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  1. #1
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    Default Essay - UN Unable to Address Modern Conflicts

    All,

    I have got to the point (Second year, actually) where I am seeking some outside feedback with some of my University work. I've just finished putting together a draft of a short essay (I didn't realize it was short till I was WELL over the actual word limit ) which is about the ability of the United Nations to address modern conflicts.

    A lot of it has been steered by me to touch on the stuff we have been covering in lectures (Ie, New Wars Theory, types/uses of power, IR theories, etc etc).

    I am going to continue to work on this draft, but I'd like to get this one out there in the hope that some of the more knowledgeable people here can provide some feedback/thoughts on what I've done.

    I apologize for grammatical/spelling errors. As I said, nothing has been "tidied up" until I'm set with the direction of my content.

    Regards,

    Mac

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    The United Nations has had a troubled life so far. The international organisation of states was founded in 1945 as a method of facilitating cooperation between states and the advancement of international security and peace. Sixty years on the UN does not appear any closer to this goal than it did at its conception, and the United Nations has continued to become increasingly incapable of addressing modern conflicts. The post-Cold War time period has been notably difficult for the UN, with its reputation being tarnished by a number of failed peacekeeping missions. There are several reasons for this, including the UN’s inability to act as a military force; it’s bloated bureaucracy and the realist theories surrounding the relationship between states and NGOs.

    When the United Nations was founded in 1945 following the end of World War II, it was expected to herald in a new age of peace in a world which had been rocked by two devastating international conflicts. The next forty years saw an international system that was dominated by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. One of the biggest issues faced by the United Nations now, however, is that the nature of conflicts has changed drastically since the Cold War days. These so called “New Wars” are low-intensity conflicts that involve a vast range of transnational connections, non-governmental actors and new strategies of warfare (Mary Kaldor). The United Nations, founded in the age of state vs. state conventional warfare, is now faced with conflicts it was never designed to handle.

    New Wars no longer revolve around the struggle to control territory, resources and the expansion of a state’s ideology, but the struggle to control the identity of the state and its people (Mary Kaldor). The United Nations is still positioned best for “Old Wars”, and struggles to solve conflicts that have their causes rooted in deeper grievances or issues than a simple land grab. One of the most critical issues in UN peacekeeping is that there are often no long-term solutions in place by the time the peacekeeping force arrives. The UN peacekeeping solutions are often “short-term Band-Aids on deep wounds that have been festering for generations” (Armstrong). By the time a peacekeeping force has had boots on the ground long enough to truly understand the issues involved, they are almost at the end of their operational deployment. This means that there is a failure for the UN peacekeeping forces on the ground to truly understand any of the issues at stake at any level.

    It took the United Nations over thirty years of effort to even define what interstate aggression was, and even then the United Nations was sporadic at best when it came to condemning cases of aggression between states. It became accepted that the United Nations was least effective in disputes when the two belligerents were non-aligned states, where there was a high international acceptance of these conflicts to continue without external interference. Conversely, the United Nations is generally the most effective in cases where the belligerent were a Western state (The big exception being the United States) initiated a dispute with a non-aligned state. It would appear that the UN is highly selective of which cases it takes responsibility for. Some conflicts attract large amounts of attention while others are overlooked for various reasons, usually political.

    In a world dominated by “New Wars”, there is another issue the United Nations faces in addressing these conflicts. This issue is the lack of hard military power within the UN. The UN lacks the offensive power and ability of most single sovereign states, and is therefore unsuited to providing a military solution when it comes to humanitarian solution. In New Wars, which are often inter-state and ignorant of typical political boundaries and considerations in fighting conflicts, the large and slow-moving bureaucracy of the United Nations can seriously struggle to keep up with a rapidly evolving conflict. Unlike what it had faced for most of its life, the UN now faced conflicts where there were “No fronts, no campaigns, no bases, no uniforms, no publically displayed honors, no points d’appui (starting point), and no respect for the territorial limits of the state” (Van Creveld, 1991).

    During the Sierra Leone Civil War, failure on the UN’s part to act resulted in the Sierra Leonean government hiring a Private Military Company called Executive Outcomes to contain and prevent the human rights atrocities being committed by the RUF during the war. Despite it’s huge successes, Executive Outcomes was forced out of the country due to political pressure from the United Nations (A. J. Venter, War Dogs, Chapter 22: Sierra Leones Diamond War). It is worth noting that the largely successful Executive Outcomes was costing Sierra Leone (And by proxy, the International Monetary Fund) $1.8 million a month. By comparison, the failed UN Peacekeeping mission cost $51 million a month. When EO left the country, it left the largely untrained, unprepared and unwilling United Nations contingent in sole charge of the conflict. What followed was a brutal rout in which the RUF seized control of the country, humiliating the international community and the United Nations. It was not until the return of the private soldiers and the British military that the UN mission was fulfilled.

    It has been noted that “Peacekeepers are traditionally too lightly armed to outfight the combined forces of every regional warring faction in the mission area. Consequently, they exercise no real coercive or punitive power” (Armstrong). This lack of capable organic military forces within the United Nations means that the UN must rely on limited sources and applications of power to achieve its aims. In order to influence Medium, Great and even Global Powers, the UN needs to hold considerable power in many different areas. With no compulsory military power, the UN struggles to force medium or great powers to act. It must rely on it’s powers or persuasion and diplomacy, or potentially it will need another Great or Global power to act on it’s behalf in order for threats or the use of force to be effective. The “Blue Helmet” of UN troops around the world is more known for it’s symbolic and diplomatic power, rather than their military prowess.

