Global Governance 11 (2005), 331–350

The Ralph Bunche Centennial:

Peace Operations Then and Now


James Cockayne and David M. Malone

A century after the birth of a father of peacekeeping, Ralph Bunche,

UN peace operations have changed dramatically. The narrowly defined,
lightly armed, strictly neutral operations of Bunche’s day have become
complex, multidisciplinary state-building operations. Then, peace-
keeping buttressed essentially self-enforcing cease-fires; now, it aims
to build the foundations of a self-renewing peace. These changes
reflect six deeper shifts: the end of the Cold War; engagement with
“internal” conflicts; rising regional organizations; North-South politics;
the U.S.-UN relationship; and changes in peace operation mandates.
These shifts create three future challenges: state building; the recon-
ception of sovereignty; and the need for realism. The December 2004
High-Level Panel report proposes modest steps toward meeting those
challenges, but the burden of realizing the proposed framework rests
squarely with UN member states. KEYWORDS: peacekeeping, peace-
building, state building, High-Level Panel, Ralph Bunche.

cholar, civil rights activist, and Nobel Peace Laureate, Ralph

S Bunche left his most enduring legacy in the field of United

Nations peace operations. The centennial of his birth in either
2003 or 20041 served not only as an opportunity to celebrate that legacy,
but also as the occasion to reflect on the changes that have occurred in
UN peacekeeping since Bunche’s day.
In Bunche’s day, peacekeeping was a term narrowly defined and
clearly understood. Today, UN peace operations cover a multiplicity of
UN field activities in support of peace, ranging from essentially pre-
ventive deployments to long-term state-building missions. In this article
we analyze the major shifts in UN peace operations since the mid-
1900s. After describing how peacekeeping operations looked in
Bunche’s era, we seek to identify continuities and changes in today’s
peace operations. We then analyze the reasons for these changes and
conclude by examining the consequences of these changes for the UN’s
involvement in world politics today and speculating on the shape of
future UN peace operations.

331
332 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

Peacekeeping Then

Peacekeeping emerged not by design but out of necessity. The found-

ing members of the UN had included in Chapter VII of the UN Charter
provisions (Article 42) that allowed the UN to take “action by air, sea,
or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international
peace and security.” The vision of a body of national military forces
permanently available to the Security Council “on its call” (Article 43)
and serving as the instrument of collective security did not materialize
due to Cold War antagonisms. Paradoxically, Cold War tensions served
to increase the need for an independent and impartial actor on the world
stage, ensuring that conflicts did not spiral out of control and further
fuel the confrontation between capitalist and communist camps.
Bunche—and a cast of other notables, including secretaries-general
Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjöld; members of the UN Secretariat,
such as Brian Urquhart; and key players from the member states, par-
ticularly Lester Pearson, Canadian minister for external affairs (and
later prime minister)—stepped into that gap. They generated an opera-
tional capacity for the UN that had not been imagined for the organiza-
tion. The Secretariat staff “started from scratch,” as Bunche himself
suggested, unaware of what peacekeeping would involve, improvising
as they went along, and making mistakes.2
The system of peacekeeping they generated involved UN missions
staffed by lightly armed Blue Helmets (as they came to be known),
operating under the strict instruction to use force only in self-defense.
Falling between Chapter VI (Pacific Settlement of Disputes) and Chap-
ter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the
Peace, and Acts of Aggression), these peace operations were creatively
crafted “Chapter VI 1/2” and required, in principle, invitation or con-
sent on the part of the recipient state(s).3 They operated under UN com-
mand, primarily undertaking activities agreed on by belligerents, such
as separating warring parties, monitoring borders, overseeing with-
drawal of foreign troops, and ceasing aid to irregular or insurrectionist
movements. The guiding principle of early peacekeeping was that it
must not give an advantage to either side involved in the conflict. Blue
Helmets sought to adopt an attitude of strict neutrality and objectivity.
The aims of peacekeeping in this earlier era were limited. In the
Middle East, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO)4 started
out as a truce monitoring operation, later taking on the task of super-
vising the implementation of the General Armistice Agreements, which
Bunche facilitated on Rhodes in 1949 and for which he received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Similarly, the UN Emergency Force (UNEF),5
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 333

established by the General Assembly in the wake of the Suez crisis, was
mandated to supervise the withdrawal of foreign troops and, later, to act
as a buffer between Egypt and Israel. Other peacekeeping operations—
in Cyprus,6 Kashmir,7 and Yemen8—had similarly limited mandates.9

Peacekeeping Today—What Is the Same?

