UNITED NATIONS- A BRIEF

INTRODUCTION
“The United Nations itself is but a cross section of the world’s peoples. It reflects, therefore,
the typical fears, suspicions and prejudices which bedevil human relations throughout the
world.” –Ralph Bunche

• The United Nations is actually a family of organizations, consisting of six principal organs
but also a panoply of agencies, programs, commissions, and more with a veritable alphabet
soup of acronyms.

• The United Nations family today addresses virtually every imaginable international issue,
from the major issues of international peace and security, to more specialized issues such as
improving the safety of international shipping, developing networks for meteorological
observations, raising countries’ levels of nutrition, and reducing the spread of infectious
diseases.

• At the heart of the UN is the Security Council, which is responsible for maintaining
international peace and security.

• While the Security Council receives more attention (and criticism) than other parts of the
UN, its work can be far removed from the other activities going on elsewhere within the
broader UN family.
• Given the variety of organizations and activities that the UN encompasses, it is not easy to
make blanket statements about the UN’s effectiveness or define it as either an actor or
stage.
• There is no single answer, since some parts of the UN are more effective than others, and
at different times, and the UN has acted as both actor and stage, depending on which part of
it you are looking at, which issue, and which time period.
• The UN’s parts are perhaps greater than the sum of its whole, and ultimately, need to be
analyzed separately.
• The story of the Security Council may be intertwined with that of the General Assembly,
but in the end the Security Council has much more clout in international relations than the
General Assembly.
• Laboring steadily, but out of the headlines, is the International Court of Justice, which has
become an influential actor in adjudicating disputes between mid-sized states.
• States remain the dominant actors at the UN, and their political will is the foundation upon
which the UN will succeed or fail, but civil society and private sector actors are also
becoming more visible and involved.
• As former US Ambassador to the UN Nancy Soderberg once noted, “There is no such
single thing as the UN.” It is a group of 193 member states, many of which have different
agendas, which are supported by a large body of civil servants.
BIRTH OF THE UN
• The League of Nations’ inability to forestall Japanese, Italian, and German expansionism,
and the subsequent outbreak of World War II, inspired many to begin thinking, well before
the end of World War II, about how a new organization might work better.

• President Franklin D. Roosevelt is widely seen as the driving force behind the
establishment of the UN, and by 1939, two years before the US entered World War II, the
US State Department was already developing plans for such an organization.

• Roosevelt was disillusioned with the League and felt that any successor should be designed
to reflect the realist nature of world politics.

• He envisioned an organization where the four major powers —the United States, Britain,
Soviet Union, and China—would act as “Four Policemen” to provide security for the world.

• His idea was that if an aggressive country “started to run amok and seeks to grab territory
or invade its neighbors,” a new global institution would “stop them before they got started.”

• When Roosevelt said, “An attack on one is an attack on all,” he was voicing what political
scientists call the concept of collective security, or the idea that states in a collective security
arrangement agree to respond together to an attack on one of their members in hopes that
such an arrangement will deter potential aggressors.
• British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was also very much involved in working with
Roosevelt to produce a common strategy on a postwar order.
• It was Churchill who wrote the first draft of the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, which laid out
the two leaders’ vision for a postwar order.
•One of the draft principles suggested by Churchill was the creation of an “effective
international organization.”
• Roosevelt finally agreed on a principle that called for, more broadly, “the establishment of a
wider and permanent system of general security,” linked to the belief he shared with Churchill
that “all of the nations of the world … must come to the abandonment of the use of force.”
• Five months after the Atlantic Charter was signed, 26 nations signed in Washington, DC, the
“Declaration of United Nations” to pledge unity in their war against the Axis powers.
• Roosevelt himself coined the term “United Nations,” apparently gaining Churchill’s
approval by barging into his bedroom at the White House while the Prime Minister was taking
a bath.
• Unfortunately, Roosevelt would never live to see the realization of his dream of creating a
new world body, since he died on April 12, 1945, a mere two months before the UN Charter
was approved.
• The United States played a leading role in the design and establishment of the UN.
• Six weeks after the United Nations Declaration was signed, Secretary of State Cordell Hull
created a new “Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy” that, in turn, created a
number of subcommittees to examine a host of issues.
•In June 1942, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles set up a subcommittee to focus on
international organization.
• A little known State Department official, Leo Pasvolsky, who was Hull’s personal assistant,
played a seminal role in organizing and influencing a number of draft charters, the latest of
which was the “basic frame of reference” for the negotiations of what became the UN
Charter.12.
• The main negotiations that crafted the UN Charter took place in two international
conferences that seem surprisingly long from today’s vantage point.
• The first, a conference at the Washington, DC, estate Dumbarton Oaks, began August 21,
1944, and ran for more than a month.
• The estate, bequeathed to Harvard University by a former US Ambassador to Sweden and
Argentina, was chosen because its buildings and many acres of spacious gardens offered
some escape from the harsh Washington heat and humidity. (This same Washington heat is
what drove the negotiators of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to escape
up to cooler Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, a month earlier.)
• At Dumbarton Oaks, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China
negotiated the basic framework, structure, and functions of the UN.
• The British delegation arrived a week early to work with the Americans on a common set of
ideas.
•The Soviets arrived next so the three most important Allied powers could negotiate.
• Because Roosevelt insisted that China should be included as a great power, the Chinese met
with the Americans and British after the Soviets left.
• According to David L. Bosco, the British and Soviet diplomats did not take seriously the
idea of China as a great power, given the precarious position of its leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
• As British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, put It: “ We in the Foreign Office generally, I think,
never thought that China had any chance of being a real world power for a very long time …
but we had to imagine that it was a world power in order to please President Roosevelt.”
• One reason the conference ran so long is the number of important issues that were difficult
to resolve, usually pitting the Soviets against the Americans and British.
• In fact, a number of issues were not resolved at Dumbarton Oaks, including the absolute
veto, who would be invited to join the United Nations, and the role of the General Assembly.
• The following year representatives of 46 governments met in San Francisco for nine weeks,
from late April to late June, to finish negotiating, and then ratifying the UN Charter.
• Notably excluded were delegates from the Axis countries—Germany, Japan, and Italy. The
conference was enormous, as Stephen C. Schlesinger described it, with: “a fluctuating
populace of some 5,000 people. … There were some 850 delegates and advisors; 2,600 media;
over 1,000 workers at the UN Secretariat; 300 or so security people; 120 interpreters
translating the five main languages—English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese; 37
foreign ministers; and 5 prime ministers. Untold numbers of local San Franciscans also
attended sessions”
• The three biggest powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had
the most clout in shaping the outcome.
• That outcome was by no means certain, given that there were plenty of debates and obstacles
along the path to the Charter.
• Despite the challenges, in the midst of the negotiating there was still great hope that a new
organization could be created that might possibly be able to end future wars.
• It is hard to imagine today how great these hopes were at the time, as the incredibly
devastating war in Europe was winding down, with an official end on May 8, while Japan had
not yet surrendered (and would do so on August 15).
•The Charter was signed with great fanfare on June 26, 1945, by 50 governments (as four more
were added to the official roster before the end) and entered into force on October 24, a day still
celebrated each year as UN Day.
• Instead of following the usual method of voting by hand, Lord Halifax, who presided over the
plenary session, asked delegates to vote by standing given “the world importance of the vote.”
• As the delegates stood, the audience of more than 3,000 “jumped to its feet to cheer and
applaud for a full minute.”
•“The Charter,” said The New York Times, “was a gift to a world ravaged by war.”
•The actual signing of the documents had to be delayed until the following morning, since the
task of printing enough copies of the Charter and its related documents in the five official
languages of the conference was too much for San Francisco’s printing shops to manage.
• Although Roosevelt had earlier thought the UN might be located in different places—with
the Security Council on an island, such as the Azores, or Hawaii, and the General Assembly
held around the world at different times, the UN’s General Assembly at its first session in
February 1946 (in London) voted to locate the UN’s headquarters near New York City.
• No one anticipated that appropriate space could be found in crowded Manhattan, but a gift
of $8.5 million by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., made possible the purchase of an area populated
by slaughterhouses and light industry.
• The US Government then approved a $65 million interest free loan for building construction
(which was not fully repaid until 1982), and the four, interconnected main buildings were
completed by 1950.
• The headquarters are considered to be international, and not US, territory.

• MAJOR DATES SURROUNDING THE BIRTH OF THE UNITED NATIONS

• September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland, starting WWII in Europe December 8, 1941,
• United States enters WWII after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor on December 7
• June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion opens second front in Europe
• January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp liberated by Soviet Red Army
• May 8, 1945, VE ( Victory in Europe )Day
• June 25, 1945, UN Charter approved, San Francisco
• August 15, 1945, VJ (Victory over Japan)Day
• October 24, 1945, UN Charter becomes effective
THE UN CHARTER AND MAIN ORGANS
• The UN Charter is an international treaty that is the UN’s constituting agreement.
• It establishes the various organs of the UN, lays out how they will operate, and also sets out
the duties and rights of member states.
• The main purposes of the UN are set out in Article 1:
• “to maintain international peace and security”;
• “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal
rights and self-determination of peoples”;
• “to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic,
social, cultural, and humanitarian character,
• and … [promote and encourage] respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for
all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”;
• and “to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in attaining these common ends.

• The signatories agreed to the following principles:

• “the UN is based on the sovereign equality of all its members”;
• that members will settle international disputes “by peaceful means and without endangering
international peace and security and justice”;
• that members “are to refrain from the threat or use of force against any other state”;
• and that “nothing in the Charter is to authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters
which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”
The United Nations consists of six major organs:
• The Security Council
• The General Assembly
• The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
• The Secretariat
• The International Court of Justice (ICJ)
• The Trusteeship Council
The Security Council
• The Security Council is the realist heart of an organization with a liberal mission.
• It is in the Security Council where the five most powerful countries after WWII—
Roosevelt’s Four Policemen, plus France, have the right to veto any proposed resolution,
which gives them more power than any other members.
• Without this veto power, the form of which was debated at great length at Dumbarton Oaks
and in San Francisco, the powerful states would never have agreed to create the United
Nations.
• After such a terrible war against fascism, the negotiators realized how important it was to
pool state power to help manage global problems.
• As Thomas Weiss, David Forsythe, and Roger Coate put it, “This was hardly wild-eyed
idealism run amok.”
• This right for five major countries to veto is one of the main design features that distinguish
the UN’s Security Council from the League’s—for the League’s Council and Assembly most
decisions required a unanimous vote, which essentially meant that any country could veto.
• As to the composition of the Security Council, France was added since it was the most
powerful country in continental Europe after Germany was defeated.
• China was soon overwhelmed by political upheaval, given the 1949 Communist revolution
and takeover.
• The Republic of China (Taiwan) managed to hang onto its seat until 1971, when the
communist People’s Republic secured it.
• Upon the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Russia inherited the old Soviet seat. The
permanent five, known as P-5, were joined at first, by six, and by 1966, ten, additional
nonpermanent members that rotate every two years, and are chosen along geographical lines.
• Each member of the Security Council has one vote, and most resolutions require nine
affirmative votes and no veto.
• The Security Council can meet at any time, and as a result, each member always has a
representative at UN headquarters.
• If a complaint about a threat to peace is brought befor it, the Security Council has a number
of options for responding.
• It will usually begin by bringing the parties involved together to try and reach a peaceful
agreement.
• It can also propose principles for dispute resolution, or mediate the dispute itself.
• It can request that the Secretary-General try to help the parties reach a peaceful agreement.
• In all of the above examples, it is playing an advisory or moderating role.
•These are laid out in Chapter VI of the Charter, titled “the Pacific Settlement of Disputes.”
• What gives the Security Council some teeth is Chapter VII, which allows it to use coercive power to
enforce peace.
• Under Chapter VII, the Security Council may call upon UN members to sanction the offending state
through economic sanctions or by completely or partially interrupting transportation linkages and
communication linkages, as well as cutting off diplomatic relations.
• If these actions don’t work, Article 52 allows the Security Council to “take such action by air, sea,
or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
• These latter actions can include “demonstrations, blockades, and other operations by air, sea, or land
forces of the Members of the United Nations.”
• While the Security Council therefore has a number of tools it can use to try to prevent, reduce, or
end conflict, and to keep the peace once conflict has ended, perhaps the most
visible activity that takes place under its auspices is peacekeeping.
• UN peacekeepers, or“Blue Helmets” as they are often called (because they wear light blue helmets
and berets), were first used in 1948 to supervise the truce between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and
in fact this group—the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO)—remains in the
region today.
• Peacekeeping has grown rapidly since the end of the Cold War, with over 50 new missions
deployed, compared with only 13 during the UN’s first 40 years.
• But while peacekeeping operations are central to the Security Council’s efforts to secure
international peace, the term peacekeeping is not mentioned at all in the UN’s Charter.
• Former UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld famously referred to peacekeeping as “Chapter
six and a half,” of the UN’s Charter, since it takes place in the grey area between the mediation and
fact-finding actions called for in Chapter VI, and the embargoes and military interventions referred to
in Chapter VII.
The General Assembly
• The UN’s General Assembly (GA) is the one place on Earth where the world’s governments
can all meet together to deliberate, and where each member has one vote.
• Every September, shortly after the GA begins its official year, a large number of heads of
state flock to New York to address it.
• The GA has a number of responsibilities and activities:
• it can bring issues to the attention of the Security Council;
• it can often make recommendations to UN member states and the Security Council (SC);
• it can initiate studies that seek to promote international cooperation in a variety of fields;
• it approves the UN’s budget;
• it elects the rotating members of the Security Council;
• and together with the Security Council, it elects the International Court of Justice’s judges
and appoints the UN’s Secretary-General.
• A two-thirds majority of member states present and voting is necessary for decisions on
important issues, including the admission of new members, the budget, and issues related to
peace and security.
• Other decisions require a simple majority.
• Given that the tiny Seychelles Islands (population of around 90,000) has the same one vote
as the United States, it should be no surprise that the GA is hardly considered to be powerful
component of the UN.
• Indeed, its resolutions are not legally binding, and therefore, the GA’s importance lies in
raising global consciousness on particular issues, and expressing the general opinion of the
“world community.”
• Many people recognize the importance of having such a forum for states to discuss virtually
any issue related to international peace and security.
• Supporters of the GA hope that one day it will evolve into a global parliament, while others
argue that such a progressive outcome is unlikely.
•The GA was given a somewhat larger role in the big issue of maintaining international peace
and security in its November 3, 1950, resolution, “Uniting for Peace.”
• Under this resolution, if the Security Council failed to act (i.e., because one of the P-5 used
its veto), but a majority of its members wanted to act, the GA could consider an act of
aggression or other breach of peace and directly make recommendations to member states on
ways of restoring peace.
• This resolution was sponsored by the United States and six other countries as a way to get
around the Soviet veto during the Korean War.
• It was first officially used twice in the beginning of November 1956, a harrowing week
where the Security Council was stymied in attempting to respond to the Israeli-Franco British
attacks on Egypt and occupation of the Suez Canal (in response to Egypt’s nationalization of
the strategically important canal) and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
• In the first case, the “Uniting for Peace” resolution was used not to get around a Soviet
veto, but rather a French and British veto of a United States/Soviet Union-sponsored
resolution calling for an Israeli-Egyptian ceasefire.
• The General Assembly held an emergency session November 2 to pass a resolution calling
for “all parties” involved in the hostilities “to agree to an immediate ceasefire” and to halt
“the movement of military forces and arms into the area.”
• A withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli troops occurred soon after, facilitated by the
first deployment of what became known as UN “peacekeepers” to separate the warring forces
and create a buffer zone between Israel and Egypt.
• Two days later on November 4, after the Soviets vetoed a United States’ Security Council
resolution deploring the use of force in Hungary (in a 5 a.m. session), another special session
of the Assembly was convened, and the Assembly promptly called on the Soviet government
to withdraw its forces from Hungary “without delay.”
• This was in response to Soviet forces invading Budapest and other parts of Hungary earlier
that day to crush a nationwide revolt against the Soviet-supported government and policies.
• While the General Assembly was respected and taken seriously in these heady early years,
over the decades its influence has waned.
• Granted, its ability to speak up on international issues gives it a voice on the global stage,
but more recently the General Assembly has been criticized for an “inability to break from a
mind-numbing routine of adopting resolutions on nearly all of the more than 150 items on its
agenda each year,” which only serves to deepen “its obscurity.”
• It is often criticized for being overly bureaucratic and inefficient in its desire to be fair and
inclusive.
•Its president is elected each year at the beginning of the new session, which means there is no
continuity in leadership.
•And under the president, there are a whopping twenty-one vice presidents and six main
committees.
• The General Assembly’s culture favors consensus, which is difficult to achieve, given that
each of the United Nation’s 193 members has a seat at the table.
• Former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in his seminal 2005 report, In Larger Freedom,
recognized that UN member states were concerned about the General Assembly’s declining
prestige and contributions. Its goal of achieving consensus on a growing number of
resolutions “ has not proved an effective way of reconciling the interests of Member States.
Rather, it prompts the Assembly to retreat into generalities, abandoning any serious effort to
take action. Such real debates … tend to focus on process rather than substance and many so-
called decisions simply reflect the lowest common denominator of widely held opinions.”
• The solution he called for was for the General Assembly to narrow its agenda, procedures, and
committee structures, to “concentrate on the major substantive issues of the day.”
• The political will, he argued, needed to come from member states.
• These suggestions have not been acted upon.
•The agenda for the 69th session of the General Assembly in 2014, for example, included over
170 topics that addressed virtually every imaginable international issue, including “harmony with
nature,” “international strategy for disaster reduction,” “globalization and interdependence,”
“sport for development and peace,” “effects of atomic radiation,” and “the role of diamonds in
fuelling conflict,” among others.
The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
• The Economic and Social Council, known as ECOSOC, was set up by the UN Charter to take
the lead on discussing, studying, and researching issues that went beyond security—or
“international economic, social, cultural, educational, health, and related matters.”
• It can make recommendations on these issues as well as “promoting respect for, and observance
of, human rights,” to the General Assembly, the UN’s specialized agencies, and individual
member states.
• It is also able to compose draft conventions or call for and prepare international conferences.
•Finally, it receives reports from the UN’s eleven funds and programs, and acts to coordinate their
work, although it does not control them.
•Today, ECOSOC consists of 54 member states, with overlapping three-year terms that are elected
by the General Assembly with seats divvied up by region.
• It holds its main four-week session in July, alternating between Geneva and New York.
• ECOSOC is essentially a deliberative forum, which gives it the ability to discuss, research,
initiate, and deepen dialogue with a variety of actors, including civil society and academics,
but no power.

• It makes suggestions, issues recommendations, manifestos, and declarations.

• Unsurprisingly, it has a reputation of lacking a clear public profile and being largely
irrelevant.

• It may also be the case that ECOSOC is under-appreciated.

• Some of its functions are no doubt useful, but they generally occur behind the scenes.

• For example, it is the main UN body that negotiates the agreements governing the ways
NGOs can interact with the UN.

• Today there are over 4,000 NGOs with consultative status with ECOSOC, which gives the
NGOs the ability to participate in a variety of ECOSOC and other UN meetings, and to make
statements and present reports.
The Secretariat; Secretary-General
• The Secretariat consists of the international civil servants working at the United Nations,
which today totals over 43,000 people from 186 different countries.
• These are the people who administer the UN’s peacekeeping operations, prepare studies on
a variety of issues, translate documents, organize conferences, and work with the
international media, among other things.
• They work in departments/offices, on regional commissions, tribunals, or in field
operations.
• The largest single number (over 6,000) is based on New York.
•The second and third top locations are Sudan and Switzerland.
• The UN staff, as international civil servants, take an oath that says they do “not seek or
receive instructions from any Government or any other authority,” outside the UN.
• Heading the Secretariat is the UN’s Secretary-General (SG).
• This position is described very simply in the UN’s charter, as the organization’s “chief
administrative officer” (Article 97).
• The SG’s official duties are to run the organization; to carry out unspecified “functions”
entrusted to him by the Security Council, General Assembly, Trusteeship Council, and
ECOSOC (Article 98); and to bring to the Security Council’s attention any matter which “in
his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security” (Article
99).
• Scholars and practitioners agree that the SG’s job is complex and extremely demanding,
with the SG facing high international expectations.
• As longtime UN official Shashi Tharoor said,
“ Over the years, observers have both granted various attributes to the Secretary- General and
challenged his fulfillment of them. He has been variously described as the personification of the
collective interests of humanity, the custodian of the aspirations of the Charter, the guardian of the
world’s conscience (if not the symbol of the conscience itself), and more prosaically as the globe’s
chief diplomat and its premier civil servant.”
• The first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, told his successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, it was “the most
impossible job on this earth.”
• One reason this was the case was that the advent of the Cold War sidetracked the UN from
visions of global importance, as Brian Urquhart noted “the new organization became occupied
with preventing a cataclysmic nuclear confrontation between its key members.”
• It did this by trying to address regional conflicts that could blow up into dangerous US-Soviet
confrontations.
• A key side effect was that the Cold War forced the UN to improvise ways to maintaining
international peace and security that resulted in expanding the secretary-general’s role.
• Hammarskjöld, who had been Sweden’s deputy foreign affairs minister, was only 45 when he
took the post. Urquhart, who was Under-Secretary-General of the UN from 1972– 1986, praised
Hammarskjöld for being an unusually skilled diplomat with a keen intellect, who was able to
diffuse superpower tensions more than once.
• His efforts helped to expand the SG’s position beyond its administrative mission to a more
flexible diplomatic one, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961.
•Hammarskjöld’s work, in the end, cost him his life; he was killed in a suspicious September
1961 plane crash, on his way to peace talks in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to end a
messy conflict that included fighting between secessionist forces and UN troops in the former
Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

