The United Nations and Conflict Prevention in the Post Cold War Era

Magisterarbeit von Aren Sarikyan

Introduction:

Following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, world affairs have entered into a new era of hopes, opportunities, threats and challenges significantly reframing the international relations of the late twentieth century and beyond. It was a momentum that states, governments, and organizations worldwide embraced with expectations and visions of change. So did the United Nations (UN).

The new era was particularly promising for this universal organization as it had presumably overcome the paralyzed nature of its functioning throughout the Cold War. Moreover, the UN was deemed to have acquired the freedom and authority it needs to exercise its primary obligation enshrined in the Charter, i.e. to prevent and remove through collective efforts threats to the peace, to suppress acts of aggression and to resolve international disputes through peaceful means and „in conformity with the principles of justice and international law.“ The first sentence in the preamble of the Charter, while claiming the international community's determination „to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,“ illustrates the high cause attached to the birth of the organization with a clear link to preventing armed conflicts.

The basic idea of preventing armed conflicts is not novel, and the term preventive diplomacy was coined by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld already in 1960. Initially the term was understood in the context of the Cold War, when UN efforts were undertaken to eliminate localized disputes and wars that could have provoked wider confrontations between the two superpowers.

Notwithstanding its conceptual importance and available operational tools, conflict prevention received little attention at the margins of global power politics. Traditional diplomatic instruments such as mediation, conciliation, good offices, continued to define the toolbox of conflict prevention activities. Preventive diplomacy, however, received particular attention because of the way Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali broadened and publicized it in his by now well-known report Agenda for Peace. The need for credible early warning mechanisms and fact-finding missions was equally prioritized.

Since the end of the Cold War, the necessity to move from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention has been incessantly emphasized and gradually reinforced into unequivocal policy through numerous General Assembly resolutions, Security Council resolutions and presidential statements, as well as through various reports and speeches by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In addition, the growing number of armed conflicts in the beginning of the 1990s, albeit most of them of civil war nature, has in turn incurred considerable pressure on the international community to reduce human suffering. Thus, the dire need to tackle conflict prevention policy into concrete actions can also be attributed to rapid proliferation of violent conflicts generating unprecedented destruction and grave human rights violations.

The failure of the United Nations, as the embodiment of the international community, to prevent large-scale atrocities such as in Rwanda and the Balkans clearly point to deficient implementation of the organization's pursued goals. Systematic failures to prevent conflicts have resulted in abundant scholarly literature attempting to explain their complex causes, as well as the role and functions of relevant institutions tasked with their containment, de-escalation, and resolution.

This work attempts to identify and analyze constraints to effective conflict prevention policies pursued and practiced at the UN level. The term policy - understood as a notion including both decisions and actions, taken under the loop later in this work - may be useful in providing a core concept, while enabling other variables such as actors engaged in decision-making processes and various tools employed to carry out these decisions to be operationalized.

Given the multiplicity of actors and complex processes conjoining both ends of policy making and implementation, thus creating a common domain for the observed phenomenon, the notion of policy will serve as a point of analytical departure and will streamline the scope of its explanatory claims. Meticulous analysis of the factors conditioning cognitive behavior of actors within a larger decision-making process (policymaking), as well as specific actions stemming from such processes and interactions (policy implementation), requires dismantling the umbrella concept policy into two subordinate ones and testing - in light of relevant theories and empirical evidence - working hypotheses pertinent to these subconcepts.

Two megatheories of international relations encompassing a number of other significant theories, namely realism and pluralism, will provide the analytical vertebrae of this work. Policy-relevant theories will supplement to understanding decision-making and bureaucratic processes both on domestic and international levels and will further provide analytical insights through rational and cognitive choice theories.

Research Question and Operationalization:

As already mentioned above, the purpose of this work is to identify and analyze constraints to effective UN policy making and implementation to prevent armed conflicts.

The objective of the analysis stems from a supposition that, despite the widely favored and accepted form by the United Nations to secure peace and stability worldwide through conflict prevention, it has not succeeded to forestall armed conflicts and impede large-scale human suffering in several post-Cold War crisis situations it has intervened. Inferring from this supposition, the following hypothetical statement can be outlined: there are constraints to UN decision-making and implementation processes that condition the degree of effectiveness in preventing violent armed conflicts.

Constraints, in this work, are conceived to be factors hindering either effective decision-making of the organization or the successful implementation of its proclaimed goals and/or missions with tools available for conflict prevention. Effectiveness, on the other hand, can be assessed through juxtaposing the outcome produced as a result of UN intervention in a particular crisis with the decisions and actions taken to prevent its escalation into an armed confrontation.

Effectiveness is used with several functions in this work. On the one hand, it helps us assess the outcome of preventive missions without running to extremes and defining policies as merely successful or failed, i.e. it provides us with a certain degree of elasticity and flexibility to evaluate given missions by contrasting their consequences with pursued or proclaimed objectives, and to see whether their effects are positive or negative. This can be achieved through evaluation of the impact exerted on human and material loss, as well as through their contribution to averting violence. On the other hand, however linked to the former function, it helps us build working hypotheses that can be tested against the empirical data in case studies.