Important aspects of peacekeeping remain now as they were in this ear-

lier era. A small number of the operations that Bunche oversaw remain
alive today, notably UNTSO in the Middle East, the UN Military
Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) for the Kashmir
region, and the UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP). In other areas, notably
the Congo, crises of Bunche’s day were resolved, only to reappear, in
different forms, back on the Security Council’s agenda today. In part,
that continuity is a product of the approach adopted by Bunche and his
colleagues, which they saw largely as buying time to allow political and
diplomatic developments to yield a solution where none had previously
been apparent.10 The resulting risk—ossifying an unresolved situation or
only deferring further conflict until a later date, a charge made against
the UN mission to Cyprus since 1974 and the UN’s role in the Middle
East in 1967—can be detected in the UN’s approach to Kosovo today.
Contemporary peace operations also face many of the same opera-
tional challenges as early missions. Weak command and control, inade-
quate communications and logistical equipment, little prior opportunity
for detailed planning, and underequipped and ill-trained military per-
sonnel are as much issues today as they were in Bunche’s day, if not
more so. In at least one area there has been an apparent decline: the
promptness with which the UN can deploy a peacekeeping force. In
Bunche’s day, a mission might be on the ground within weeks—even
days—after the decision to deploy; today it takes months. The reasons
for this are complex. Early missions sometimes deployed without ade-
quate support or equipment. Today’s missions undertake a greatly
enlarged range of operational tasks requiring larger numbers of person-
nel. And the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has
undergone serious shake-ups affecting recruitment and deployment
times.11 The size of DPKO is also contentious. As the Brahimi Report12
of 2000 highlighted, the growth and complexity of today’s peace oper-
ations have at times led to a diffusion of responsibility to a point where
it fails to be discharged.
The challenge of financing peacekeeping remains constant. Bunche
knew the problems of the “tin cup,” as he called it, only too well.13 So,
334 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

too, the vulnerability of peacemakers is similar now to the situation in

Bunche’s day.14 The devastating attack on UN offices in Baghdad on 19
August 2003, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty-one other
UN staff, demonstrated that terrorism has reemerged today as a threat to
the organization just as it was when Count Folke Bernadotte, UN media-
tor in Palestine, was assassinated in September 1948.15 It is a cold com-
fort that these attacks, separated by more than half a century, stand as tes-
tament to the ongoing appeal of the UN as a symbol of effective change,
change that can prove highly threatening to some in conflict situations.

Peacekeeping Now—What Has Changed?

Although there are continuities between peacekeeping then and now,

much has also changed. Today’s peace missions do not simply monitor
cease-fires or supervise the implementation of a peace agreement
between states; more often they aim to resolve internal conflicts char-
acterized by intercommunal strife, crises of democracy, and fighting
marked by struggles over national resources and wealth, among other
precipitating causes of war. Peace operations aim increasingly to imple-
ment a preventive approach to the recurrence of conflict, creating an
operational and political space in which international actors undertake
peacebuilding activities. In Bunche’s day, peacekeeping aimed to but-
tress essentially self-enforcing cease-fires; today it aims to build the
foundations of a self-renewing peace.
These surface-level differences are the consequence of six deeper
shifts affecting peace operations: changes resulting from the removal of
Cold War constraints; a deeper engagement with conflicts traditionally
considered “internal”; an increased role for regional organizations; the
impact of North-South politics; the evolving U.S.-UN relationship; and
changing considerations in mandating peace operations.

From Cold War to P-5 Concord

The end of the Cold War brought a new complexion to Security Coun-
cil discussions of peacekeeping. The end of that era, which partially
paralyzed the Security Council, was signaled by Soviet president Gor-
bachev’s famous Pravda and Izvestia article on 17 September 1987 call-
ing for “wider use of . . . the institution of UN military observers and
UN peace-keeping forces in disengaging the troops of warring sides,
observing ceasefires and armistice agreements.”16 With the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the five permanent members (P-5) adopted a more
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 335

cooperative approach to peacekeeping, underwriting almost a decade of

unprecedented Security Council activism. Buoyed by the success of the
UN-mandated enforcement operation against Iraq in 1990, the Council
massively accelerated its pace of work. In the period between March
1991 and October 1993, it passed 185 resolutions (a rate about five
times greater than that of previous decades) and launched fifteen new
peacekeeping and observer missions (as against seventeen in the pre-
ceding forty-six years).17 Vetoes also dropped by roughly 80 percent on
a year-by-year basis.18 P-5 cooperation largely continued throughout the
1990s, with Russian concerns over Yugoslavia and Chinese concerns
over Taiwan mostly quarantined from other issues.
There were, of course, exceptions to this concord, notably on Israel-
Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. In some ways, however, these
exceptions serve to prove the importance of the new pattern of P-5 con-
cord, which paved the way for UN peace operations in Iran and Iraq,
Angola, Namibia, Central America, Western Sahara, Cambodia, Somalia,
Bosnia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, Georgia, Liberia, Chad, Libya,
Tajikistan, Haiti, Croatia, Macedonia, Eastern Slavonia, Guatemala, Cen-
tral African Republic, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
In sum, the removal of Cold War constraints has largely freed the
Council to engage in peacekeeping in places and forms that would have
been unthinkable during the Cold War—including internal conflicts.

From Interstate to Internal Conflict

A key characteristic of the Council’s new approach has been its will-
ingness to intervene more often in essentially internal conflicts19 and
complex humanitarian situations.
Contemporary UN peace operations adopt a more multidisciplinary
approach than their precursors,20 emphasizing not simply the cessation
of military hostilities, but the creation of conditions for a durable peace.
Recent peace operations have attempted to implement complex man-
dates significantly more ambitious than most in the past (Opération des
Nations Unies au Congo [ONUC] being the one clear exception).21
These operations often center on objectives such as humanitarian assis-
tance (in the short term), civil administration functions, police monitor-
ing and training, human rights monitoring and training, economic
reconstruction, and other essentially civilian functions. This diversifica-
tion creates significant challenges of coordination, which increasingly
are addressed by a civilian leadership. Although the military compo-
nents of these missions often remain the largest, the mission objectives
336 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

are not necessarily ones to which the military can or wish to contribute
greatly. Sometimes, as in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the military
components retain their own lines of command and control outside the
UN structure.
These changes in the structure and objectives of UN peace opera-
tions have occurred in slow motion, with practice in one mission often
influencing the design of ensuing ones in the same country (for exam-
ple, Haiti) or elsewhere. The evolutionary nature of this change has
robbed it of media coverage. Some acute observers, such as Elizabeth
Cousens and Karin Wermester, have argued—rightly in our view,
though not uncontroversially—that the type of peacebuilding in which
the UN engages is much more political in nature than are most devel-
opmental or narrowly defined peacekeeping efforts.22
The UN has needed to identify new tools for peace. The Security
Council has looked increasingly to sanctions regimes, as an alterna-
tive—or in addition—to the use of force. After the early and disap-
pointing experiences with sanctions against Southern Rhodesia in 1966
and South Africa in 1977, the Security Council has since 1990 imposed
sanctions or embargoes on fifteen different countries or groups. The
regimes have grown increasingly sophisticated, targeting specific indi-
viduals, groups, and asset or goods types. Blanket economic sanctions
have fallen out of vogue as their humanitarian costs have become appar-
ent—first in Haiti, then in Iraq—and as the ability of the targeted gov-
ernments to manipulate sanctions for their own ends has slowly become
apparent.23
The UN has also begun to explore the role that accountability
mechanisms can play, both in removing the architects of violence from
political power and in regenerating the social fabric of war-torn soci-
eties. The Security Council’s use of its Chapter VII powers to create ad
hoc international criminal tribunals for, first, the former Yugoslavia and,
then, Rwanda was a watershed that resulted in the UN’s involvement in
the establishment of war crimes tribunals in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East
Timor, and now Cambodia. It also led to significant pressure for a more
universal International Criminal Court, which has now come into
being.24 There has also been increased experimentation with alternative
accountability mechanisms, notably truth commissions.25

The Rise of Regional Organizations

The removal of Cold War constraints has also allowed regional organi-
zations to take a more active role in peacekeeping. The Security Coun-
cil’s exclusive role in authorizing the use of force has been challenged,
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 337

due to its own inaction, by the Economic Community of West African

States (ECOWAS) in Liberia and Sierra Leone, by the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) in Kosovo, and most recently by a U.S.
and UK–led coalition of the willing in Iraq. The UN increasingly relies
on regional mechanisms to discharge peace enforcement responsibili-
ties, mandating regional organizations to this end in the former Yugo-
slavia (NATO), Liberia and Sierra Leone (ECOMOG—the military arm
of ECOWAS),26 Democratic Republic of Congo (European Union), and
Afghanistan (NATO). The Security Council’s recent endorsement of the
lead role the African Union has taken in the Darfur conflict in Sudan
emphasizes the trend.27
There are many arguments in favor of the integration of regional
arrangements and organizations into the UN peacekeeping system.28 They
often enjoy a special legitimacy, access, and influence within their
regions and may be more familiar than UN actors with local conditions,
particularly with the regional dimensions of conflict. They may be able to
mobilize incentives among affected actors in ways that the UN cannot,29
and they might play a key role in generating a culture of human rights,
transparency, accountability, and democracy. Where the UN’s attention
and resources are inevitably split between multiple conflicts worldwide,
and where the Security Council’s attention span is notoriously short,
regional organizations have strong incentives to stay the course.
However, key arguments against regionalization focus on political
opposition to regional peacekeeping and on the disparity between re-
sources available to different regional arrangements, which could lead to
a “de facto class system” of regional responses, depending on the inter-
est a particular crisis holds for the major powers.30 The politicization of
regional mechanisms is at the heart of the controversy surrounding their
place within the UN system. The prohibition contained in Article 53 of
the charter against enforcement action by regional organizations with-
out Security Council authorization remains salient as a check on great
power unilateralism and for that reason is particularly welcomed by the
global South; but it has also been seen—often by those in the North—as
an unwelcome restriction on humanitarian efforts.

The Impact of North-South Politics

The removal of Cold War constraints signaled a shift away from East-
West cleavages in world politics to North-South divides. This pattern
originally emerged in the heyday of decolonization, but several UN
decisionmaking bodies, notably the General Assembly and the Eco-
nomic and Social Council, have thus far failed to overcome them.31
338 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