• The end of the Cold War put a new set of demands on the SG, as intrastate conflict
escalated, severely straining UN peacekeeping abilities.
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian scholar-diplomat, faced the debacles of peacekeeping
in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.
• He was known as a brilliant intellectual with an authoritarian leadership style, who often
spoke his mind to member states and the press in ways that sometimes got him into trouble.
• He also had a tense relationship with the United States (particularly its permanent
representative, Madeleine Albright), which ultimately resulted in the United States making
clear it would refuse his bid for a second term.
• Kofi Annan, in turn, is often likened to Hammarskjöld in terms of his negotiating skills
(and like his predecessor, Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—in 2001).
• He was the first SG to emerge from the UN bureaucracy, after a 30-year career through the
ranks.
•He was the head of UN peacekeeping during the “two defining genocidal crimes of the
second half of the twentieth century,” Rwanda and Srebrenica.
• But despite these failures and others while he was SG, Annan was known as affable, calm,
and possessing a certain moral authority.
• As SG, he ran into trouble with the United States over its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which
Annan said was illegal from the “Charter point of view.” (Annan also joked that the
acronym, SG, stood for “scape goat.”)
• During his tenure, Annan also had to cope with some damaging UN reports that found
“widespread” evidence that UN peacekeepers and staff had sexually abused or exploited war
refugees in West Africa, and in individual countries such as the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
• Finally, in 2004, the UN was also charged with mismanagement in the UN oil-for-food
program in Iraq, which in the end almost ended his leadership of the UN.
• The program started up in 1996 to allow proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil to be used to
help buy food and other necessities for Iraqi citizens who were hurt by international
sanctions.
•Instead, Saddam Hussein figured out how to use the program to receive over $1 billion in
kickbacks from companies getting lucrative contracts, while smuggling over $10 billion in oil
into Iraq.
• An independent inquiry charged by Annan and the Security Council to review management
of this program also found plenty of evidence of mismanagement and unethical conduct.
•When Ban Ki-moon took over the Secretary-General position in 2007, he acknowledged that
the institution was under the strain of scandal and criticism of weak management:
“You could say that I am a man on a mission, and my mission could be dubbed ‘Operation
Restore Trust,’” he said, “I hope this mission is not ‘Mission: Impossible.’”
• Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, has a quiet leadership style, which initially
generated criticism that he was making changes to the UN bureaucracy without sufficient
transparency or consultation.
• His priorities have included increasing awareness of climate change as a major global
problem; consolidating the UN’s work with women into a new agency, UN Women; creating a
mediation support unit for peacekeeping conflicts; strengthening the UN’s response to major
disasters and crises, like the devastating cyclone in Myanmar (2008), the earthquake in Haiti
(2010), the flooding in Pakistan (2010), and the exodus of refugees from Syria (2015); and
improving the UN’s ability to act quickly to safeguard human rights.
• He has also been keen to strengthen UN peacekeeping, especially by prioritizing prevention
and mediation, making missions more responsive and ending the problem of peackeepers
engaging in sexual abuse and exploitation.
• Perhaps the greatest challenge facing a UN Secretary-General is how to maneuver between
being an independent voice and diplomat and being an agent of the states that appoint
him/ her.
• As Simon Chesterman noted, unsurprisingly, member states are “most enthusiastic about the
independence of the Secretary-General … when his decisions have coincided with their
national interests.”
• Secretary-Generals have used what wiggle room they have in a variety of ways.
• In addition to negotiating an end to conflict, they also may mobilize international support for
a variety of issues; and they may suggest normative changes in how states think about
maintaining peace and security.
• For example, Annan played a leading role in pushing states to embrace a norm of
responsibility to protect people against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against
humanity, and that norm has certainly spread over time, even if it is not always followed.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ)
• The International Court of Justice (also known as the ICJ or the World Court) is the UN’s
main judicial body and is based in The Hague, Netherlands.
• It is the only one of the UN’s six main organs that is not located in New York City.
• The ICJ has two primary duties: to settle disputes between member states and to offer
advisory opinions to the UN and its specialized agencies.
• In a way, it embodies a revolutionary idea in a world of realpolitik— that states with a
dispute can go to a “neutral” body to adjudicate.
• Many people mistakenly assume that the ICJ can try individuals, but it cannot.
• Also, states, and not individuals, bring cases to the ICJ.
• Rulings are made by the 15 judges who are elected by the General Assembly and the
Security Council for 9-year terms.
• Judges are distributed by region, and must be “persons of high moral character,” widely
recognized as experts in international law or as qualified to be appointed to their own
country’s “highest judicial offices.”
• The judges make a declaration in the court that they do not represent any country, but rather
will act “impartially and conscientiously.”
• Only states that are members of the UN (and/or are parties to the Court’s Statute) can bring
cases to the Court; it is therefore not open to cases from individuals or private institutions or
other international institutions.
• (This is in contrast, for example, to the relatively new International Criminal Court, which
was created in 1998 to punish individuals guilty of crimes against humanity.)
• The ICJ had its roots in the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), which was
set up in 1920 under the old League of Nations along similar lines as the ICJ.
• The ICJ essentially replaced the PCIJ, incorporating the latter’s doctrine, procedures, even
staff, but it is also different in several ways.
• One is that while the PCIJ was a parallel institution to the League, the ICJ has equal
standing to the Security Council, General Assembly, and other primary UN bodies.
• Second, Axis countries and their allies, who were not invited to join the UN, were also not
invited to be members of the new court.
• When the new court was created, the old one was formally dissolved, and its archives were
handed over to the new ICJ, which was located in the same Peace Palace in The Hague.
• In another sign of continuity, the last president of the PCIJ, Judge José Gustavo Guerrero
(El Salvador), was elected as the first president of the ICJ in April 1946.
• In adjudicating disputes, the court uses several sources of international law, including
treaties, international custom, general legal principles, and judicial decisions or teachings of
well-known legal scholars.
•If the parties agree (and none have done so to date), the ICJ can even make a decision ex
aequo et bono, which means based on what is considered to be fair and equitable, rather
than existing international law.
• Throughout most of its life, the ICJ has not been at the forefront of solving interstate
disputes.
• ICJ judgments were certainly not requested in most of the serious conflicts that came
before the UN during the Cold War, including Korea and Vietnam.
• Powerful states prefer to solve their problems on their own, and not entrust them to a body
of impartial third parties.
• In fact, during the Cold War, the Court sometimes had little in its docket.
• In the 44 years between 1947 and 1991, the Court had 66 contentious cases, or an average
of 0.6 a year.
• It also had 22 advisory cases. Between 1963 and 1966, it did not take on any new cases.
• Since the end of the Cold War, the ICJ’s caseload has increased but not to impressive
heights; between 1992 and 2014 it considered 68 contentious cases, or an average of 3 a
year.
• One reason behind the Court’s light docket is that under international law, there is no
compulsory jurisdiction.
• That means that here is nothing to force a state to be part of a case at the court.
• That being said, if a state agrees to submit a case, then under the ICJ’s rules, that state has
to abide by the Court’s decision.
•Nonetheless, the Court has no way to enforce compliance.
• The ICJ’s statute tried to get around the problem of lack of compulsory jurisdiction through Article
36, paragraph 2, known as the optional clause.
• It says that states can declare in advance that they accept compulsory jurisdiction.
•Ideally, this makes it harder for states to cherry pick the cases they will accept (i.e., never accepting
cases where they are the defendant).
• To date, however, only 72 states out of the UN’s 193 members have accepted this clause.
• Some states that accepted the clause in the past set time limits on their acceptance, which have
since lapsed or been terminated.
• Today, only one member of the P-5 that accepts the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction is the United
Kingdom; the United States and France had accepted the clause in the past, but
subsequently withdrew, and China and Russia have never agreed to it.
• States have, however, indirectly agreed to accept the Court’s jurisdiction when they sign treaties
that contain clauses that say disputes will be submitted to the Court.
•Several hundred of such treaties exist today.
• When a case comes before the Court, the state submitting the case is called the “applicant” and the
other state is the “respondent.”
• There is a written stage (which can range from months to several years) and an oral stage (which
can last up to six weeks), the latter of which usually takes place in the Court’s Great Hall of Justice
in the Peace Palace.
• The judges’ deliberations are secret, but their final judgment is issued in public.
• States do not have the possibility of appeal.
• Many of the Court’s cases have involved disputes over land or maritime boundaries, but it
has also ruled a variety of issues that include disputes over dam projects, international criminal law,
and military activities.
• The number of these cases has picked up since the end of the Cold War, in part because
such disputes between developing nations can no longer quickly escalate up to a superpower
confrontation.
• In other words, the removal of the lid of superpower rivalry has allowed long simmering
disputes between smaller countries to bubble up to the surface.
• Since the end of the Cold War, the Court has become a key institution for solving border
and boundary disputes, mostly between developing countries.
• Examples include the land and maritime boundary between Cameroon and Nigeria, the
ownership of islands between Bahrain and Qatar, and the ownership of islands between
Benin and Niger.
• But big states are involved, too, and sometimes bring cases against each other.
• One example is Germany vs. the United States (2001), where Germany wanted to overturn a
capital punishment conviction of two German brothers sentenced to death in Arizona for
stabbing a man to death in 1982 in a failed bank robbery.
Trusteeship Council
• The Trusteeship Council is somewhat of an oddity, because since November 1994, it only
exists on paper, mainly because it completed its job.
• In fact, this is a rare instance of an international institution fulfilling its mission and going
out of business.
• The Trusteeship Council’s job was to administer “Trust Territories” placed under its care,
and to help these territories move toward self-government or independence.
•The Trust Territories were territories (mainly colonies) “detached from enemy states”
following WWII, or “held under mandate,” since the League of Nations era.
•There were 11 such territories.
• The last one was the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), which became
independent in 1994.
• One reason the Trusteeship Council still exists is because removing it requires amending
the UN Charter to delete Chapter XIII, which lays out the Trusteeship’s role.
• Moves to amend the Charter, in turn, quickly get bogged down by contentious politics,
since there are many other aspects of the Charter that some states would like to see changed,
and others would like to see remain the same.
• It is also worth pointing out that the activities undertaken by the Trusteeship Council still
exist, but not under its auspices.
• For example, the UN was involved in administrative functions in Cambodia and Somalia in
the early and mid-1990s, respectively, in East Timor (1999–2002) and in Kosovo, since 1999.
THE LARGER UN FAMILY
• Beyond the UN’s six main organs is a rich panoply of agencies, programs, funds, and other
organizations, some of which predate the UN itself.
