The Largest Governing Body: The Successes and Failures of the International Legal System and the Peacekeepers

The United Nations (UN) is a master at resolving potentially violent and destructive conflicts and providing a platform for diplomats to engage with one another more easily and faster.

The organization has an even longer history of assisting the global community in various endeavors, ones not strictly related to diplomacy or military affairs, but in the fields of medicine, archaeology, and education.

Yet, the UN has also been extremely slow to react in the way of human rights violations, taking extremely long to make an effort against genocides and other extremely serious matters. The successes and failures of the UN and the international legal system are multiple.

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The Successes

One of the largest successes of the international legal system has been the creation of the United Nations. While they certainly have their fair share of criticism, they are an incredible organization that have been able to codify international law, assist in peacekeeping operations and document human rights violations, and act as an overall body for the conduction of warfare and diplomacy.

Though often seen as impotent by many journalists and casual observers, The RAND Corporation, in 2005, published a study in which they found that two-thirds of every peacekeeping operation were successful in addition to performing nation-building efforts at a better rate than the United States. The ability of the organization to effectively gather diplomats in one central location and assist in diplomatic resolutions is quite remarkable and really has the ability for military conflicts to be avoided. A study by Dartmouth and Ohio State seemingly confirmed this, stating, “of 5,143 U.N. General Assembly voting records from 1946 through 2011,…the process of nations working together over time builds trust and facilitates fast, transparent communication that raises the chance of resolving crises peacefully”. Scott Pauls, one of the studies’ heads and the Chair of Mathematics at Dartmouth, said, “Our analysis provides evidence that the U.N. is more than just a witness of changing policy preferences. The world body impacts future decisions, particularly by suppressing conflict”.

Due, primarily, to the fact that the United Nations has created a place for diplomacy to thrive in one centralized location, it has allowed for diplomats, foreign policy theorists, and experts of varying faiths, creeds, ethnicities, and political thought to come together and engage in discourse and solve matters pertaining to policy.

As well, there are multiple other successes of the UN in world affairs. Since the 1980s, the UN has worked tirelessly to eradicate smallpox through the World Health Organization (WHO) and has endeavored to protect Earth's Ozone layer. The organization has also both promoted arms control and saved the lives of “over 90 million children since 1990”.

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The Failures

Concurrently, the greatest misstep within the international legal system has been the UN’s failure to act in specific genocides/war crimes incidents. In particular, the two cases most prominent are the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwandan genocide in 1995 and 1994 respectively. In both cases, there were clear violations of Human Rights and evidence of war crimes.

The Srebrenica massacre remains one of the most deplorable acts of human depravity. On July 11 of 1995, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić entered the town of Srebrenica and rounded up Bosniak (a minority ethnic group in the Eastern European region) men and teenage boys in front of their wives and children while the “Dutch UN peacekeepers stood by helplessly…[and] was humiliated by Mladić who slaughtered a pig in their presence in a gruesome symbolic display”; the 8,000 Bosniaks were later executed over an eleven day period while Mladić assured their families they would not be harmed. The fact that UN peacekeepers allowed, first, an occupying force to take over what was designed a UN safe zone, and, second, to commit a war crime in the zone, is unforgivable and an extreme stain upon the organization. Many, including UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, believe that the UN bears some level of responsibility, with the diplomat having stated, “For us who serve the United Nations, that truth is a hard one to face. We can say –and it is true –that great nations failed to respond adequately. We can say –and it is also true –that there should have been stronger military forces in place, and a stronger will to use them…we made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence which, however admirable, was unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia”.

The Rwandan Genocide is a far more complicated situation and, due to its complexity going back nearly a century, I will not fully explain. Suffice to say that the incident was an ethnic genocide committed by extremist Hutu forces against Tutsi rebels. Throughout the conflict, Hutus committed acts of extreme violence against Tutsis and any group showing moderation or any group separated by ethnic lines. In their report on the incident, the UN believed “that 800,000 Rwandans had been killed in just three months”. The commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Major General Roméo Dallaire of the Canadian Army, has openly stated in his memoir that the United Nations explicitly kept him from performing missions that would assist in peacekeeping operations, such as seizing weapons caches and failing to listen to Dallaire’s calls for increased manpower and equipment.

