Writings of David D. Caron

Review of The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict After the Cold War by Steven R. Ratner, 90 American Journal of International Law 335-37 (1996).

The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict After the Cold War by Steven R. Ratner, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 303. Index. $45.

The New UN Peacekeeping is a strikingly valuable and important book. It is an ambitious work, and its scope might easily be understated. Three contributions can be said to stand out, however. First, Professor Ratner's work clears away the confusing and confused verbiage that has flourished amidst the increased United Nations operations following the end of the Cold War and offers in its place an understanding of what has changed and what is demanded by such changes. Second, after a review of the early efforts of the League and U.N. at peacekeeping, Ratner applies his framework to discuss and evaluate the U.N. peacekeeping effort (UNTAC) in Cambodia. Third, and overshadowing in my view the extensive original research he offers on UNTAC, are the prescriptions he outlines for policy makers considering whether and how to undertake new U.N. peacekeeping operations.

In providing a paradigm for understanding peacekeeping, Professor Ratner emphasizes that, despite the array of terms employed at present, there exists two basic forms. Although sometimes referred to by him as the old and the new peacekeeping, or the first and the second generations of peacekeeping, he also emphasizes that these terms should not be taken as implying an evolution from one type to another. Both continue to exist. If one, the new, seemingly predominates at the moment this is because the type of situation it addresses also predominates. In archetypal terms, the old peacekeeping is a part of the avoidance of further violence through the freezing of a conflict, for example observing activities along a cease-fire line ("impasse management"). In contrast, the new peacekeeping is often a central part of the attempt to implement an agreed political resolution of a conflict, for example, the reconstruction of the Cambodia. In Ratner's view, the new peacekeeping consists of "UN operations, authorized by political organs or the Secretary-General, responsible for overseeing or executing the political solution of an interstate or internal conflict, with the consent of the parties." Thus while the old peacekeeping usually involves observation of an agreement aimed at avoiding aggravation of a conflict, the new peacekeeping aims "primarily at assisting a state or group of states in executing an agreed political solution to a conflict." While the old peacekeeping tends to involve only military mandates such as observing a cease fire line, the new peacekeeping "can have (and usually have had) a substantial or predominantly nonmilitary mandate and composition." Corollaries to these observations include (1) the new peacekeeping agenda is more complex. (2) the new peacekeeping involves more types of actors, including guerrilla movements, regional organizations, non governmental organizations and domestic political parties, and (3) the new peacekeeping is a fluid phenomenon in that the "UN may adjust the mandate of an operation to respond to the political situation on the ground, adding or eliminating tasks at the behest of the parties and the international community." Finally, central to this more complex peacekeeping is the existence of three, at time conflicting, roles for the UN: executor, mediator and guarantor.

In applying his framework to UNTAC, Professor Ratner's analysis is unparalleled. It offers a balanced careful assessment of the multifaceted UNTAC effort drawing upon extensive field research and his interviews with some four score plus persons involved in peacekeeping generally and UNTAC specifically. Professor Ratner eschews easy answers noting that the complexity of the agenda of the new peacekeeping necessarily means it is harder to define the dimensions by which to assess success. Yet, Professor Ratner finds, for example, that UNTAC was only "partly competent" in ensuring that its personnel understood the history, culture and current politics of Cambodia and that such lack of understanding arguably allowed predisposition to become manifest in actions and be interpreted as bias. As to the success of UNTAC in reconciling its three roles of executor, mediator and guarantor, Ratner offers insights but hesitates to judge the choices made by Akashi, the Special Representative chosen by the Secretary-General. "The second-guessing game has no end." He is, in contrast, critical of the U.N. staff present with UNTAC whose predisposition towards compromise and friendly relations, and simultaneous lack of personal experience in governmental administration, undercut the primary roles of executing and guaranteeing a settlement.

Professor Ratner's articulation of a paradigm for understanding the new peacekeeping and his careful dissection of UNTAC form the bases for the prescriptions he offers in his final two Chapters. In considering when policy-makers should undertake the new peacekeeping, Ratner stresses two core issues: "the amenability of the underlying conflict to UN participation in its solution and the capability of the Organization and its member states to effect useful involvement." The first core issue asks whether the parties have demonstrated a readiness to resolve the conflict and how the U.N. is to play a role in that resolution. The second issue asks whether the member states are ready to devote sufficient resources to the operation, whether there is sufficient time to prepare the operation -- including the recruitment of personnel, whether the right leadership exists to "execute" the political agreement while in all likelihood simultaneously "mediating" adjustments to that very same agreement (both to be accomplished without the U.N. losing its position as an honest broker), and whether adequate mechanisms for oversight by the U.N. will exist. Acknowledging that the U.N. is not yet ready for such new peacekeeping, Professor Ratner discusses the need for reform so as to enhance the Secretariat's capacity to integrate peacemaking and peacekeeping, to train personnel in, and later supervise, nonmilitary peacekeeping functions, to integrate human rights awareness in peacekeeping, to review procurement and recruitment procedures, and to coordinate its efforts with those of the Specialized Agencies. Professor Ratner finally emphasizes that the "burdens of leadership" ultimately fall on the members and political organs of the U.N. It is the members and U.N. political organs that are responsible for the articulation of policies which rest on the consensus of a broad base of states, which retain such broad support through appropriate oversight, which remain vital because they are adjusted or "reset" as the consent underlying the political 'solution' decays, and which remain credible because the necessary commitment of resources and people is made.

As many across the globe watch with anxiety the present arrival of the Implementation Force in Bosnia to implement the 1995 Dayton Accords, Professor Ratner's study is mandatory reading both for those who must "implement" those Accords and the many more who seek to make sense of this new peacekeeping.

David D. Caron, University of California at Berkeley