Overall the United Nations Record on Peacekeeping has been a successful one.

When United Nations (UN) troops are deployed their goal is not to fight enemy troops or to

conquer territories, but to protect the peace between parties previously at war (Deutsche Welle,

2012). The UN regards its history of peacekeeping as one with an impressive record of

achievements. It cites the operations carried out in Tajikistan, Namibia, Mozambique, Guatemala,

El Salvador and Cambodia as examples of peacekeeping operations where UN troops successfully

conducted missions which ended conflicts and promoted reconciliation (UN, n.d.) However, there

have been a number of failures which shed a bad light on the peacekeepers with the UN missions

to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, Rwanda in 1994 and Somalia in 1993 standing out as the ones

which arguably failed most notably (Deutsche Welle, 2012).

Mathias Dembinski of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt argues that due to the increasingly

comprehensive nature of peacekeeping missions it has become very difficult to evaluate whether a

peacekeeping mission has been successful (Deutsche Welle, 2012). Other analysts are less

diplomatic with Boot arguing that the UN’s record of peacekeeping was one of “almost unrelieved

failure”. Boot based his argument on the failure to of UN troops to prevent the killings of over

800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and the “worse than useless” intervention of UN troops in

Bosnia (Boot, 2000). Boot’s argument however does not reflect the complexity of the situation in

Bosnia. While the UN intervention and the delivery of humanitarian aid were certainly prolonging

this conflict it also saved many peoples’ lives (Shawcross, 2000).

The above examples show that there is a certain difference in opinion among analysts as to

whether the UN’s record of peacekeeping is a successful one. Empirical evidence shows that the

establishment of durable, long-term peace conditions are fostered by peacekeeping missions.

However the short-term effects of peacekeeping operations can be different. Hultman argues that

peacekeeping missions can have unintended negative effects of creating violence against civilians

by rebel groups. However, if these missions had a clear-cut mandate to protect civilians, evidence

also shows that violence against civilians by rebel groups had been reduced. Therefore it is

important that the success of peacekeeping missions is evaluated against the specific mandate of

every mission (Hultman, 2010).

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When we look at the political process of drafting a specific mandate for a UN peacekeeping

operation we notice that these processes are often shaped by the reluctance of one or more

members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to become too involved in a conflict (Findlay, 2002).

Therefore the variations in the scope of mandates not only reflect the needs essential to resolve

the conflict but also the political interests of certain states. This, in extension, means that the

success of a mission is also influenced by politics (Allen & Yuen, 2014) The political influences on a

successful peacekeeping mission could arguably been observed most clearly in the recent Syrian

crisis, where no mission could be established due to contrasting political interests by members of

the UNSC.

Whether the UN peacekeeping record can be deemed a successful one also depends on the

definition of success in the context of peacekeeping. Hultman, among others, has in her work

already differentiated between short and long-term success and argued that the mandate

fulfilment should be used as criteria. Further to that Heldt and Wallensteen raise the question

whether resource limitations and/or recalcitrance of the warring parties must be taken into

account. Likewise we must consider if limitations of casualties, conflict containment, the

facilitation of conflict resolution or the establishment of democracy are the defining criteria (Heldt

& Wallensteen, 2006). If we therefore accept that the definition of successful peacekeeping is not

an exact science, than we must also accept that the same is true for the definition of failure in

peacekeeping. Likewise it is hard to establish exactly how much credit (or blame) the UN should

take for changes in any given peacekeeping operation, especially as the different criteria are

dependent on each other (Doyle et al, 1997).

In an attempt to quantify the success rate of UN peacekeeping missions Heldt and Wallensteen

have established that the success rate of interstate peacekeeping missions has been much higher

than those of intrastate missions, with virtually no ongoing conflicts once interstate missions had

been deployed and ongoing conflicts in one fifth of the intrastate missions deployed between

1948 and 2004 (Heldt & Wallensteen, 2006). Whether this is a remarkable success rate is arguably

open to further discussion.

Conclusion

The failures of UN peacekeeping have indeed been prominent. The massacres of innocent civilians

in Bosnia and Rwanda casted a very bad light on the UN peacekeeping operations. Have these

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failures been offset by other, more successful missions? I think yes. Every life saved is valuable and

while the UN peacekeeping record is far from perfect it can most certainly be credited with saving

the lives of many innocent people. That is why every peacekeeping mission should be evaluated

independently and judged carefully as to whether its mandate has been fulfilled and if it has been

adjusted quickly enough in case the realities on the ground changed. Trying to measure the

success of peacekeeping on an overall scale is perhaps not the best way to judge it as missions

vary too much in their basis of deployment, evolvement over time and (political) stakeholder

interests. The modus operandi of peacekeeping must therefore continuously be challenged and

lessons must be learned from failures in order to prevent failures in the future. Avoiding to repeat

mistakes of the past ensures success in the future.

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