Successes and Failures of United Nations Peace Operations

Abstract

What does ‘success’ in peace operations mean? Is it purely the absence of hostilities or should it also be measured in terms of civilian suffering? Did a UN peacekeeping mission succeed because it fulfilled its mandate of monitoring elections or did it fail because it was not able to prevent civilian massacres in the areas where peacekeepers were deployed? Peace operations conducted by the United Nations remain under close scrutiny from both scholars and practitioners. This article examines the existing measures of UN’s effectiveness, proposes a new scale of measurement of successes and failures of UN PKO’s and examines 6 cases of UN PKO’s in Africa (UNTAG in Namibia, ONOMOZ in Mozambique, UNAMIR in Rwanda, UNOSOM in Somalia, MINURCA in Central African Republic, ONUB in Burundi) across proposed measures. The definition of success offered in this article (limiting violent conflict, reducing human suffering, preventing conflict from spreading, and preventing war from recurring) does two important things: 1) it acknowledges the different nuances, voices, and forces — international and domestic, societal and institutional — affecting whether a mission may or may not be considered successful; 2) it insists that the human dimension remains the primary criterion for such considerations. A more nuanced consideration of “success” and a close look at so many cases is relevant not only to conceptual debates about these issues but also to “real” policy in the past, present, and future. The article concludes that the suggested measures of success/failure lead to a more nuanced evaluation of UN’s performance.