The failure of the United Nations to try and prevent a genocide or an extremely destructive violation of human rights shows how, though they are an improvement upon the League of Nations and have succeeded in a wide array of activities in their 70-plus year history, they still hold a certain amount of responsibility for not intervening in these extremely barbaric and violent acts.

One of the potential solutions to better responding to instances of genocide the world over is by better solving the challenges facing the UN’s Peacekeeping forces.

The weakness of the legal system (in the case of both Rwanda and Srebrenica) is shown via the lack of military power the UN holds to properly assist in peacekeeping operations and act in violations of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights and War Crimes/Crimes Against Humanity. However, the solution to this problem with the UN’s response to genocides and human rights abuses is a rather obvious one: the Peacekeepers.

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The Peacekeepers

The UN’s Peacekeeping force has the goal of helping “countries navigate the difficult path from conflict to peace” with “unique strengths, including legitimacy, burden sharing, and an ability to deploy troops and police from around the world, integrating them with civilian peacekeepers to address a range of mandates set by the UN Security Council and General Assembly”. Commonly called the “Blue Helmets” given their issuance of blue helmets and berets to signify their allegiance, the Peacekeepers, as of 2020, had over 80,000 troops, police officers, staff officers, and military experts within their ranks. The bulk of these Peacekeepers, as well, came from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Nepal.

The United States, interestingly, contributed only 33 personnel in total to the peacekeeping forces in 2020. Most likely, this is due to the fact that the “Trump administration reinstated a cap on annual U.S. contributions to UN peacekeeping and sought additional, massive cuts to major operations in Africa”.

Peacekeepers have been around since the late 1940s and performed remarkable work throughout the Cold War, enjoying “the consent of the parties to the conflict and the support of the Security Council and the troop-contributing countries”. Yet, going into the post-Cold War world, with changing threats from state actors to non-state actors, the rise of terrorism in military and international conflicts, and a constantly changing geopolitical landscape, the Peacekeepers mandated a change in the way they conducted themselves.

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, second-generation peacekeeping was needed which involved “civilian experts and relief specialists as well as soldiers” and gave Peacekeepers the ability “to employ force for reasons other than self-defense…[in cases like Cambodia, Somalia, and Yugoslavia and due to these second-generation changes] the UN reacted to threats to peace and security within states, sometimes taking sides in domestic disputes and thus jeopardizing its own neutrality”.

Throughout the 1990s and into the current decade, the UN’s Peacekeeping mission has also been rocked by scandal and corruption.

One of the most infamous scandals revolved around child prostitution and sex trafficking. In 1992, while UN peacekeepers were assigned to Mozambique to oversee the peace accords, it was found that “soldiers…recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution”. While the soldiers were sent home once an investigation confirmed this, the same report also found “In 6 out of 12 country studies on sexual exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict prepared for the present report, the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution”.

Various instances of child abuse, sex trafficking prostitution, rape, and sexual assault have been found amongst the UN peacekeeping force in various war ravaged regions, though most of these have occurred in African countries like Tanzania, Senegal, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, and Niger. While some may argue that these events have only occurred in the 1990s, this type of sexual abuse occurs still in the UN peacekeeping force; this past September, “the United Nations decided to withdraw 450 Gabonese peacekeepers from the Central African Republic…[over] claims of sexual abuse”. In 2020, the Human Rights Watch documented that many media outlets reported that the UN Peacekeeping force in Haiti “published credible reports of sexual abuse and exploitation” while mentioning that “Of the 2,500 community members interviewed by the researchers about living in towns with peacekeepers, 10 percent raised – without prompting – the issue of children fathered by the soldiers”. Many have also raised the issue that these investigations rarely result in charges being filed against peacekeepers and even more rare are convictions.