North-South politics play an important—if complex—role in con-

temporary UN peace operations. The Security Council’s increased
involvement in essentially internal conflicts led to peace operations
tackling the legacies of state failure in the global South. Northern
states—most notably the United States, as a consequence of attacks on
its troops in Somalia—quickly lost their appetite for such interventions.
At the same time, though, the severity of these internal emergencies
often required a more assertive military strategy than the UN had
become accustomed to, and which required the kind of high-tech mili-
tary punch that only Northern militaries could pack. In light of failures
in Bosnia and Somalia, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
concluded by 1994 that the UN should not itself seek to conduct large-
scale enforcement activities. Consequently, the Security Council in-
creasingly “outsourced” to “coalitions of the willing” peace enforce-
ment operations: Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti in 1994–1995;
Implementation Force (IFOR) and then Stabilization Force (SFOR) in
Bosnia since 1995; Mission Interafricaine de Surveillance des Accords
de Bangui (MISAB) in the Central African Republic in 1997; Kosovo
Force (KFOR) in Kosovo since 1999; International Force for East
Timor (INTERFET) in East Timor in 1999–2000; International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since early 2002; and now the
Multinational Interim Force in Haiti since March 2004.32 Enforcement
action occurs where there is an adequate coalition of countries willing
to make available the necessary lift, troops, finance, political capital,
and military hardware. Notably, Western powers are not the only such
intervenors: ECOMOG has intervened in several West African conflicts
with prior or post facto Security Council support.
Overall, this has had profound results on the demography of UN
peace operations. Increasingly, with the exception of West Africa, en-
forcement actions are advocated, then carried out, by the global North,
whereas traditional peacekeeping operations are executed mostly by
the global South,33 something Brian Urquhart—Bunche’s closest and
longest-standing collaborator at the UN, and his biographer—suggests
would have appalled Bunche, if he had lived to see it.34 Developing
countries today make up over three-quarters of the troop contributors for
peacekeeping operations under the command of the UN, notably in
Africa. By contrast, a number of industrialized countries (especially
those in NATO) provide troops that operate under national command but
with UN authorization, in effect allowing the militaries of the industri-
alized world to “play” with each other.35 The United States, in addition
to participating selectively in NATO activities, effectively operates as a
free agent.
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 339

U.S.-UN Relations

U.S. hegemony—most pronounced in the military sphere, where Wash-

ington spends as much on defense as the next dozen or so countries
combined—creates a further challenge for the UN. In Bunche’s day,
bipolarity was the key problem; many today would suggest that the key
challenge for peacekeeping is unipolarity. The approval of the Dayton
Peace Accords (on Bosnia), brokered by Washington, was a turning
point in UN affairs, rendering the United States, according to one Secu-
rity Council ambassador in early 1996, “the supreme power.”36 The
Security Council’s task in constraining this power without alienating it
was made infinitely harder by the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, in the eastern United States, which instilled a new sense of vul-
nerability in the United States, epitomized in the 2002 National Security
Strategy. Greater hostility in Washington toward attempts in the UN and
elsewhere to constrain U.S. power has been matched by growing suspi-
cions elsewhere of Washington’s intentions and of the wisdom of some
of its actions, notably in attacking Iraq. The challenge for the Security
Council is meaningfully to engage the United States on the major secu-
rity challenges without acquiescing in dangerous initiatives; to “have
the courage to disagree with the USA when it is wrong and the matu-
rity to agree with it when it is right.”37 The Council must “keep intact
its integrity, while improving its effectiveness.”38
A clear risk for the Council is that Washington will conceive the
Council’s role mainly, at best, as one of long-term peacebuilding fol-
lowing short and sharp U.S.-led military interventions (the latter
whether mandated or not by the Council). UN “peace operations” risk
becoming “picking-up-the-pieces operations” of the sort we see emerg-
ing in Haiti and Afghanistan. Movement in that direction would only
serve to undermine the legitimacy—and consequently the effective-
ness—of UN peace operations. Urquhart again suggests that Bunche
“would have deplored an increasing tendency to regard the UN as inca-
pable of ‘first-instance’ peace-keeping, and as only being good enough
for a follow-up.”39

Changing Considerations in Mandating Peace Operations

The UN system has long been concerned with the humanitarian plight
of refugees and other civilian victims of armed conflict. In the 1990s,
however, the Security Council increasingly invoked the plight of refu-
gees and their implied destabilizing effect on neighboring states as
grounds for its own involvement in conflicts, as it did in Yugoslavia,
340 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

