Conceptual foundations of peacekeeping within the UN

Torosian Akop Coordinator of the Vitaly Churkin Moscow International Model of the United Nations, UNA-Russia 129090, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, Prospekt Mira, 36 akop_08_93@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Against the background of the recent intensification of regional organizations in peacekeeping^[1], it is periodically mentioned that the UN does not have a monopoly on peacekeeping. At the same time, the leading role in the conduct of peacekeeping operations undoubtedly belongs to this organization, and its principles of peacekeeping are considered universal.

The functioning of the UN peacekeeping mechanism and the activities of the Security Council in the field of peacekeeping operations seem appropriate to be viewed through the prism of constructivism, since the UN Charter not only does not contain a definition of "peacekeeping", but also does not mention the term itself in principle. In other words, there has been the development and gradual legitimization by the United Nations and its Member States of norms and practices related to peacekeeping operations on the basis of time-limited Security Council resolutions authorizing operations and defining their mandate, as well as documents containing the key principles of peacekeeping practice set out in other Security Council documents and Reports of the Secretary-General, which put forward proposals for the improvement and development of peacekeeping. Thus, the meaning invested in conducting peacekeeping operations is a combination of their perception by the international community^[2] with compliance with proven principles that have proven their relevance.

Within the framework of this article, it seems, following the theory of institutionalized leadership, the Security Council is considered as a single group uniting countries, including those acting as "great powers" and being the guarantor of the world order as a whole. Such a group should strive for regular interaction and be responsible for the functioning of the entire system of international relations; it should be compact in composition, have sufficient strength to maintain world order, have limited membership and a high degree of institutionalization^[3]. The Security Council has similar parameters, which unites a limited number of states and includes permanent members ("great powers") who have exclusive rights (in particular, through the right of veto) to influence the activities of the UN, including in the field of peacekeeping. The documents prepared by the Security Council itself or at its request, including those of a recommendatory nature, are considered by us as a manifestation of the will of the institutional leader forming the agenda in this area as a whole.

Conceptualization of the principles of UN peacekeeping: from collective security to peacekeepingThe legal basis of peacekeeping activities used by the UN Security Council in developing the mandates of specific peacekeeping operations are Chapters VI (Peaceful settlement of disputes) and VII (Actions against threats to peace, violations of peace and acts of aggression)

The UN Charter^[4]. Recently, in connection with the increase in the intensity of involvement of regional organizations in the process of conducting peacekeeping operations, Chapter VIII (Regional agreements) has also been of particular importance. The uniqueness of the conceptual approaches of the UN to peacekeeping is that it is perceived as an activity "at the junction" of Chapters VI and VII of the Charter, combining the principles of peaceful settlement of disputes and enforcement of peace; in this connection, Secretary General Dag Hammerscheld called Chapter VII "Chapter 6.5"^[5].

The above-mentioned duality is inextricably linked with the stagnation of the implementation of Articles 45-47 of Chapter VII of the Charter, which presuppose active participation in peacekeeping activities of the UN Military Staff Committee and its use "for joint international coercive actions"^[6]. The functioning of such a structure corresponded to the principle of collective security and implied the cooperation of the five permanent members of the Security Council to prevent potential armed conflicts, but with the beginning of the cold War after 1947, the application of these articles became virtually impossible. As Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali notes in the introduction to the third edition of the UN book "Blue Helmets", the approaches to resolving crisis situations contained in the UN Charter are based precisely on the principle of collective security and are radically different from those peacekeeping practices that are observed today^[7]. The process of putting together the fundamental principles of the UN's activities aimed at maintaining peace has come a long way, since 1948, when military observers ("blue berets") were deployed in the Middle East with the sanction of the Security Council in accordance with Article 40 of the Charter The UN and the UN Body was created to monitor the terms of the truce in Palestine^[8]. An important milestone in the history of peacekeeping operations is considered to be 1956, when for the first time in the history of the Organization's existence, against the background of the Suez crisis, a contingent of the UN Emergency Armed Forces (UNEF I) was stationed on the territory of a foreign state — Egypt^[9].

It is from the moment of the involvement of the UN Security Council I that the process of folding the key conceptual foundations of UN peacekeeping — the three key principles of peacekeeping, which will be discussed below ^[10], can be counted. The activities of the UN emergency armed Forces could be approved only after the establishment of the mission by the UN Security Council and obtaining permission from the countries involved in the conflict. Firstly, the deployed forces had to be absolutely impartial, that is, not to side with any of the parties to the conflict. Secondly, they had to be multinational and have the right to use weapons exclusively for self-defense.

The principle of consent of the parties to the conflictLet's consider the features of the application of the principles of UN peacekeeping and their evolution over time.

