State-Building and the UN
The first decade of the 21st century has been a difficult one for the UN, as its credibility has taken a serious battering. Incidents such as the international furore provoked by the Volker report on the UN administration of the Iraq sanctions prior to the 2003 invasion, accusations of corruption against the previous UN Secretary General (UN SG) Kofi Annan’s son and allegations of financial impropriety by the ex-head of the Iraqi Oil-for-food programme were a significant embarrassment to the UN.
Moreover, UN peacekeepers, deployed to help maintain peace and ensure the safety of civilian populations in war-torn areas, were accused of rape and the forced prostitution of women and young girls in countries such as the Congo. Since their arrival in Haiti in 2004, UN peacekeepers have been accused of not only failing to protect ordinary Haitians from death squads and colluding with extremist forces threatening Lavalas Party and Aristide supporters but of being implicated in a range of atrocities, including murder and rape.
The failure to satisfactorily resolve the dispute amongst UN Security Council (UNSC) members over the invasion of Iraq dealt a substantial blow to the international legal order. The UN has become widely regarded by many in the South as an instrument of the North (Northern Hemisphere). They argue that international law has become an instrument of neo-colonialist policy with the UN at best a toothless body powerless to prevent this development, at worst a willing collaborator in this process.
This change in perception has led to the UN and its personnel having to substantially upgrade security measures upon deployment to post-conflict regions. Although UN peacekeepers had been targeted on several occasions in the past - Ireland alone has suffered some 86 peacekeeping fatalities in such missions - UN staff had tended to be relatively immune from such incidents.
The 2003 attack on the UN office in Baghdad firmly removed any lingering shreds of doubts the organisation might have had regarding the vulnerability of its personnel. The October 2009 assault on a UN guesthouse in Kabul, which resulted in 12 deaths, confirmed that the organisation was now in the eyes of many a legitimate target.
Yet only two decades previous, as the enmities of the Cold War were apparently fading away, political leaders from around the globe had been clamouring for the creation of a new international framework based on mutual cooperation.
This optimism soared ever higher when the US-led multinational force, sanctioned by UN Security Resolution (UNSR) 678, expelled Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait. The massacre of retreating Iraqi soldiers, predominantly conscripts, was studiously ignored by the trumpeters of the new dawn of global cooperation. The divisive political rivalries of the cold war were now allegedly a historical curiosity. According to George Bush senior:
… a new world order - can emerge:… An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony…. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.
Of course, this was nothing more than empty rhetoric on the part of Bush Snr., as the US or indeed the rest of the North had no intention of respecting the `rights´ of the weak, apart from when it was convenient to do so.
However, many were taken in by this empty pipedream and believed that the bi-polar global political structure might provide an opportunity to reassess many of the standard practices and traditional norms of international relations. In this respect the UN was no exception and so began to question hitherto sacrosanct international legal principles such as state sovereignty, non-intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states and the prohibition on the use of force in peace-keeping missions. Implicit in these developments was the expanded role the UN might play not only in maintaining peace but in state-building activities in ‘failed states’.
While today these issues might seem negligible, at the time they were regarded as quite revolutionary in scope. Furthermore, they demonstrated how far the UN had evolved from the original intentions of its founders.
As a result, the UN began to expand its role in post-conflict environments, as it was argued that `failed´ states required greater support in the development of improved governance structures and legal systems as well as substantial capacity building assistance to avoid relapsing into conflict.
The UN therefore started to expand its range of support functions to include an active involvement or taking the lead in state-building programmes. 1989 to 1993, saw eight such missions established in post-conflict countries - Namibia, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Liberia and Rwanda. In a relatively short space of time, state-building became the UN’s primary security activity.
UN State-building initiatives generally arise in two situations. Firstly, they are provided in the case of ‘failed states’ where
state apparatuses are unable to exercise full control over their respective territories, are unable to fulfill domestic and international development and legal obligations, lack effective national judicial systems to ensure the ‘rule of law,’ do not demonstrate the requisites of liberal democracy, and are unable to prevent their territories from being used in the perpetration of economic and other crimes. (Guttal 2005: 40)
In the second instance they occur in countries emerging from domestic conflict. The World Bank reported in 2006 that some 20 million people worldwide lost their lives through civil wars with another 67 million displaced. 16 of the 20 poorest countries globally had endured a major armed domestic conflict. These countries had become trapped in a vicious cycle where poverty was provoking conflict and conflict in turn was provoking poverty.
However, despite two decades of state-building, a high level of uncertainty remains as to how the UN might successfully make the leap from peacekeeping to state-building, which includes functions such as peace-building, “consolidation”, new governance and administrative support measures.
