Publishing With Us. Book Authors Journal Authors. Free Preview. Show next edition. Buy eBook. The members of the OECD, the rich countries club, provide only 3 percent of the soldiers for these missions — even though they pay 86 percent of the overall cost of peacekeeping. These missions will therefore fail, because peacekeeping has become a way for rich countries to send the soldiers of poor countries off to deal with conflicts the rich countries do not care all that much about.
It also reflects the preoccupation with terrorism and the inability to see anything other than a military solution. There is another way, but it is doubtful that the international community has the will, attention span and unity to undertake it.
In the UN Development Program interviewed young African men who had voluntarily joined violent extremist groups. The study found they were motivated by a sense of grievance toward, and a lack of confidence in, their governments. For them, the extremist ideologies were a way to escape a future without hope.
The study concluded that improved governance was a far more effective response to violent extremism than a military one. The governments in these five countries will not lessen their corruption, repression and incompetence, however, simply because it is the right thing to do. These countries are as underdeveloped politically as they are economically and have weak legislative and judicial branches, civil society and press freedom.
The incentive to govern better will therefore have to come from outside forces. The international community could provide that incentive by applying substantial and consistent economic and political pressure. The five countries should be declared de facto failed states, and international organizations put in charge of their finances.
Any aid or trade with them should be made contingent on the attainment of better governance, human rights and adherence to democratic norms. To do that effectively, however, the most powerful countries and international and nongovernmental organizations would have to make peace the top priority and not allow sovereignty to be used as a shield by autocrats.
Democracy in Africa. That requires the international community to be willing to have the peacekeepers inflict and take casualties. The rise of terrorism is the reason the final stage in the evolution of peacekeeping has become so dangerous.
Whatever it is called, when extremist violence comes into play there is no role for peacekeeping. Yet peacekeepers are being asked not only to protect civilians but, often, to help the government stabilize the situation and extend its control over its own territory in countries threatened by extremists.
The fundamental problem is that there is no peace to keep, and U. This violates all three of the traditional principles of peacekeeping and makes the peacekeepers targets. The prospect of such attacks has accelerated the trend among rich countries to decline to provide troops for peacekeeping.
As the operations changed from the classical variety to multidimensional missions and as the number of casualties grew and some of the missions, like the one in Angola, failed, the enthusiasm for participating waned.
As peacekeeping evolved further into the protection and stabilization missions now underway in Africa, the interest of developed nations in putting their troops at risk virtually disappeared. To make matters much worse, the five countries where these protection and stabilization missions are taking place—Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—have governments that are among the most corrupt, repressive and incompetent in the world.
One need only to look at their corruption rankings by Transparency International, their political liberty rankings by Freedom House or their governance scores on the Ibrahim Index to confirm that.
In addition, these countries are not particularly interested in protecting their own citizens. Their armies and police exist mainly to protect the government and not the nation as a whole or its citizens.
Enhancing the capability of security forces alone will only strengthen their ability to keep that regime in power and to suppress any democratic alternatives. In , in tacit recognition of this problem, U. Since R2P was created, the Security Council has passed 75 resolutions reminding governments of their obligation to protect their own citizens. Of that number, 41 were directed at the five countries where protection and stabilization missions are now taking place.
The R2P principle also holds that if the government fails to protect its own citizens, the international community may step in to do so. Because the governments of these countries are either unwilling or unable to provide such security, the peacekeepers are being asked to do so.
Since the wealthy nations with the most capable armies are unwilling to provide a significant number of troops, this most dangerous and difficult type of peacekeeping is left largely to poorly equipped and trained soldiers from developing countries who are not going to defeat violent extremism. If the United States cannot prevail against violent extremists in Afghanistan after 18 years of trying, there is no chance that the available peacekeepers can succeed in Africa.
And asking peacekeepers to die protecting the citizens of a country whose government will not is unlikely to inspire them to make that sacrifice. The most recently launched peacekeeping missions will therefore fail, because U.
If the international community wants to try to impose a peace, it should send troops that are capable and willing to do that. Such a solution is not going to happen, however.
It is far easier to identify a policy problem than to come up with realistic recommendations to fix it. Peacekeeping is a bandage, not a cure, for the scourge of violent extremism.
Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Jett reviews the history of peacekeeping and the evolution in the number, size, scope, and cost of peacekeeping missions.
He also explains why peacekeeping has become more necessary, possible and desired, and yet, at the same time, more complex, more difficult, and less frequently used. There are no reviews yet.
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