What one might spontaneously feel to be confronted with at the initial stage of analysis is the multiplicity and complexity of connotations the term policy entails. Since conflict prevention policies, seen through both decisions and actions, may roughly be divided into two domains of investigation (yet not separated as they are interrelated) and where pertaining to those concepts variables such as decision-makers and instruments tend to maintain a causal relationship, it would be reasonable, perhaps in practical terms, to investigate both domains separately, while taking into consideration how decisions impact the choices of actions, and how the former can be influenced by the consequences of these actions.

Such an approach enables us to establish a cyclical causal relationship, i.e. from policy making to implementation, and then proceeding back to policy making in form of policy feedback. Viewing this kind of interaction as cyclical also implies that policy making is a continual process where each notion in the cycle is both a dependent and an independent variable at distinct stages and in specified relations - a model that renders segmented operationalization possible. Patterned analysis is often beneficial for creating an order and where overlapping concepts can be discerned and analyzed while avoiding overall confusion.

Decisions made in the Security Council - the UN authoritative body whose resolutions are legitimately binding for all member states - are extending into foreign policy making of individual states, which in turn may be influenced by both state and non-state actors. Thus, taking into account only the mechanisms and tools available to the UN will not be sufficient to understand the conflict prevention agenda of the organization. Prudent examination of major interest groups involved in the process of making up such policies (before they land in the UN and speak in one common voice on behalf of a state) is indispensable for understanding the stakes attached to particular situations.

Moreover, the choices of the tools to regulate crisis situations may differ from member state to member state based on preferences, which may result not only in belated action to preclude threats but also in considerable inaction. For that purpose, major assumptions of realist, pluralist as well as policy-relevant theories will be applied to provide extensive theoretical groundwork for deeper analysis of foreign policymaking procedures at the domestic level and their transmittance or transformation in the international system.

Guided by this spirit, part one presents the above-mentioned two dominant paradigms in international relations theory along with their critical observations on peace, security and cooperation. Essential to this work concepts such as state and non-state actors in international relations, the international system as such, the role of institutions in world politics, emerging transnationalism and interdependence as factors in stability and vulnerability are discussed here.

In addition, policy-relevant theories will attempt to uncover some relevant bargaining and negotiating processes between competing interest groups, and will further elucidate relevant bureaucratic and organizational structures streamlining or constraining such processes. The purpose here is to create an extensive theoretical basis that can be utilized to critical and prudent analysis of the surveyed phenomenon.

Part two, which is both descriptive and analytical, provides approaches to understanding conflicts along with their trends and possible causes. It takes into account the altered nature of the international system of the post-Cold War environment and reveals the complexity of intrastate conflicts - a prevailing dilemma for the UN in regard to intervention and sovereignty. How the United Nations perceives conflicts and what measures it employs to forestall them, whether operational prevention (measures applicable in the face of immediate crisis) or structural prevention (measures to ensure that crisis do not arise in the first place or, if they do, that they do not recur), are further discussed here. To what extent conflict prevention policy has been substantiated in UN legal and institutional realms - how far it has moved from rhetoric to practice - is equally reflected in this chapter.

In part three, the two domains supporting the umbrella concept for conflict prevention policy are further dismantled and analyzed in terms of their constituents. The first part deals with major actors preoccupied with decision-making processes, where who and why questions attempt to reveal actors and their motivations, interests, rights and obligations attached to particular situations. The second part tackles instruments at the UN's disposal while considering what and how questions as to the choice of the tools and their application in the implementation of prevention policies.

Both actors and tools of conflict prevention are examined, while applying relevant theories, through reversed disposition of constituents in each stage of the cycle (dependent variables) against their preceding ones (independent variables), i.e. through analytical juxtaposition of effects and causes. Assumptions made on possible challenges constraining the roles and functions of both actors and tools of conflict prevention will provide the working hypothesis to be tested in case studies.

Part four, the core empirical part of this work, analyzes two cases of attempted UN conflict prevention with different outcomes and attempts to identify constraints to decision-making and policy implementation processes in various crisis situations. Two case studies - Rwanda and Iraq - are subjected to comparative analysis with relevant working hypotheses tested against available empirical data. Selection of these particular cases has been made considering such criteria as the nature of conflict, geopolitical environment, diversity of actors and interests involved, as well as choices of preventive instruments. The cases are examined with particular emphasis on factors impeding or conducing to the success of missions launched under the aegis of the UN. The distinct nature of these cases accounts for recurrent or identical structural and functional patterns supporting or rebutting assumptions and findings in Part three.

Concluding, part five collects the factors constraining effective policy making and implementation processes identified in part four and attempts to classify them under major conceptual domains: political, legal, operational and institutional. The intention in this chapter is to present the nature of these constraints and illustrate their complexity and specificity as they occur in given stages of policy making and implementation.

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