The main stumbling block in the case of the principle of "consent of the parties to the conflict" is the question of whether it is necessary to take into account the opinion of all participants without exception, which is why in the literature one can often find a refined version of this principle, which consists in resolving the "main" conflicting parties ^[11]. This principle is based on one of the fundamental provisions of the UN Charter, according to which peacekeeping forces (like any actor in world politics in principle) should not interfere in the internal affairs of a state, while this principle of peacekeeping also applies not only to UN missions, but also to operations conducted by regional organizations.

In this context, it is also necessary to take into account the difference between the concepts of "peacekeeping" and "peace enforcement": in the first case, the consent of the parties concerned is required, whereas in the second, the UN Security Council has the right to use coercive measures in order to eliminate "threats to the peace, any violation of the peace or an act of aggression" without taking into account the opinions of the conflicting parties.

Disputes around the first principle are being conducted with respect to the number of parties whose resolution is required to start a peacekeeping mission. Firstly, a party to the conflict may, after a period of time, withdraw its permission to engage the UN peacekeeping contingent, after which all its activities must be completed, and its participants must leave the conflict territory. An example of a similar fate of a peacekeeping mission is the UN Mission in Chad and the Central African Republic (MINURCAT), during which in 2010 the Government of Chad demanded that the UN Secretary-General curtail the mission launched in 2007 after negotiations, and after the Government of Chad assured of the ability to ensure security in the region, all UN peacekeepers left the country^[12]. Only civilian representatives of the UN political mission remained in Chad.

Secondly, not only government forces can take part in the conflict, but also numerous disparate groups with no unified command center, as a result of which there is a problem of taking into account the opinions of small groups, without which at the same time the peace process is impossible. Thus, during the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Lebanon in 1978, Hezbollah and the Palestine Liberation Organization often did not fulfill the established requirements for achieving peace, which were agreed upon by the Governments of Lebanon and Israel, which led to a significant slowdown in the establishment of peace in the region^[13]. Despite the fact that the clarified wording of the agreement of the "main" parties to the conflict, mentioned by us, appears more and more often in official UN documents today, it is often necessary for the participation of all parties involved in the confrontation to achieve peace.

The principle of impartialityThe second principle, which is among the key conceptual foundations of UN peacekeeping operations, is impartiality.

Such a position guarantees the non-involvement of the peacekeeping contingent in an armed conflict between the parties and its non-participation directly in hostilities; at the same time, as a rule, peacekeeping forces are deployed only after the conclusion of a ceasefire agreement, which should minimize the risk of possible involvement of peacekeepers in armed clashes. In addition, official UN documents confirm the need for the parties concerned to strive for peace, a process in which UN forces can only play a supporting role.

Since the beginning of the UNEF mission I, the principle of impartiality, as well as the principle of consent of the parties, has undergone a conceptual evolution. Initially, "impartiality" was understood as the neutrality of the participation of the peacekeeping contingent, which, regardless of the course of the conflict, should not have been involved in hostilities and used force; however, over time, the concept of "tough measures (operations) for peacekeeping" (Eng. robust peacekeeping) appeared. So, in 2000, the UN Secretary-General K. Annan instructed a group of international experts, headed by former Algerian Foreign Minister L. Brahimi, to develop recommendations for improving UN peacekeeping, the result of which was the report of the High-level Panel on UN Peace Operations ("Brahimi Report") in 2000. As it is noted in it, in the case of a clear violation of the peace conditions and the unwillingness of one of the parties to contribute to the development of the peace process, the effectiveness of the UN mission may be called into question, as a result of which the authors of the report conclude that "impartiality" is not equivalent to neutrality and treatment of all parties on equal terms ^[14]. Such a position refers to the genocide in Rwanda, where in 1994 the UN peacekeeping mission was unable to prevent the mass extermination of Rwandan Tutsis, which led to the death of about a million people. In general, at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, there is an expansion of the conceptual field associated with UN peacekeeping: for example, under Secretary General K. Annan, concepts such as "preventive deployment", "preventive humanitarian assistance" and "preventive peace-building" were introduced into the language of UN documents^[15], which indicates the expansion of the functionality of peacekeeping missions as such and an expanded interpretation of the key principles of peacekeeping.

The principle of non-use of force

The third fundamental principle of UN peacekeeping — the principle of "non-use of force" - has undergone an even greater conceptual evolution. During the Cold War, there was an official ban on the use of force by peacekeeping contingents, but after the 1990s, due to the emergence of new challenges to peacekeeping by non-state actors and the transformation of the activities of peacekeeping forces^[16], which also began to take part in conflicts without an agreement between the participants in the confrontation, on which the mandate of the operation could later be based^[17], the discussion around the "classical" principles of peacekeeping activity intensified; as a result, the term "new type of operations" ("hard operations"), already mentioned earlier, appeared. As a consequence of this evolution of the possibility of UN peacekeepers using weapons outside the classical competence of self-defense, difficulties with determining the nature of the mission have become difficult; it has become difficult to distinguish between the formulas of "peacekeeping" (that is, peacekeeping based on Article VI of the Charter) and "peace enforcement" (collective security based on Article VII). The 1992 report "Agenda for Peace" is also devoted to the analysis of the current problem, in which the interpretation of the concept of peacekeeping was expanded: in the event of a failure of a mission using peaceful means, the Security Council could use methods involving armed forces. Based on this approach, UN Secretary-General B. Boutros-Ghali took the initiative to create special "peace enforcement units" that could be used during a peacekeeping operation in the event that classical means were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, over time, the format of "hard" peacekeeping did not justify itself, and in 1995, in an Addendum to the Report, the authors recognized the need to distinguish between the concepts of "peacekeeping" and "peace enforcement"^[18], returning to the classical interpretation of the principle of "non-use of force".

At the same time, the discussion around "tough" peacekeeping was conditioned by the inability of the "Blue Helmets" to take measures in case of a threat to the civilian population, and the procedure for the actions of peacekeepers in case of deterioration of the situation in the country of conflict, as in the case of the genocide in Rwanda, has not been worked out. At the UN level, this issue was raised only in 2000 in the Brahimi Report, where it was noted that peacekeepers should use armed force against those parties who, having signed a peace agreement, systematically violate it^[19]. Thus, by the second half of the 2000s, the wording on the use of force by peacekeepers to protect civilians and maintain order in the territory of the mission was fixed in the practice of the UN. In addition, we are talking about those cases when the government is not able to ensure order in the controlled territories by itself, and instead a UN peacekeeping mission is authorized to carry out the tasks of maintaining security in the region.

The discussion around the limits of the use of force by peacekeeping missions continues to this day. The events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013, when the UN Security Council added a special "operational intervention brigade" to the UN mission, whose goal was to eliminate armed groups on the territory of the DRC, are indicative. This topic has become the subject of active discussion among political scientists specializing in peacekeeping issues. In their opinion, despite the fact that the UN resolution on the DRC emphasized the temporary nature of the deployment of a special group, the legitimacy of attracting such a unit, which in its goals contradicts the key principles of a peacekeeping operation, raises questions^[20], especially considering that the success of its activities can be considered doubtful, including due to the murder In February 2021, on the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italian Ambassador to the country Luca Attanasio, who was traveling in a convoy of the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUC) to Rutshuru to provide humanitarian assistance to a local school under the auspices of the World Food Program (WFP)^[21].

ConclusionDespite the discussions around the expanded interpretation of the key principles of UN peacekeeping, which form its conceptual basis, the principles themselves are today considered unshakable and without alternative.

Thus, in the report on the results of the session of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, held from February 16 to March 11, 2016 in New York, it was emphasized that the activities of UN peacekeeping operations should be based on the three principles described above: the mission must obtain the consent of the parties to its activities, be impartial, andThe "Blue Helmets" have the right to use weapons only for self-defense and the fulfillment of the mandate^[22]. The Russian Federation consistently advocates that all UN peacekeeping operations should be conducted strictly in accordance with the above principles.

There is no doubt that peacekeeping has become an effective tool of the UN for the prevention and containment of armed conflicts; its very concept is a vivid illustration of the flexible policy in the field of global governance, which was mentioned earlier, namely, the simultaneous adaptation of policy and its proactive innovation. Peacekeeping has become one of the most important priorities of the UN in ensuring international peace and security; probably the most important of the UN's political inventions designed to fill a gap in a situation where the concept of collective security could not be implemented due to the unfolding cold war and despite the obvious need for tools for global conflict management.

The conceptualization of the principles of UN peacekeeping reflects the processes of evolution of the system of international relations in the bipolar and post-bipolar period in general, and the UN in particular. The impossibility of implementing the original ideas laid down in the UN Charter prompted States to develop flexible mechanisms for responding and adapting the Organization to current conditions and moving from the concept of collective security to modern peacekeeping practices; the key principles that laid the foundation for UN peacekeeping operations were gradually formed. Along with the above—mentioned principles — the consent of the parties, impartiality and non-use of force - there are also such fundamental components of the success of peacekeeping operations as general guidance from the founding body, that is, the UN Security Council, as well as the order of management and control over international peacekeeping forces that operate under the leadership of the UN Security Council, but are under the command of the Secretary General. a secretary who speaks on behalf of the UN and has political guidelines from the Security Council.

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