There are some solutions to this growing and rather serious problem, however. In 2019, the UN released an article focusing on the global challenges the force faces, identifying one possible solution being inter-country partnerships. The Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, stated that these partnerships are of “central importance…to the success of operations…[adding] that peacekeeping has been made more effective by the increased number of women: the UN, he said, has met its targets for the percentage of female peacekeepers deployed as individual officers, and allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse are on a steady downward trend”.

The Under-Secretary’s emphasis on partnerships was a main focus in a 2018 speech in which he stressed that partnerships, especially in the European Union and Africa, were of utmost importance. Increasing the partnerships between nation-states and countries is a must for the UN in addition to creating a superior and highly effective peacekeeping force to stop genocides, human rights abuses, and other intrastate military conflict.

In starting this new relationship, the United States would be a key ally to make in further developing peacekeeping missions throughout the globe.

From a security perspective, the United States should be greatly more involved in these peacekeeping operations. They are, from a security capability, the strongest military force in the Western world and have immensely advanced military technologies, equipment, and strategies. Due to the isolationist and distancing policies of President Trump, however, the U.S. has taken a back seat in international affairs and peacekeeping operations. However, “China has boosted its support in recent years, including launching a ten-year, $1 billion fund for peacekeeping operations” which is a great threat to global and regional security. By not being as involved in peacekeeping operations with the UN, the U.S. is essentially allowing foreign adversaries to gain the upper hand in war-ravaged places and locations susceptible to extremist politics and anti-U.S./Western sentiments. There is a national security implication with the United States having taken a laissez-faire attitude to international peacekeeping operations and becoming uninvolved in global affairs.

The Biden administration should be taking a much more active role in UN peacekeeping operations and re-engaging the international community in these more military and stability tasks. However, some have identified a way in which the Biden administration could more actively engage the world and better work on peacekeeping and UN goals.

Amanda Long, a Senior International Partnerships Assistant with the U.S. Institute of Peace, wrote on this problem and identified many ways in which the U.S. and Biden could reform and revitalize the Peacekeepers. She writes, “It seems relatively straightforward, but simply paying its dues will go far to repairing frayed U.S. credibility on multilateral issues. Doing so would help to restore U.S. leverage on the Security Council and rebuff criticisms from China and other permanent members about U.S. freeloading… The United States could signal support by appointing a senior diplomat to secure buy-in from other [UN Security Council] members and the [African Union] for a related Security Council resolution, one that commits to providing sustained financing to support regionally led operations, assuming they meet a set of agreed conditions” while also arguing that the U.S. should utilize their vast wealth, tactical expertise, and logistical capabilities to better support the UN peacekeeping mission. This would greatly help in a variety of ways: better increasing America’s global standing throughout the world (importantly in the third-world), better providing destabilized regions with economic and food aid, and secure these regions where anti-Western terrorism could arise and halting it at infancy.

By including the Americans in these peacekeeping operations, the U.S. could also re-engage with the world in a military sense and better improve the strained relations the U.S. has with foreign militaries. Furthermore, it would allow the U.S. to get more nations involved in the UN’s peacekeeping and other operations, which would allow the United States to eventually back away as strongly from these operations, a burden the American taxpayer has often been shouldering.

There are a vast many benefits to the U.S. becoming more involved in the peacekeeping mission of the UN. By improving the UN’s military capabilities and taking more stringent efforts to root out corruption within the UN peacekeeping force, the UN could be able to bring about a level of professionality in this force. Bringing the U.S. into the fold on this would greatly assist in bringing about that professionality. Not only that, but the advanced type of military technology, organizational systems, logistical ability, and strategic education that the U.S. military and foreign affairs section has would significantly help the UN solve many of their peacekeeping problems and potentially gain more nation-state allies.