The new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is out! This sturdy volume, which I helped set up in 2005-6, has chronicled the long decline of peacekeeping since then. This year’s excellent volume (now stewarded by my colleagues Sarjoh Bah and Ben Tortolani) opens on a particularly grim note:
2008 was the worst year for peacekeeping in over a decade. The largest and most visible peacekeeping operations faced serious military and political reversals. These endangered not only specific missions, but the entire global peacekeeping enterprise. No major peacekeeping provider was unaffected. The United Nations was tested in Congo and Sudan, NATO in Afghanistan, the EU in Kosovo, and the African Union in Somalia.
Today’s FT takes up the story:
United Nations military operations might have reached their limits, with the two largest peacekeeping operations stretched to breaking point in the past year, the organisation’s chief peacekeeper warns in a report to be published on Tuesday.
The warning from Alain Le Roy, under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, appears in a foreword to the annual peacekeeping survey of the New York-based Center on International Co-operation. It comes a year after the centre’s last review criticised the security council for authorising big new peacekeeping missions round the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors were overtaking their ability to deliver. [GOWAN INTERJECTS: I told you so!]
The UN is currently responsible for 18 peace missions worldwide that deploy 112,000 uniformed personnel at the cost of almost $8bn a year. “UN peacekeeping is now at an all-time high,” according to Mr Le Roy.
In the light of the near-collapse last October of the peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN’s largest, the security council has finally taken note. France and the UK have launched a review on how best to fix a system that one diplomat at the UN described as “breaking at the seams”.
We may yet save peacekeeping from strategic collapse. But can we save it from anonymous diplomats resorting to cliches?
