issue to the forefront

The UN introduced the human security approach in the 1994 global development report.

The introduction of this concept made a transition from the narrow concept of national

security to an all-encompassing concept of human security Oscar (2013). It is a change

from an exclusive stress on territorial security towards much greater stress on people’s

security. Since then the issue of human security has become the focus of attention in

every corner of the world. Therefore, I believe, the contribution of UN in bringing the

human security concept on the table has chanced the assumption of security from

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conventional to non-conventional security paradigm. This could be considered one of its

successes.

2. Failure of UN

Taking into consideration the global nature of the world that we are living in make

complicated to restore peace in a classical approach, I believe that UN has felid to meet

its objective that has envisaged to make our world free from war and conflict. Rather the

re-occurrence of conflict and interstate conflict and war is dramatically incising in the

21st century a state of condition that our world never experienced since the establishment

of UN. While the situations are getting complicated and the recurrence complication of

conflict increasing from time to time, I believe that UN still trying to operate in a way

that it used to function in a traditional way of 20th century. In this section I will try to

analyze some of its failures.

2.1. Power and Recourse hungry Wolfs in its belly

It may not be debatable that the vital and primary interest and objective of

contesting worlds political and economic giants is maintaining their geopolitical

position in a way to facilitate their ideological imposition as well as economic and

resource exploitation. Especially the neoliberalism of the west requires imposing its

ideology of liberal economy to create dependency on local and domestic political

economy. In this regard, as John (2015) clearly stipulated it, in the shadow of the

cold war, the United States and advanced industrial democracies established a wide

array of global and regional institutions to manage economic, political and security

relations he further explains that the Britton Woods institutions WTO, the United

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Nations and various functional institutions provided the bulwark for un open and

managed postwar world economy and global order…China, India, Brazil and others

are on the rise and they are seeking to renegotiate their role in the global

order…….states continue to have deep and growing in an international order (G.

John I., 2015). Taking John’s statement of account, I believe that UN becomes the

tool for those global political and economic giants who are spinning the axis of

global politics for the sake of their own interest. That is why UN kept silent and

Reluctant while the recent and ongoing devastating crises in Libya, Syria and

Yemen, to mention a few, claims millions of life and leads to displacement while

the hungry wolves are proximally fighting to hold their geopolitical position.

2.2. One-size feet for all approach

In my opinion, the securitization and conflict resolution, including post conflict recovery

and development policies, strategies and mechanisms are designed in the corridors of UN

headquarter in New York. In most cases deign and implementation processes of conflict

resolution, as well as development policies and strategies of the UN, do not consider what

is really happening on the ground. Most of the time, less attention is given to the locally

driven solution for local problem by fully involving regional and local actors.

As it is clearly stated by Autesserre (2014), the solutions provided by UN for conflict

resolution and peace building is undertaken by supply-driven than demand-driven

approach. Furthermore, according to Autesserre (2014), this solutions and peacebuilding

approaches are highly influenced by liberal internationalism where most western values

and practices onto other culture. As it precisely stated by Autesserre (2014), the

international peace builders do not fully understand the conflicts they are trying to

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resolve. Because they rarely include local leaders in decision-making, do not speak the

local languages, and do not stay posted long enough to oversee effective change. This

leaves decision makers out of touch with the key players in the peace building process

(Autesserre 2014). She further explains this idea in that International donors [actors]

typically do not have the knowledge; skills or recourses to bring meaningful change to

the way post conflict societies are governed (Autesserre 2014). I believe that one of the

reason for frailer of avoiding conflict, especially interstate conflict, and restoring

enduring peace is the UN homogeneous and top-down oriented approach to solving the

problem in different parts of the world.

2.3 Peacekeeping Without Biting Teeth

An internal UN study last year found that UN peacekeeping missions routinely avoid

using force to protect civilians who are under attack, intervening in only 20 per cent of

cases despite being authorized to do so by the UN Security Council. Peacekeeping in

conflicting zone especially, in areas of armed conflict requires an appropriate forceful

response (Barney Henderson. The Telegraph, 22 December 2018). The conflicting parties

could not case fire and stop fighting unless peacekeeping forces take appropriate forceful

measure. On this regard, the article of Barney Henderson further accounts that while

some peacekeeping missions perform adequately, others have failed to protect civilians –

notably at Srebrenica, where Dutch peacekeepers watched on powerless as thousands of

men were murdered. Because of the absence of this forceful mandate and accountability,

we have seen many devastations and loss of life in different parts of Africa while the

peacekeeping force of UN kept passive to use all necessary means.

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As it was precisely stated by Victoria Holt and Glyn Taylor(2009), the UN peacekeeping

force was deployed in areas of the war zone without having strong and appropriate

deterring actionable force. They further explained that the failures of missions to provide

security in complex crises such as Somalia, and to protect civilians from mass atrocities

in Rwanda and Bosnia, tested the fundamental principles and capabilities of UN

peacekeeping operations and demonstrated that reform was urgently required. (Victoria

Holt and Glyn Taylor, 2009) Therefore, I believe, UN peacekeeping forces have to take

the necessary military action including the use of appropriate force coupled by rational

accountability to make the fighting parties give up.

To conclude, On my point of view having this lists of problems, but not last, the UN

security architecture has to go through genuine structural and institutional reform that can

allow all Nation States can play their role in conflict resolution, decision making as well

as locally driven policy formulation and implementation on their local and regional

affairs.

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References;

1. Autesserre S.(2014). Peace Behind: conflict resolution and the every day politics

of international intervention. Cambridge University Press.

2. Barney Henderson. “What have been the successes and failures of UN

peacekeeping missions?”. The Telegraph, 22 December 2018.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/html. (Accessed December

23, 2018).

3. G.John I.,(2015). The future of Multilateralism; governing the world in a post-

hegemonic era. Japanese Journal of political science.

4. Sarah H, Abejandara K., Bujanes A. the UN peacebulding (2014). The UN

peacebulding Architecture past present and future.

5. Oscar A., Gomez D.,(2013). Human Security: A thematic Guideline Note for

Regional and National Human Development Report.

6. UN news 27, July 2016. https://www.un.org/press/en/1998/19980831.l2894.html.

(Accessed December 23, 2018).

7. www.unpbf.org/ application-guidelines/what-is- peacebulding/

8. https://www.un.org/press/en/1998/19980831.l2894.html