Somalia, Haiti, and (later) Kosovo. The globalization of civil society,

feeding on the so-called CNN effect of selective but intensive media
coverage of humanitarian disasters, mobilizes public opinion and cre-
ates pressures on governments to “do something.”40 They, in turn, look
to the UN, with its specialized expertise and “critical mass” in the areas
of refugee protection and humanitarian assistance, to take the lead in
acting and in serving as an instrument for burden sharing.41 The main-
streaming of human rights discourse and the growth of nongovernmen-
tal activist networks has reinforced this trend.42 The creation of the
position of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1994 served
further to highlight the humanitarian imperative in the UN’s political
and security work. Kofi Annan, elected to the post of secretary-general
in late 1996, staked out new ground in championing human rights and
concern for civilians in war as key themes. As he recently acknowl-
edged at a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda
genocide, his own thinking was much influenced by the failures of the
UN system in Bosnia and Rwanda.43
By the late 1990s, the pressures for a more proactive approach to
humanitarian crisis and serious human rights violations had led some
states to break with the Security Council and undertake their own unau-
thorized “humanitarian interventions,” as NATO did in Kosovo in 1999.
Resistance to such an approach came from several quarters within the
UN, including some countries of the South, but also from Russia (over
Kosovo) and China.44 Other governments supported a more interven-
tionist approach: the July 2000 Constitutive Act of the African Union
featured a right of the Union to intervene in a member state “in respect
of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes
against humanity.”45
Since the end of the Cold War, UN peace operations have also
increasingly been mandated in support of internal political processes,
the organization of elections, and the defense of democracy—for exam-
ple, in Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Kosovo, East
Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq.46 Democracy has become both a reason
for intervention and an exit strategy: the holding of free and fair
national elections, perhaps after a longer democratic process of consti-
tutional reform, marks one of the few clearly agreed indicators of per-
formance success in complex state-building peace operations. At the
same time, the reliance on democratic elections alone carries terrible
risks, most clearly illustrated in East Timor in 1999. The Security Coun-
cil today understands that one successful election says little about the
sustainability of democracy and the durability of peace.
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 341

Tomorrow’s Peace Operations: Challenges for the Future

What can we expect of tomorrow’s peace operations? It is difficult to

predict long-term trends; we can, however, offer some speculation on
the challenges of the immediate future: state building, with all its oper-
ational and policy complexities; the shift under way in the UN’s
approach to both sovereignty and security; and the need for realism.

The Challenge of State Building

The UN’s involvement in state building47 is not likely to cease anytime
soon. If anything, the difficulties faced by the U.S.-led coalition in
postwar Iraq have only highlighted that the UN is, to adapt a phrase
used by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the “indis-
pensable organization” for the political management of international
crises involving the interests of several powers and regions—if often an
exasperating one. The difficulties outsiders face in helping a people
build a state are so great—from the technical expertise required to the
need for coordination among contributing states—that perhaps only a
multilateral organization with the experience and universal legitimacy
of the UN can hope to pull it off.48 In some ways, though, the UN may
face state-building challenges that states do not, particularly since it has
not traditionally been in the business of day-to-day government. Its
learning curve as “virtual trustee” has been steep.49
The policy content of specific exercises in trusteeship and state
building often remain unclear. What kind of state should the UN attempt
to build? What are the indicators of success? There is convergence
around the paradigm of representative democracy, but peace operations
too often arise as an ad hoc response by the Security Council to a situ-
ation spiraling out of control. To be successful, state building demands
something more than firefighting. It requires taking seriously the con-
nection between conflict prevention and development, between human
rights and security.50 It requires the involvement of members of the
multilateral community whose mandate has traditionally been perceived
as falling outside that of “peace operations”: the World Bank, the UN
Development Programme (UNDP), and even the World Health Organi-
zation. That may mean that complex peace operations require a more
deliberate, whole-of-organization approach, with the secretary-general
and the Security Council acting as the coordinating actors. This
approach might require the Council to delegate portions of that role
elsewhere within the organization, as the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy
342 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

suggested in 2001 might occur through the Economic and Social Coun-
cil.51 The “Peace-Building Commission” proposed by the secretary-
general’s High-Level Panel on Security Threats, Challenges and Change in
December 2004 may do much to achieve these objectives. The devil will,
inevitably, rest in the details of final implementation, even if the proposal
is broadly approved at the UN summit to be held in September 2005.