• Some of these are well known, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), one of the
specialized agencies; United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and UN Environment
Programme (UNEP).
• Others do important work, but rarely make it to the headlines, such as the International
Maritime Organization (IMO).
•These various other bodies are involved in just about every imaginable issue area in international
politics, including human rights, humanitarian aid, women and children, nutrition, minorities and
indigenous people, sustainable development, agriculture, and the prevention of terrorism and
organized crime, among others.
• They have a wide range of tasks as well, which include bringing states together to recognize
issues and sign treaties; monitoring compliance of treaties; education; distributing specific forms of
aid (vaccines, seeds, blankets, shelter, food); training; coordinating other states and non-state
actors; developing standards and formulating rules on specific issues; gathering, disseminating, and
manipulating information; and building networks in specific issue areas.
• Their activities may be judged individually, given that each body has its own history, rules,
management, and so on; but they may also be evaluated by issue area, since often multiple UN
bodies are working on the same area and have different degrees of success at coordinating their
activities.
•There is a rich literature, for example, describing and evaluating the UN’s activities in human
rights, the environment and sustainable development, and global health.
UN EVOLUTION
• The Cold War began soon after the UN was created, and it lasted for 40 years, from the late
1940s until the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.
•The Four Policemen that Roosevelt envisioned would maintain international peace and
security were replaced by two superpowers, armed with nuclear weapons, facing each other
with suspicion in a newly bipolar system.
• The Soviets used their veto power regularly against other members of the Security Council
in the early years, often to kill proposed membership from other countries, including Ireland,
Italy, Nepal, Libya, Spain, and Jordan, since the United States would not approve the Soviet
republics’ separate memberships.
• The Soviets wielded their veto 71 times in the UN’s first decade, for example, compared
with France (3), China (1), the UK (2), and the United States (0).
• The United States did not wield its veto until 1970, highlighting that it was comfortable
with the Council’s direction during the earlier period.
• While Cold War tensions shrunk the UN’s ability to be a major power in the world, its role
was far from unimportant.
•For example, the UN acted as a safety valve when it kept regional conflicts from exploding
into broader and more dangerous East-West confrontations.
•This was important in parts of the Middle East, Cyprus, and Africa.
•There were several important peacekeeping initiatives during the Cold War, including the
disastrous example in the former Belgian Congo between 1960 and 1964.
• The Republic of Congo declared independence on June 30, 1960, after which its former
colonial power, Belgium, launched a military intervention.
• UN peacekeepers were to help facilitate the withdrawal of the Belgian troops, to help set up
the post-colonial government, and to maintain Congo’s political independence.
• Around 20,000 peacekeepers were there at the peak of the operation.
• Meanwhile, the rich Katango province seceded, and the superpowers lined up on opposite
sides of the domestic political conflict. (The Soviets supported the prime minister, and the
West and UN supported the president, and at one point the president and prime minister fired
each other before the prime minister was murdered.)
• At some point government infrastructure collapsed and no one was the authority. This case
was infamous because the UN was embroiled in a domestic conflict, and it ended up not
being neutral. This is also where Dag Hammarskjöld lost his life.
• And, while the UN was not able to act decisively in many serious Cold War matters, it did
give states a way to protest loudly to show their indignation.
• One example was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
• While the United States was not willing to intervene directly, it made its displeasure known
in the Security Council, where its ambassador called the invasion “an affront to all civilized
sensibilities.”
• Finally, the UN actively encouraged decolonization (supported by the United States),
which in turn contributed to the rapid growth of newly independent countries as members of
the United Nations after India’s independence in 1947.
• UN membership jumped from 51 countries in 1945 to 144 by 1975, with the biggest
increase taking place in Africa, where membership jumped from 3 to 47 countries.
• One unintended consequence of this growth in membership, from the view of the United
States, was that the General Assembly went from being dominated by Western opinion
comfortably beyond the Soviet veto (or being what John Foster Dulles called the “town
meetings of the world,” that “served to enlighten world opinion about the nature of Soviet
leadership”) to a body that began to challenge American views and interests.
• By the 1960s, the developing world had achieved an automatic majority in the General
Assembly, and was not shy to use it.
•The developing world often voted along with the Soviet bloc and against the wishes of the
United States.
•As Edward Luck put it, “Ironically, by getting its way in supporting the decolonization
struggle, the United States helped to transform the General Assembly into a far more diverse
and contentious place.
• The result was that US policymakers became alienated from the General Assembly.
•In 1971, the General Assembly voted to have Beijing take the place of Taipei in the Chinese
seat on the Security Council (and several delegates danced in the General Assembly’s aisles
to celebrate the vote).
• This move put two Communist powers among the P-5, and removed a US ally.
• US President Gerald Ford, in a 1974 speech to the General Assembly, reminded its
representatives to be “alert to the danger of the ‘tyranny of the majority.’”
•The following year, the General Assembly stepped up the heat in criticizing Israel, by passing
a resolution equating Zionism with racism.
•This move angered US policymakers and resulted in both the Senate and House passing
resolutions to reassess the United States’ continuing participation in the General Assembly.
• The US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously responded that the United States
“does not acknowledge, it will not abide by it, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act,”
which he said gave anti-Semitism “the appearance of international sanction.”
• While the United States remained in the General Assembly, it did pull out of the
International Labour Organization in 1977, accusing it of being too politicized (among other
things, it had granted observer status to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which the
United States accused of being a terrorist group).
•The United States and Great Britain also pulled out of UNESCO in the 1980s for similar
reasons.
POST-COLD WAR AND BEYOND
• The end of the Cold War, and years leading up to it, saw a dramatic change in the role of
the UN as a more prominent actor in global governance.
• The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is widely credited with initiating a dramatic thaw in
the Security Council relations, by calling on the UN to play a more prominent role in world
politics in 1987.
• Cooperation between the superpowers and other members of the Security Council further
deepened in 1990 and 1991 as the diplomatic process aimed at getting Iraq out of Kuwait
(after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion) led to Security Council approval of the use of force
against Iraq.
•The resulting, successful, campaign against Iraq was led by the United States, with a
number of other countries, such as Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, also contributing
troops.
• According to one UN observer, this was a period of “euphoria” in the Security Council, as
a number of complex UN peace operations were launched in places like Cambodia,
Namibia, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.
• Indeed, UN peacekeeping activities expanded dramatically between 1988 and 1994, with
more than 20 new operations approved in a six-year period, compared with 13 in the forty
years between the UN’s birth and 1988.
•The number of peacekeepers rose from 11,000 to 75,000.
• In the decades since the Cold War ended, the UN’s activities have continued to expand and deepen
in areas such as the global environment, development, health, and human rights, among others.
• This has happened along with growing understanding that the UN’s central mandate of promoting
international peace and security intersects with issues such as poverty reduction and human rights.
• The UN popularized the term human security in the early 1990s to highlight the fact that individual
security goes beyond the absence of conflict.
• As Boutros Boutros-Ghali noted in An Agenda for Peace, “a porous ozone shield could pose a
greater threat to an exposed population than a hostile army. Drought and disease can decimate no
less mercilessly than the weapons of war.”
• In the area of environment, for example, the UN hosted treaty-making conferences on issues that
include sustainable development, climate change, ozone depletion, biodiversity,
and dangerous chemicals. There is great variation in the success of these treaties, with UN efforts on
ozone depletion among the more successful and efforts on biodiversity much less so.
• The UN has played a leadership role in organizing science and negotiations around climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, is a scientific body that brings
together research on climate change related issues, including its impact and policy options for
addressing its consequences.
• It shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore. Bodies of the UN
that work on global environmental issues include UNEP, World Meteorological Organization, Food
and Agriculture Organization, and UN Development Programme (UNDP).
•The UN’s activities in the area of development are equally extensive.
• The UN launched the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 as a way for
relevant countries and donor organizations to cooperate to tackle eight major development
goals with 18 specific targets by the end of 2015, including the eradication of extreme
poverty and hunger, the reduction in child mortality, improvements in maternal health, and
the promotion of sustainable development.
• It is true that there have been improvements in some of the issue areas and in some parts of
the world.
•The world met the goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty
(compared with the baseline year of 1990), and it also reached the goal of halving the
number of people who lack access to reliable sources of clean water.
•There have also been sharp declines in the rates of maternal and infant mortality and more
people have access to water and better sanitation services.
•But other goals were not met, sometimes because they were unrealistic.
• For example, Goal 2 was to achieve universal primary education. Around 10 percent of
children still remain out of school, although that percentage has been shrinking over the past
15 years.
• UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted that even where the MDGs have been
successful progress has been uneven with “the poorest of the poor” still left behind.79 The
most progress occurred in Asia, and the least in sub-Saharan Africa.
• But even inside individual countries and regions, trends were often uneven.
•After three years of negotiations, UN member states agreed in August 2015 on a new set of
ambitious goals, called the Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the MDGs and run
to 2030.
•There are 17 goals, with 169 targets.
• The new goals, adopted by world leaders in a September 2015 Sustainable Development
Summit at the United Nations, also are aimed at eradicating poverty.
•But they are also more explicit about bringing in the economic, social, and environmental
dimensions of sustainable development.
UN AND HUMAN RIGHTS
• The area of human rights has seen a great deal of evolution over the years. The term human
rights is built into the UN Charter, which makes seven different references to human rights
as a basic purpose of the organization.
• That said, the Charter did not define human rights.
• It just noted that states should respect them and that the UN should promote and encourage
them.
• There is no language that the UN should protect them.
• Given that Article II of Chapter 1 states that the UN should not meddle in any member’s
domestic affairs, the role of the UN in helping to spread human rights norms has been an
important one.
• Human rights, as the UN defines them today, are rights inherent to all human beings,
whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion,
language, or any other status.
•We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination.
•These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.
• As scholars Weiss, Forsythe, Coate, and Kelly-Kate Pease have noted, the UN has been at
