¿Son útiles las Misiones de Paz?

Un pregunta que se repite: cuán útiles y necesarias resultan ser las misiones de paz. Seguramente una de difícil respuesta. Pero, sí, probablemente, la pregunta equivocada si se analizan cuáles serían las condiciones de vida de determinados lugares sin la presencia de estas fuerzas internacionales.

Recent Focus on Cost Obscures U.N. Peacekeeping's Strategic Successes

Argentine NCO in Haiti.

By Bruce D. Jones | 14 Mar 2012

The past year could have been a disastrous one for U.N. peacekeeping. Twelve months ago, Côte d’Ivoire appeared to be on the brink of renewed civil war in spite of the presence there of United Nations and French forces. South Sudan’s vote for independence in January 2011 also had the potential to unleash mass violence. From Haiti to Liberia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, peacekeepers were charged with overseeing elections that might have resulted in significant instability. In Somalia, U.N.-mandated African Union (AU) forces were locked in grinding combat with Islamist al-Shabab rebels.


The risk of one or more of these situations spiraling out of control was high. Some came very close to doing so. For the first three months of 2011, the U.N. was on the defensive in Côte d’Ivoire. Thousands of civilians lost their lives before the Security Council ordered peacekeepers there to take more robust action. The U.N. force in Sudan was rendered helpless when Northern and Southern forces clashed in the disputed region of Abyei. The U.N. had known its contingent in the area was vulnerable, but had to deploy an entirely new mission to restore order.

Yet peace operations demonstrated an unexpected degree of resilience overall, as chronicled in the Center on International Cooperation’s new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations. The U.N. reasserted itself in Côte d’Ivoire, and though presidential polls in the DRC proved to be deeply flawed, those in Haiti and Liberia were conducted relatively smoothly thanks in part to the U.N. In Somalia, al-Shabab pulled back from Mogadishu as the AU forces took the initiative. Other regional organizations also found themselves being drawn into peace operations: The Arab League sent an admittedly ill-fated observer mission to Syria, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations mandated an observer mission to help reduce tensions on the Thai-Cambodian border.

Yet these developments had surprisingly little impact on policy debates about the future of peacekeeping at the U.N. and in other organizations in 2011. Rather than talking about the effects of operations, diplomats and officials have developed one obsession: what operations cost.

From 2008 to 2010, the global economic downturn had only a marginal effect on peacekeeping. Western powers, led by the Obama administration, remained ready to fund the bulk of the U.N. and AU operations, while also sustaining NATO deployments. This has started to change over the past year as the financial crisis has made itself felt in the world of peace operations.

In New York, 2011 saw a fierce debate over the rate of reimbursements to the U.N.’s troop contributors -- still primarily from Asia, Africa and Latin America. For the past decade, the troop suppliers have received just more than $1,000 per month per soldier. Last summer, they demanded a 57 percent increase. Western governments pushed back, eventually agreeing to a temporary deal for a 7 percent hike.

There were also serious arguments among Western countries about the costs of the U.N. missions in South Sudan, Haiti and Liberia. U.S., British and French officials traded barbs in the media over austerity, with the U.S. accusing the Europeans of pushing for unwarranted U.N. budget cuts.

Cost issues are not solely confined to the U.N. The European Union, which had been mandating an increasing number of missions prior to the financial crisis, has become wary of new operations. Analysts are still trying to interpret how cuts to NATO member countries’ defense budgets will restrain future deployments.

Advocates of peacekeeping tend to react badly to being challenged over the costs involved. They point to the relatively low price of U.N. and AU missions, at present less than $10 billion a year combined, and compare this to the sums devoted to trying to save the euro in 2011. The current level of spending on peace operations is also soon likely to fall as NATO draws down in Afghanistan and the U.N. implements plans to reduce its missions in a number of cases, including Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But there is little to be gained from avoiding or dismissing debates over the costs of peacekeeping. Instead, there is a strong case for using the current combination of strategic and financial pressures as the basis for a more serious debate about how peace operations are run.

Such a debate would start from two presumptions. First, the financial pressures are real and denying them is foolish. Second, the demand for effective peacekeeping operations is equally real, whether in Côte d’Ivoire or Syria. Trying to cut costs just to save money is a mistake. Refusing to accept the need to spend money more effectively is just as mistaken.

Instead, it is necessary to analyze the political economy and strategic logic of peacekeeping. The ongoing debates over the reimbursement rates for countries supplying peacekeepers need to be tied to more honest evaluations of the effectiveness of the forces involved. Can the systems for funding the supply of personnel and assets to the U.N. -- or any other organization -- be better calibrated to improve their impact in the field? Is it possible to distinguish more reliably between those cases where significant long-term military deployments are a necessity or a luxury?

The reimbursement debate in 2011 did at least result in the creation of a Senior Advisory Group of international experts tasked with reviewing how U.N. troop contributors are compensated. If the members of this group are ambitious, they could spark a broader rethinking of how to make peacekeeping more effective by tying the way peace operations are funded to improving their performance.

As the past year has shown, peacekeeping is an effective and necessary part of the international security tool kit. It would be tragic if debates about current and future operations were reduced to arguments about funding, leaving fragile states and vulnerable populations out of the equation.

Bruce Jones is the director of the Center on International Cooperation and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This article is an edited and updated version of his foreword to the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations