The Limits of UN Multidimensional Peace Operations

Abstract

This chapter considers the emerging matrix of norms that embrace an ethos of human security at a number of levels, within and between societies, and through a variety of institutions and regimes. The contemporary — and perhaps Eurocentric — commitment to the ‘mission’ of democratization and the emergence of humanitarian intervention as a response to human security issues, tends to underpin this. Yet, while many have seen these developments as a fulfilment of the UN’s originally intended role, in practice many new questions have been raised. Somewhere in between the global and the local, it is argued here, is located the traditional international system of Westphalian states, within which power-politics continues to condition diplomatic discourse about international and intrastate conflict, and about the activities of international organizations. This system coexists, somewhat uncomfortably, with a pattern of civil or ethnic conflict and an emerging post-Westphalian international system, in the midst of dilemmas of economic, military and cultural insecurity in a globalizing, fragmenting, and interdependent environment.

The UN is an international body with a contradiction at its core. It is an association of sovereign states brought into existence by those states in order to curb the shortcomings of the state.…^l

in its work … the United Nations has already started to embrace a new holistic sense of security. Its efforts to reduce poverty and promote development and democratization — including electoral assistance and civil education — have gradually become more comprehensive and more integrated. All of those efforts may be described as preventive peace-building, since they attack the root causes of conflict.²