the center of the development of human rights law.
• One of the foundational documents was the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights,
which as a declaration was not a binding treaty.
•This was the first attempt by states to specify what the Charter meant by human rights.
•Its 30 principles were a mix of those important to both democratic/capitalist and Marxist
ideals, and reflected an incredible level of compromise in the negotiation
process.
•The Soviet Union pushed for the abolition of the death penalty, designed to annoy the United
States, especially as Stalin was slaughtering civilians at the same time. (In the end, the Soviets
abstained.)
•Saudi Arabia was not comfortable with the “religious freedom” clause, and South Africa,
heading into a system of apartheid, was not happy about Article 21 (1) “Everyone has the right
to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.”
• The negative rights were actions that a government should not take against a person.
• Governments should allow freedom of speech, freedom from slavery, freedom from torture.
• Positive rights were actions that a government is obligated to provide a person.
•These I nclude the right to food, clothing, and housing, and the right to rest and leisure.
• Another way to view the negative and positive rights is to see them in terms of government
obligations: what governments are obligated not to do, and obligated to do.
•Soon after the Declaration was signed, members moved to build the principles into legally
binding treaties.
•Today there are over 25 UN human rights conventions, which include treaties on the
elimination of slavery, on refugee status, on genocide, the rights of the child, and against
torture.
•Many norms have spread, often with the help of NGOs, such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch.
•As scholar Anne Marie Clark has noted:
“ Numerous treaties and monitoring mechanisms are in place. Every year, UN bodies receive
reports from states and nongovernmental organizations on human rights conditions in scores
of states. … Human rights standards are now built into peacekeeping agreements and many
types of multilateral treaties.”
• Scholars evaluating the UN’s human rights machinery agree that as impressive as it is, the
results are mixed to poor.
• As Weiss et al. have noted, “UN activity concerning human rights often displays an
enormous gap between the law on the books and the law in action.”
• States regularly oppose stronger action on human rights or have engaged in abusing human
rights.
•Human rights are addressed in many parts of the UN.
•There is the Security Council, which can link a human rights problem to a breach of
international peace and security.
•For example, in 1991 the Security Council called Iraq’s attacks on its Kurdish people a
threat to international peace and security.
•This opened the way for “implicit approval” of the use of force in Iraq by the United States
and others.
•The UN created the position of the High Commission for Human Rights in 1993, for a
person who would act as the UN’s “principal human rights official” by supporting the work
of other parts of the UN and working with states to uphold human rights.
• There was also the former UN Commission on Human Rights, which existed between 1946
and 2006.
• In its later years, it was considered to be a joke of the UN system, since its members
included countries known for abusing human rights.
• Libya, for example, was well-known for its systematic violations of human rights, yet it was
nominated to preside over the Commission in 2002.
•At one point, the Commission’s membership included Sudan, during the time in which its
government was slaughtering people in Darfur.
•The Commission was replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC),
designed to have 47 member states elected by the UN General Assembly with three-year
terms, with no option for immediate re-election after two consecutive terms.
• In some years the member states continued to include countries that were not widely seen as
prioritizing human rights, including China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba.
• Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and others
questioned the HRC’s early focus on condemning Israel nine times but saying nothing about
countries like North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar.
• The United States refused to join at first, worried that the Council would be packed with
human rights abusers.
But US President Barack Obama decided to join given his emphasis on the importance of
multilateral institutions, and some have argued the HRC has become more effective as a
result.
PEACEKEEPING AND PEACE OPERATIONS
• The UN’s actions in peacekeeping have been one of the most visible and contentious areas
of its work in the past few decades, mainly because of a set of highly criticized failures,
especially in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda, that prompted so much soul searching and
analysis seeking to explain what went wrong and why.
• As noted earlier, the demand for peacekeeping rose exponentially in the early and mid-
1990s.
• Nineteen ninety-two was a banner year for the start of huge operations, including
Cambodia (20,000 troops); Croatia (12,000); El Salvador (several hundred); and
Mozambique (several thousand).
• There were more conflicts, to be sure, but at least initially, there was also a positive feeling
that the UN could help resolve them, given positive public opinion on the success of the US-
led intervention in the Gulf War.
• The nature of peacekeeping also evolved.
• Traditional peacekeeping operations during the Cold War had certain common criteria: the
conflicts were interstate, and not intrastate; the peacekeepers went in after fighting was over
and with the consent of all parties.
• The peacekeepers monitored ceasefires and were unarmed, or lightly armed, and neutral in
the sense that they were not to interfere.
• Force was only allowed for self-defense (The UN’s actions in Korea and Congo were
exceptions).
•The idea was that peacekeepers could help monitor a truce that would allow diplomats to
negotiate a peace.
•This type of arrangement still exists on the border between Kuwait and Iraq, in the Golan
Heights between Israel and Syria, and in Cyprus.
•Some scholars argue that these operations may only have succeeded in delaying conflict,
not resolving it.
• In fact, the three basic principles still exist today: consent of the parties, impartiality, and
no force except in cases of self-defense or where it’s necessary to defend the mandate.
• Yet, not all peacekeeping missions have followed all of these principles.
• After the Cold War, many peacekeeping missions became more complex, and
multidimensional, such as the cases in Cambodia (1991–1993), El Salvador (1991–1995),and
Namibia (1989–1990), Mozambique (1992–1994), and Eastern Slavonia (Croatia, 1996
-1998).
• These are sometimes called second-generation peacekeeping.
•In these cases peacekeeping operations had more objectives, although they were still based
on consent of parties, and involved interstate disputes.
• These operations included civilian experts as well as soldiers, and their missions might
include collecting arms, reintegrating former combatants, drafting and helping to implement
peace treaties, reforming the police, and monitoring elections.
•The overarching idea is that the missions are not only maintaining peace and security, but
they are protecting civilians and human rights, and helping the countries restore the rule of
law.
• This change coincided with Boutros-Ghali’s landmark report, Agenda for Peace (1992)
and its 1995 supplement.
• In Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali noted that the 100 conflicts that have taken place
since the UN’s birth left around 20 million people dead.
• He admitted that the UN had little power to address these conflicts, pointing out that 279
vetoes were cast in the Security Council during this period.
• The goal of the report was to revisit how the UN reacted to conflicts on ways that went
beyond peacekeeping.
•The report presented the additional processes of preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and
post-conflict peacebuilding.
• The idea behind preventive diplomacy was to try to avert disputes or prevent them from
escalating into broader conflict.
• Peacemaking was “action to bring hostile parties to agreement.”
• Parties would end their conflict and negotiate a peaceful settlement.
•Post conflict peace building was seen as helping to “avoid a relapse into conflict” by using
a variety of diplomatic, political, military, social, and economic development means to help
to sustain peace.
• The report also called for “peace-enforcement” units that would be more heavily armed
than peacekeeping units and could be authorized to use force.
•Third generation operations, or what Boutros-Ghali called “peace-enforcing” are the most
contentious and the most different from traditional peacekeeping.
• In these cases, the UN may go in without consent of all parties.
• The disputes have been intrastate, which directly contradicts the UN’s Charter, Article 2,
about not intervening in matters within a state’s domestic jurisdiction.
• And, finally, the peacekeeping forces have used force to implement a peace (that not all the
parties agreed to) when there was no peace to keep.
•The parties to the conflict did not adhere to peace agreements and/or the peacekeepers did
not have enough political or logistical support to succeed.
•The failed peacekeeping examples of Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda were all examples of
third generation peacekeeping.
• Many analysts have argued that these specific cases deeply damaged the UN, showing it to
be ineffective, or worse.
•A key dilemma for the UN in these cases has been whether or not to remain impartial and
neutral.
Bosnia
• The UN struggled with one of its largest and most expensive peacekeeping operations in history in the
former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995.
• This was a case of UN peacekeepers entering a full-blown war, where the United States and leading
European powers were simply not willing to intervene more forcefully.
• Over 250,000 people ultimately died, with millions more made homeless.
• This conflict grew out of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which ultimately triggered great violence and
ethnic cleansing.
• Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito held the country and its major ethnic groups together from
1953 until his death in 1980.
• The country splintered after his death, and a rotating presidency failed by June 1991, when Slovenia and
Croatia declared their independence while ethnic Serbs sought to form a “Greater Serbia” by seizing land
in Croatia and Bosnia.
• Croatian forces fought against the mainly Serb forces in the Yugoslav People’s Army and Croatian Serb
militias.
•The war began in April 1992.
•Within two months, a million people were displaced, and “several tens of thousands,” primarily Bosnian
Muslims, were killed.
•The literature on the war in former Yugoslavia contains numerous explanations of the
conflict.
• These include the role of domestic elites and animosity between poor and wealthy
republics.
• While there was killing on all sides, the ethnic cleansing in this case was primarily a
campaign controlled by the Bosnian Serb army aimed at killing, raping, torturing, and
expelling Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.
• A special horror was the 1995 slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys
in Srebrenica, a city deemed to be a “safe area” by the United Nations, which was unable to
protect these people in the end.
• Indeed, none of the six safe areas the UN created for Muslim enclaves inside Bosnia had
enough troops to make them safe.
• Over 100 members of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) also died in or
near the safe areas.
• The Serbs even chained UN peacekeepers to bridges and other strategic targets to prevent
NATO from fighting via air raids.
• The slaughter at Srebrenica has been labeled “genocide” by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and others.
• The UN’s involvement was insufficient by all measures.
• The 1991 UN arms embargo mainly helped the Serbs, who already had the former Yugoslav
army’s military equipment.
•The United States did not see the conflict as a threat to US strategic interests.
• Boutros-Ghali said in June 1993 that he estimated 34,000 troops would be necessary to
protect the safe areas, but knowing he would not get that number from member states, asked
for 7,600.
•He only received 5,000, which deployed nine months later.
• Prospects for peaceful settlement only became possible after heavy NATO bombing of strategic Bosnian
Serb positions, which brought the various parties to an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, to
negotiate a political settlement, the Dayton Peace Accord.
• As Weiss, Forsythe, Coate, and Pease have noted, the subsequent deployment of a huge, 60,000-person
NATO-led peacekeeping mission post Dayton created another set of problems for the United Nations.
• Bosnia-Herzegovina became a center of sex-trafficking into Western Europe, and a number of UN
peacekeeping officials were accused of being involved in this.

Somalia
• In the case of Somalia, the UN was entering a failed state beset by conflict between warring groups and a
ballooning humanitarian crisis where people were dying of starvation and sickness.
• There were no legitimate leaders to consent to UN peacekeeping involvement.
• General Mohamed Siad Barre had led a repressive regime for twenty one years and had alienated other
political factions (clans) from government positions.
•These other clans eventually rose up against his rule.
• Unlike the case of Bosnia, Somalia is a country of one religion and even one language.
• Barre was ousted in 1991 by General Mohamed Farrah Aideed, who led a militia against Barre.
• Power struggles between the clans resulted in thousands of civilians being killed or wounded.
•In the midst of the conflict, by early 1992, people were starving.
• Boutros-Ghali was especially upset that the Security Council was focused more on Bosnia than on
Somalia.
• The United States responded with humanitarian aid, much of which disappeared to looting and
corruption in the country.
• Media coverage of the humanitarian horror (including television images of emaciated
children) fueled public opinion in the United States and elsewhere that the United States and
United Nations needed to act.
• Of the three different peacekeeping missions in Somalia between 1992 and 1995, one was a
small, traditional peacekeeping force (UNOSOM I), one was a US-led multinational force,
and one was a “peace-enforcement” mission, which replaced the previous two.
• While the UN acted in the name of a threat to international peace and security, this was
clearly an intrastate conflict and humanitarian disaster.
• The subsequent debacle of the UN in Somalia has been widely analyzed in the literature, and
the main explanations for the failure focus on the fact that the UN missions were vague,
relations between Aideed and UN negotiators were poor, and UNOSOM II was poorly run
(and indeed many Somalis thought the UN itself was about to invade the country).
• Analysts also note that the humanitarian aid did save lives.
•At the peak of UN involvement, more than 38,000 were involved in peacekeeping in
Somalia, with the bulk coming from the United States.
• A traumatic moment for the United States occurred in 1993, when US Army Rangers were
killed and one Ranger’s naked corpse was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, amid
shouting and laughter, after militias shot down two US Black Hawk helicopters.
•The photos of the body dragged through the streets, taken by
Canadian photographer Paul Watson, horrified the American public, which was not used to
US soldiers dying in a country the US had no strategic interest in, in a mission that was seen
as humanitarian.
• Subsequently, the US formally ended its mission in Somalia in 1994.
• While the US initially blamed the UN for the fiasco, in fact the US soldiers were under a US chain
of command, with the decision to send them in coming from Special Operations in Florida.
• The rest of the peacekeepers left a year later.
• Today, Somalia continues to be unstable.
• Its first parliament in over 20 years was elected in August 2012.
• The country has been challenged with Islamic extremism, famine, pirating, and continued poverty.
Are There Any Successful Cases?
• While this set of horrific peacekeeping cases hurt the UN’s legitimacy, there have also been
successful cases of peacekeeping.
•Two examples are United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia, and United
Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) in El Salvador.
• The purpose of UNTAG was to help Namibia prepare for independence, which it achieved in 1990.
•UNTAG’s job was to supervise elections to ensure they were fair, to make sure South African troops
withdrew from Namibia, ensure that Namibian refugees could return home, and that political
prisoners were released.
• Scholar Lise Morjé-Howard argued that this case was the UN’s first major success because UNTAG
was well run, not micro-managed from New York, and especially good at responding to local political
forces at important moments in the process.
•In El Salvador, ONUSAL was created in 1991 to help mediate the negotiations that ended the civil
war, to broker a peace agreement, to monitor compliance by both sides, to monitor and promote
human rights, and to help promote democratization.
•The mission was created six months before a ceasefire ended a civil war that had lasted more
than a decade.
•There was no guarantee this mission would be a success
•. Scholar Tommie Sue Montgomery attributes the success to factors that include the fact that
both warring parties were on board with having the UN there as a mediator, the skill of the UN
negotiating team, the quality of the ONUSAL staff, and support from people across the
political spectrum.
• Despite disillusionment in the UN, peacekeeping missions continued on, and after a lull in
peacekeeping from 1996 to 1998, there was a surge in the number of missions and troops sent
at the end of the decade, including the 1999 launch of missions to Kosovo, Sierra
Leone, East Timor, and the Democrat Republic of Congo.
• These were also complex, multidimensional missions in places where governance was not
functioning well or at all.
•The Security Council’s practice of authorizing coalitions of member states to engage in using
force has also increased in recent decades, including the cases of the 1994 US intervention
in Haiti, NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and the 1999 Australian-led
intervention in East Timor.
• The disastrous cases of the mid-1990s also prompted the UN to assess and revise its
peacekeeping strategy.
• UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan created a group of experts to make recommendations for
how to improve peacekeeping.
•The group, led by UN Under-Secretary-General Lakhdar Brahimi, produced Report of the
Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”) in August 2000.
•The report made numerous recommendations.
•These included arguments that peacekeepers needed “clear, credible and achievable
mandates,” as well as “solid commitments from Member States” for forces.
• If those were not forthcoming, the Security Council should not send in peacekeepers.
• Part of having clear mandates is that, according to the report, “The Secretariat must tell the
Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear, when formulating or
changing mission mandates.”
• It was a blunt, straightforward report.
•It also adopted the terminology that has been becoming more prevalent since the 1990s of
peace operations as including peacekeeping, conflict prevention, mediation, and
peacebuilding.
• For example, peace operations today also include what are called “special political
missions,” which are run out of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and focus on
preventive diplomacy, mediation, and longer term post-conflict peacebuilding.
• The DPA, set up in 1992, has seen its stature grow in recent years given more support for
alternatives to a militarized approach.
• Some, but not all, of the Brahimi Report’s recommendations have been implemented.
•According to William Durch et al., the UN has done better implementing the more concrete
recommendations than those aimed at changing strategy or member state actions.
R2P and More Recent Peace Operations
• One major response to the UN’s inability to prevent widespread civilian death in the three
cases mentioned above, as well as Kosovo, was the appearance of a new norm to encourage
the world to act in such horrific situations.
• The Responsibility to Protect norm (R2P) was first promulgated by the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in a 2001 report.
• The idea is that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from
“avoidable catastrophe—from mass murder and rape, from starvation,” and if they are
“unwilling or unable” to act, then other states should bear that responsibility.
• It is a view concerning under what circumstances the international community has the
responsibility to violate a state’s sovereignty, and what “humanitarian intervention” may
mean in practice.
•The report was written in response to Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call for some way to
have international unity around this difficult question.
•And while the report was written before the terrorist attacks in the United States on
September 11, 2001, the authors argued that their ideas can extend to a response to terrorism
as well.
•“Military power,” they argued, “should always be exercised in a principled way, and the
principles of last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects are all applicable to
such action.
• The report laid out a number of ways that the international community can have leverage
over a situation where there is a strong need for human protection, such as political,
economic, and judicial actions.
• It argued that military intervention may be considered as a possibility in extreme cases
where a number of criteria are satisfied, including situations where people are faced “with the
threat of serious and irreparable harm,” such as large-scale loss of life due to actions, neglect,
or failure by the state and large-scale ethnic cleansing.
•Annan endorsed the principles and urged governments to embrace them as a means to
protect victims of atrocities, and the General Assembly and Security Council both affirmed
the principles in 2005 and 2006, respectively.
•While many agree that the R2P offers a strong moral framework for intervention, the fact is
that it does not yet have the political traction needed to be translated into notable action.
•It has been applied in cases that many find dubious, such as Russia’s unilateral use of force in
Georgia.
•It has not been applied in cases where it would seem highly relevant, such as Afghanistan and
Iraq, and where it has been used to justify action, it has not succeeded.
•R2P was not used to mobilize an international response to the Burmese government’s refusal
to allow outsiders to deliver promised aid following the 2008 Cyclone Nargis, which
killed tens of thousands of people and doomed thousands more to suffering.
•It has not been used in Syria, where war and atrocities prompted more than half of the
country’s population of 22 million to leave their homes, creating a refugee crisis.
• Darfur is a case where the international community was slow to stop what is widely
considered to be genocide, despite invoking R2P.
•Darfur is a region in Western Sudan where conflict broke out in 2003. The Sudanese
government responded to an attack by rebel groups by sending troops and militia groups to
bomb and burn villages and commit rape and other atrocities.
• By the end of 2006, hundreds of thousands of people had died, and over two million (a
third of the Darfur population) had been displaced.
• Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell publicly labeled the conflict as a genocide in
September 2004 (but was also advised that this did not mean the United States had to be
involved with a military intervention).
•The UN was in an uncomfortable position for a variety of reasons, including China’s
resistance to Security Council resolutions to condemn Sudan and Kofi Annan’s worries that
member states would force the UN to act without giving it necessary resources to do so, and
as a result moved slowly to take action.
•Nonetheless, the Security Council did take actions such as authorizing an arms embargo
and a ban on Sudanese military flights.
•A peace agreement between the Sudanese government, one faction of rebels, and the
government of Nigeria, was signed in May 2006.
. The Security Council later reaffirmed R2P in an April 2007 resolution on Darfur, and
subsequently it authorized the deployment of a 26,000 person hybrid UN and African Union
(AU) force to Darfur (UNAMID) to support the implementation of the peace agreement and
to protect civilians.
• The mission faced many challenges, including violent attacks on peacekeepers and the
Sudanese government’s confrontational behavior.
•What seemed like a case study of how R2P could work in practice has not been a clear
success.
•As an influential report to the UN noted, “the hybrid African Union-United Nations mission
is a mere shadow of its original purpose, restricted to the delivering on the narrow objectives
of monitoring conflict, patrolling camps and stimulating local efforts to build dialogue.
• The case of the UN in Libya is an example of a UN Security Council Resolution that sought to
apply the principle of R2P and did not involve UN peacekeepers.
• The Libyan crisis began in February 2011, when a demonstration protesting the arrest of a
human rights activist resulted in Libyan government security forces firing at the crowds and
killing over 100 people.
• The protests were seen as part of the Arab Spring, a wave of protests, riots, and rebellions
against undemocratic regimes that began in Tunisia in December 2010.
•As protests spread throughout Libya, amid calls for democracy, political reform, and justice, the
government response was violent and brutal.
• The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 in March 2011 that condemned the
government’s use of violence and violation of human rights and authorized (under Chapter VII)
member states to “take all means necessary” other than a “foreign occupation force” to protect
civilians under threat of attack.
• It also authorized a no-fly zone, banned travel, and froze assets of relevant officials.
• The resolution provided the legal basis for intervention by the US, France, and UK, soon
followed by NATO.
•NATO took the lead in operations against Libyan forces, which lasted seven months until
Libya’s dictator, Col. Mummar el-Qaddafi was captured and killed by Libyan opposition forces.
• The subsequent mission in Libya, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, was a
peacebuilding mission run by the DPA, not a peacekeeping mission run by the Department of UN
Peacekeeping Operations.
• While the UN has worked to bring warring coalitions together to end conflict in the country and
create one government, the country remains unstable and its infrastructure is in bad shape.
• We can see from these cases that R2P is no panacea.
•It is argued that if the international community pursued humanitarian intervention in Darfur
under the R2P banner, the results could be disastrous, with the government closing down
humanitarian efforts, and the rebels gaining heart to fight harder and longer.
• It is posited that R2P “should be seen less as a normative vocabulary that can catalyze
action, and more as a policy agenda in need of implementation.
• In terms of how to improve overall UN peace operations, in June 2015, the High Level
Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, chaired by Jose Ramos-Horta,
presented its report to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
•Horta is a former president of East Timor, co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, and
head of the United Nations Integrated Peace-building Office in Guinea-Bissau.
•The report made four main recommendations that reflected the growing importance of the
DPA’s approach.
•The first called for putting political solutions ahead of military engagements in the design
andimplementation of peace operations.
• Second, it calls for a more flexible use of the “full spectrum of UN peace operations,”
arguing for smoother transitions between the special political missions and peacekeeping
operations.
• Third, it argues for more collaboration and consultation throughout the UN system and with
relevant partners. And finally, it calls for more “field-focused” and “people-centered” peace
operations.
• More than 120,000 people currently serve in UN peace operations around the world, which
is a record level of deployment.
• The budget for current peacekeeping operations is around $8.5 billion.
•Since the birth of peacekeeping, over 3,000 UN peacekeepers have lost their lives.
•Peacekeeping and other peace operations are increasingly taking place in more difficult
environments, where often there is no peace to keep and peacekeepers are operating in the
midst of conflict, often facing attacks from extremist groups.
• As the 2015 Report noted, Today a growing number of missions operate in remote and
austere environments where no political agreement exists, or where efforts to establish or re-
establish one have faltered.
•They face ongoing hostilities and parties who are unwilling to negotiate or otherwise
undermine the presence of a mission by condoning or inflicting restrictions on its ability to
operate.
•The challenge is multiplied in large, infrastructure-poor countries where it is harder for UN
missions to make their presence felt. Logistical supply lines in vast, landlocked and often
insecure operating environments are often stretched thin and left vulnerable to disruption.
EVALUATION OF PEACEKEEPING
• There are many strands of literature on the UN today.
•One strand focuses on the UN’s history and evolution, often with an emphasis on the Security
Council.
•Some scholars focus on individual UN bodies, such as UNDP or UNEP, or specific issues areas,
such as human rights, development, refugees, the environment, and humanitarian assistance to
name a few.
• There is also a literature on the UN and its role in international law and specific analysis of the
various Ad Hoc Tribunals created under the Security Council auspices.
• Indeed, the literature on the UN spans disciplines beyond political science, including international
law, sociology, public health, and development economics.
•It is worth examining the category of research that asks whether peacekeeping has been effective.
• One example is the work of Morjé-Howard, who argued that variation between success and failure
in peacekeeping in civil wars can be explained by how three conditions play out.
• The first is how favorable “situational factors” are.
• These include factors such as whether the warring parties have consented to having peacekeepers
in the country.
•The second is the degree of Security Council interest in the conflict.
•She argues that very high levels of Security Council interest can actually undermine the ability of
peacekeepers to carry out their mandates, as can very low levels of interest.
•Moderate interest, she concluded, is necessary but not sufficient for success.
• Finally, the degree of organizational learning matters as a factor distinguishing success from
failure.
• The message is that peacekeeping missions that were able to adapt and adjust to their
conditions were likely to be more successful.
• From a different perspective, Virginia Page Fortna argued that not only should one compare
cases of peacekeeping, but also look at cases where peacekeeping was not used.
• If peacekeepers are only sent to easy places, she argues, we are ikely to see a strong
effective impact.
• In fact, peacekeepers tend to be deployed in difficult situations.
•She concluded that peacekeeping does have significant and positive impact on the stability
of peace, by changing the incentives for war versus peace, reducing uncertainty about what
each side intends, and helping to reduce the likelihood of “accidents” that may lead to war.
• Michael Lipson presented a very different view of peacekeeping.
•Instead of focusing on mandate fulfillment, he examined organizational or process
performance.
•In these areas, he argued that it is very difficult to evaluate the UN’s performance in
peacekeeping because of the ambiguity inherent to them.
• Ambiguity, for example, can occur in a lack of agreement about what a type of conflict (is it
civil war or genocide?), or about who has authority over a mission within the UN, or about
the goals of the mission.
•Today’s multidimensional peacekeeping operations include the Department of
Peacekeeping Operations as well as various other UN agencies, funds, and programs, all of
which may have different mandates and cultures.
•Heidi Hardt explored why some organizations make peace operations decisions more
efficiently than others, and argued that “informal institutionalization” is key to speeding up
decision making when it counts.
• In particular, informal norms of working method, communications, and personal politics
seem to matter in security-related negotiations involved in setting up peace operations.
CONCLUSION
• In 1996, the late US Republican Senator Jesse Helms wrote an article in Foreign Affairs arguing
that if the UN could not get its proliferating bureaucracy under control, it should be abolished.
• At the time, Helms was chairman of the powerful US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
•He was concerned that the UN was taking sovereignty away from states as a “power hungry and
dysfunctional organization,” and criticized the UN for making every problem in the world its own.
•That criticism echoes similar views from people who want to abolish the World Bank or the
International Monetary Fund and represents one end of the political spectrum.
•The UN responded, in part to this type of criticism, with some reforms to its bureaucracy.
•But Helms’s views still resonate today in some quarters.
• Most of the more mainstream accounts today begin with the assumption that we need the United
Nations even with its flaws.
• As Madeline Albright, former US permanent representative to the United Nations and former US
Secretary of State, wrote a decade ago, “for $1.25 billion a year—roughly what the Pentagon
spends every 32 hours—the United Nations is still the best investment the world can make in
stopping AIDS and SARS, feeding the poor, helping refugees, and fighting global crime and the
spread of nuclear
weapons.”
• Ultimately the ability of the UN to remain effective in global politics depends on the political
will of its members, the quality of its staff, the institution’s resources, and its ability to respond as
nimbly as possible to global problems.
•As the UN has now celebrated its 70th birthday, this likely means that while we should not expect
any miracles, we are likely to continue to see variation across UN bodies, and we can hope that
ongoing
debates about the best ways to reform the UN and its parts result in some positive steps.