Reevaluating Sovereignty and Security

The convergence of peacekeeping and state building points to a deeper
trend at work in UN processes: a slow-moving reinterpretation of sov-
ereignty. Although sovereignty is still the lingua franca of UN diplo-
matic discourse, the degree of intrusiveness the Security Council was
prepared to mandate throughout the 1990s was striking, responding as it
was to a sharp redefinition in practice of what constitutes a threat to
international peace and security and justifying the piercing of the veil of
sovereignty. That said, the sovereignty of states, more than ever, is not
equal in the practice of the Council, with the P-5 being more equal than
the rest.
This gap between de jure and de facto sovereignty fuels perceptions
of a North-South divide in world politics. It serves to intensify concern
that currently fashionable discourses on human rights and humanitari-
anism serve as a Trojan horse for the political interests of the North.
The UN’s increased humanitarian focus is, for the South, a two-edged
sword: on the one hand, it offers a basis for arguing that the North
should focus its resources as much on dealing with the threats of
poverty, deprivation, and disease as on terrorism and the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction; on the other hand, it offers the North a
platform from which to argue for greater intervention in Southern coun-
tries where governments fail to guarantee their citizens’ human security.
Accordingly, when the Brahimi Report recommended the creation of a
new information and strategic analysis unit to enhance conflict preven-
tion activities, representatives of the South worried about the potential
intrusiveness of improved UN information management. In contrast, the
North worried about financial, personnel, and materiel overcommitment
in the peacekeeping field.
Increasingly, sovereignty is coming to be seen not just as a source of
rights, but also as a source of duties to provide security to individuals
and groups within society, a “responsibility to protect.” This idea was
born from the Canadian-inspired International Commission on Interven-
tion and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in December 2001.52 However, tak-
ing the responsibility to protect seriously would have consequences not
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 343

only for states, but also for the UN, forcing it to work ever harder to
forge “coalitions of the willing” for humanitarian purposes, even where
member states’ short-term political interests apparently run counter to
such action. Countries working together within “Groups of Friends,”
often spanning the North-South divide, can serve to build support at the
UN for intervention in specific instances.53
Terrorism places a further premium on cooperation; but it also
poses enormous challenges for UN peacekeeping.54 Not only can it
make UN peacekeepers targets; it also calls into question whether the
UN is equipped to deal with today’s security threats. Addressing trans-
national nonstate terrorism certainly falls outside the paradigm of UN
peace operations. Some states are increasingly pushing to use Chapter
VII powers of the Security Council not as the basis for UN peace oper-
ations, but as the basis for global legislation and regulation against ter-
rorism. This legislative penchant emerged first in the 1990s with the
establishment of the ad hoc criminal tribunals and the oil-for-food pro-
gram in Iraq, but it has moved to center stage with the establishment
and operation of the Counter-Terrorism Committee under Resolution
1373 and with current moves in the Security Council to criminalize
activities resulting in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). Thus, in the future, UN peace operations may have to compete
for scarce resources with other forms of Security Council intervention
designed to legislate or regulate for peace.

The Need for Realism

The salience of state building and new approaches to sovereignty and
security has evolved gradually from Bunche’s day to the present. One
challenge remains constant: to marry the UN’s idealistic, long-term
objectives with realistic tactics. Today’s peace operations reflect a num-
ber of hard lessons calling for greater realism, whether in the changed
approach to impartiality in peace operations55 or in the mandating
process. Looking ahead, the UN needs to be both bold and realistic
about what it can achieve in the short term: pushing harder for a rapid
response capacity, making a virtue of necessity in the move to greater
regionalism, and accepting that Africa (with its “orphan conflicts”)56 is
likely to remain at the center of the peacekeeping agenda for many
years to come.
Rapid deployment could certainly be achieved today, given that it
was achieved more than forty years ago in the Congo. Two keys to
improved performance on this front are reducing the time it takes to hire
staff for peace operations and, on a parallel track, providing greater sup-
344 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