A principal focus area has been ‘governance’, through which the UN (and the North in general) hope to amalgamate the traditional functions of peacekeeping with the required socio-economic and political assistance to ‘consolidate’ peace. Generally, this entails the incorporation of significant capacity-building programmes which emphasise ‘good governance’ and the improvement of public sector capabilities through technical assistance support.
However, this approach has been widely criticised. How exactly will these governance and public sector management capacity building support mechanisms be comprised? Who will be responsible for their delivery? Who will decide which programs should be financed and the priorities of the ‘needs’ and how will current governance capability ‘gaps’ be identified?
The Peacebuilding Commission (PC) was established by world leaders attending the 2005 World Summit to provide an overall strategic approach to state-building. A year later, in October 2006, the Peacebuilding Fund was launched to support the Commission’s operations.
However, many observers have expressed their concerns regarding the PC´s neutrality, given the presence of all five of the Security Council’s permanent members as full-time members. Johan Galtung, Director of Transcend University in Romania, claims
… the commission will act in the interest of the great powers - particularly the US and the UK. In ways, they are generations behind in their thinking on peace - to them peacebuilding equals maintaining the status quo, which will not lead to any peace where there are global and societal inequalities and injustices. (Roughneen, 2006)
Moreover, despite the identified need for state-building assistance, the actual finance provided for such programmes is less forthcoming. This funding shortfall seriously hampers UN state-building activities. The corollary of this is the leverage this situation provides wealthier, donor nations that possess the necessary resources to pay for such state-building efforts. In exchange for their support they are able to exert considerable influence to ensure the UN’s state-building operations are devised and implemented in line with their own policy objectives.
The obvious example is the role the UN has played in Iraq subsequent to the 2003 invasion. Despite the offensive having been launched outside the ambit of the UN and without its backing, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1483 on May 22nd 2003, which recognised the US and UK as ‘occupying powers’. This resolution opened the door for the UN to step in and assist in the building of new ‘democratic’ structures.
UN acknowledgement of their status as ‘occupying powers’ also brought significant benefits to the US and UK. It helped them counter claims that they were acting solely or largely in their own interest in Iraq. Moreover, UN involvement helped them rally greater international support for the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq, politically as well as economically. Finally, UN presence allowed the ‘occupying powers’ operate, in theory at least, at one remove from the Iraqi government and administrative structures, thus facilitating their claim that they were not merely puppets of the US.
However, while the ‘occupying powers’, and Iraqi authorities might have profited from UN participation in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq, this approach entailed considerable risks for the UN itself. By aligning itself with the ‘occupying powers’, the UN became a lightning rod for the discontent of their opponents, leading to the 19 August 2003 attack on the UN office in Baghdad that resulted in 23 fatalities.
Another area of controversy area has been the UN´s assumption of actual governmental powers in a number of states, as has been the case with certain `transitional administrations´. These administrations have traditionally been established when prior state institutions collapsed due to conflict between various domestic factions as in Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzogovina or where such institutional structures did not exist at all as in East Timor, Afghanistan and Namibia. The invasion of Iraq saw a third type of transitional administration, one where the state in question already had a substantial level of human, institutional and economic resources.
The involvement of the UN in transitional administrations has been widely criticised as, at best, a dubious application of the UN’s expertise. In its efforts to introduce new government structures and legal systems, the UN has adopted an approach of ‘benevolent autocracy’, whereby the concerned state and its citizens find themselves obliged to submit to the UN’s dictates. For many, this is totally contrary to the original mandate of the UN where the sovereignty of states was deemed more or less inviolable.
Moreover, why should the UN be allowed determine the future political, economic and legal structure of any state? This issue is of particular concern for the South which tends to decry the establishment of systems and structures of governance, virtually totally predicated on those of the North, irrespective of the relevant state’s political, economic, social and cultural heritage.
It is clear the UN record in state-building operations has been for the most part a failure. The UN has engaged in a rote application of state-building programmes based on neo-liberal, ‘western’ democratic ideals. If the UN is to maintain its involvement in state-building - a debatable issue in itself - it must prioritise indigenous and domestic political and socio-cultural practices and the development of locally-compatible government and administrative structures.
In the final analysis, it is important to bear in mind that the UN is not an independent or autonomous organisation. Its member states decide what it can and cannot do. It is hard to dispute the fact that the richer states in the North have a disproportionate influence on the UN´s state-building interventions.
Bibliography
Guttal, S. (2005a) ‘Reconstruction: A Glimpse into an Emerging Paradigm’, Silent War
The US’ Ideological and Economic Occupation of Iraq, (Focus on the Global South Publication),
Roughneen, S. (2006) Challenges Ahead for UN Peace Commission.
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