Reports: U.N. Peace Operations

This meeting note captures the proceedings at a seminar on November 2, 2011 on “Transition Compacts: Lessons from UN Experiences.” The seminar sought to learn from previous agreements on peacebuilding and development priorities between national governments and international partners in fragile and conflict-affected states.

During the meeting, the International Peace Institute presented a study on United Nations experiences with this first generation of “transition compacts,” a summary of which is included at the end of this note.

The seminar was hosted by IPI and organized in collaboration with the United Nations and the International Network on Conflict and Fragility (INCAF), a subsidiary body of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. Participants included officials from the UN, its member states, the World Bank, and INCAF. The meeting was convened under the Chatham House rule of nonattribution.

This paper, the second in a series on Security Council working methods and the performance of peace
operations, addresses the Council’s engagement in Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR) from early 2006 to the end of 2010. While the Council explored options for deploying some sort of UN peacekeeping presence to these countries from mid-2006 onwards, these discussions were secondary to much higher-profile debates about the possibility of a large-scale force in Darfur. After Chad had stated its initial opposition to a UN military deployment, France initiated proposals for the deployments of an EU
military mission linked to a UN police presence to Chad and CAR in mid-2007.
After lengthy negotiations, the two organizations deployed in early 2008, and operated in parallel until March 2009. The EU mission then closed, following a pre-arranged schedule, while the UN mission (MINURCAT) deployed a military presence. However, Chad put a growing number of obstacles in MINURCAT’s way, and eventually withdrew its consent altogether. MINURCAT ended its operations in
December 2010.
The goal of this paper is to show how the Security Council’s working methods affected its dealings with Chad and CAR prior to the launch of MINURCAT and the parallel EU mission (EUFOR Tchad/RCA) and its oversight of the two operations from 2008 to 2010. While the two missions’ performance was shaped by multiple contextual factors (and in EUFOR’s case, European politics) it offers lessons about the relevance of working methods to an operation’s effectiveness. This is particularly true because MINURCAT was subject to almost constant political pressure from the government of Chad, and the Council’s working methods inevitably shaped elements of its response to this pressure.

Summary

Problem Identified
Peacebuilding operations in conflict and post-conflict societies often undermine local capacity, ownership, and sustainability. The acknowledged remedy is to empower local actors to take the lead in planning and implementing programs, but few empowerment strategies that work in practice have been documented and explained.

Action Taken
- Several organizations have reconfigured empowerment techniques traditionally used for peacetime development to work in societies emerging from conflict.
- Local actors have seized the chance presented by these new approaches to develop and implement their own creative solutions to conflict. Local ownership has in turn enabled the integration of other sectors of society and government into peacebuilding activities.

Lessons Learned
- Focus on facilitating processes instead of trying to achieve specific outcomes. Successful interventions help participants open channels to defend their own interests, with the participants determining the final decisions and outcomes.
- Design programs to promote learning rather than to yield specific results. Effective programs create opportunities for participants to seek out and absorb knowledge critical to good decision making.
- Don’t be deflected by political pressures. Even well-known empowerment principles (such as respecting local counterparts) can be sidelined if interveners do not prioritize them above the kinds of political pressures typically encountered in conflict zones.

The past year could have been a disastrous one for U.N. peacekeeping. Twelve months ago, Côte d’Ivoire appeared to be on the brink of renewed civil war in spite of the presence there of United Nations and French forces. South Sudan’s vote for independence in January 2011 also had the potential to unleash mass violence. From Haiti to Liberia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, peacekeepers were charged with overseeing elections that might have resulted in significant instability. In Somalia, U.N.-mandated African Union (AU) forces were locked in grinding combat with Islamist al-Shabab rebels. 

Yet peace operations demonstrated an unexpected degree of resilience overall, as chronicled in the Center on International Cooperation’s new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations. The U.N. reasserted itself in Côte d’Ivoire, and though presidential polls in the DRC proved to be deeply flawed, those in Haiti and Liberia were conducted relatively smoothly thanks in part to the U.N. In Somalia, al-Shabab pulled back from Mogadishu as the AU forces took the initiative. Other regional organizations also found themselves being drawn into peace operations: The Arab League sent an admittedly ill-fated observer mission to Syria, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations mandated an observer mission to help reduce tensions on the Thai-Cambodian border.