    CONTINUED

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    Simply put, the United Nations is incapable of undertaking military action under it’s own banner as long as the contributing states can only provide poorly trained, equipped soldiers who have little understanding or direction in the conflict they are ordered to contain (A. J. Venter, War Dogs, Chapter 6: The United Nations Debacle in West Africa). Whereas past conflicts involved clear distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, the United Nations was now facing situations where there was no distinction at all, and warzones were rife with criminals, paramilitaries, terrorists and mercenaries. For an organisation consisting of states that have a history of only dealing with state vs. state issues, it is difficult to now be dealing with a number of non-state actors. Furthermore, UN forces have a history of being hamstrung by vague mission mandates and diplomatic pressures. During the 1994 UNAMIR mission in Rwanda, an understrength contingent of UN peacekeepers was unable to intervene during the genocide because of its limited jurisdiction and mandate to act. It took the UN Security Council six weeks to adopt a resolution which provided aid to the UNAMIR force, but by that stage it was too late, and a failure of the United Nations to act quickly resulted in the mass murder of up to 800,000 Rwandan people. The UN is better suited to act as a forum for international diplomacy and cooperation between states rather than as an international interventionist military force.

    It is difficult to clearly state why many states are pessimistic when it comes to dealing with the United Nations. Realists would argue that because the international system exists in a state of anarchy, then NGOs such as the UN are not to be trusted or relied upon. This would explain a lack of active involvement or trust in the United Nations, which in turn explains why the United Nations is incapable of addressing modern conflicts. Liberals would argue that the UN is in fact a competent organisation, but only with the contribution of all states, and that the only reason the UN is prone to failure is because states have not invested enough trust or resources into the United Nations for it to work properly. This is a “chicken or the egg” causality dilemma. Attempts by states to bolster or champion the United Nations as a “solution” have been troubled since the fall of the Cold War. As the United States proclaimed itself the victor, it asserted the idea that this was the UN’s opportunity to take on it’s role as the “guardian of international peace and security” with it’s plans for “An Agenda for Peace” without the traditional Soviet influence hampering efforts. To quote Chesterman, “the rhetoric was euphoric, utopian, and short”. The following two decades saw a notable increase in the number of UN peacekeeping expenses – the result was a massive financial and human expense, with very few positive results to show for it.

    The prevalence of realism and the growing mistrust in the United Nations was not helped by the obvious drawbacks in having an international collection of states needing to reach a consensus on interests before action could be taken. With the founding of the UN, there was an immediate rush by all states to push for their nationals to be awarded senior positions within the bureaucracy. It would be naïve to assume that there was ever a point in which the personnel under the UN were not subject to political factors – the Soviet Union continually accused the first Secretary General of pro-Western bias. This proved a problem in situations where the United Nations required consensus from a large proportion of its members for action to take place. It means the interests of other states can hamstring legitimate and well-intentioned actions – effectively bringing the UN down to the lowest common denominator. It has been noted that as the UN has grown so large now that achieving consensus with a number of small developing countries is particularly difficult.

    Since the end of the Cold War the United Nations has struggled to maintain it’s position as an eminent actor in the international system, mostly because of the relationship between realist states and the public attention which has been drawn towards the operational failures of the UN when it comes to addressing modern conflicts.

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    It seems a very broad topic for such a short essay. I'd suggest focusing on a single example and trying to identify the factors that prevented the UN from acting effectively. Even that would be a lot to accommodate, but it would be easier to develop a coherent argument with a tighter focus.
    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

    H.L. Mencken

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    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    On balance it is better to have the UN than not. It's efforts at peacekeeping have not all been bad, although from the essay you'd guess it was bad, bad.

    How about including references to the successes: Namibia, Mozambique, Cambodia, Cyprus and on Israel's borders?

    The UN is generally only successful in conflicts when there is a local and international agreement. The UN's mistake IMO was to try peace enforcement when only international agreement was in place, the DRC is a great example.

    You will have noted the changing composition of UN military forces too, many of the "regulars" are no longer there: Canada, Scandinavia, and even India appears to be asking itself why. The USA rarely has been a participant.
    davidbfpo

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    In addition to the points raised by Dayuhan about the scope of the essay and by davidbfpo in general I wanted to throw in some personal views:

    1) I'm in general quite sceptic about the use of a too sharp schema of "new" and "old" wars. In fact I do believe that those conflicts described as "new" types have even older roots and have ever been part of the history of humankind. Only in some parts of the world they have been overshadowed in relative recent times by the those described here as "old" wars.

    2) The UN has for obvious political and to a lesser degree legal reasons an easier time to efficiently act when there is a relative strong consensus about the problem and the mandatem, when there are distinct persons and institutions with which an effective interaction is possible. This hardly goes only for the UN or other international organisations but is in general even true in the private sector.

    3) In short having the UN is, as written before, on balance then not having it. It even can be far better under some circumstances, especially when it has a narrow mission. As the US and it's Western allies have experienced even a vast amount of ressources and direct control over efficient national means can result in little progress when the local institutions are largely ineffective and the situations chaotic.

    P.S: I do not understand the distinction between "Liberals" and "Realists". Thanks.
    ... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"

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    Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935

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