port to attempts to establish a rapid response capacity, such as the

Standby High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) project, or through closer
UN cooperation with regional rapid reaction initiatives (such as that of
the European Union). A better-defined relationship between the UN and
regional organizations is highly desirable on a number of levels.
Regional organizations and other, more flexible enforcement and some-
times peacekeeping arrangements involving several states will likely
play more, and the UN less, of a role in international security in the
future unless the UN can demonstrate greater capacity for operational
effectiveness.57 Realism also dictates that the UN must accept that Africa
will remain at the center of its peacekeeping agenda for many years to
come, if only because “coalitions of the willing” are likely to address
conflicts in more geostrategically significant regions. The Security
Council already spends the majority of its time on African issues, with
mixed success. The regionalization of conflicts in West Africa and the
Great Lakes has posed challenges to the UN’s traditional models of
mediation and peacekeeping. The severe underdevelopment of most of
Africa contributes tremendously to the severity of many of these con-
flicts, and this is unlikely to be reversed soon. The key question is
whether the UN will be able to mobilize the resources, and then adminis-
ter them adequately, to address these most murderous of today’s conflicts.

Conclusion: Building on Ralph Bunche’s Legacy

The end of the Cold War led to heightened activism on the part of the
Security Council and a more cooperative approach to peacekeeping
among the P-5. Although the Council remains split on some issues,
notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq, it has demonstrated an
increased willingness to engage with a broader range of conflicts, includ-
ing a number of essentially internal ones. This has produced mixed and
complex results, including a new multidisciplinary approach to peace
operations, a reevaluation of impartiality, and experimentation with new
tools for peace, such as accountability mechanisms and new forms of
sanctions.
Regional organizations play an increasingly important role in dis-
charging peacekeeping and peace enforcement mandates. At the same
time, UN politics has shifted from outright confrontation across an East-
West chasm to more subtle tensions across a North-South divide, with
the consequence in peace operations that the North increasingly takes
on peace enforcement activities, particularly in geostrategically salient
regions, and the South plays more traditional peacekeeping roles,
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 345

particularly in Africa. This risks making peace enforcement appear a tool

of Northern policy, especially in the context of U.S. military superiority.
Peace operations are increasingly mandated with human rights and
democratic development objectives, reflected in a broader engagement
with state building. This poses enormous operational challenges for the
UN system, which requires a more integrated whole-of-organization
approach. More attention must be paid to clarification of the objectives
of state building and indicators of success. Nevertheless, the UN remains
the “indispensable organization” (if not always a successful one) in
many postconflict contexts, as the United States has learned in Iraq.
The UN has learned hard lessons about the dangers of “old” con-
ceptions of sovereignty and now stands on the brink of a fundamental
repositioning. Growing support is emerging for concepts of sovereignty
and human security serving the notion of states’ responsibility to pro-
tect, but much work remains to be done to develop and operationalize
these ideas. This is made all the more challenging by the scourge of ter-
rorism, which influences many contemporary attitudes to military inter-
ventions in the name of “peace and security.”
Following the presentation of the High-Level Panel’s report, A
More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility,58 in December 2004,
the responsibility of building further on Bunche’s legacy rests primarily
with member states. From the peacekeeping perspective, the centerpiece
of the panel’s report is the proposal to establish a peacebuilding com-
mission to assist states in the transition from the immediate postconflict
phase to longer-term reconstruction and development. It also offers
careful compromise proposals in a number of other areas, such as Secu-
rity Council enlargement, that will help to ensure the organization’s
continuing relevance to the most pressing issues of international peace
and security. The secretary-general’s own report In Larger Freedom,59
presented in March 2005 and formulating a package of reforms from the
menu provided by the High-Level Panel, takes up many of the most sig-
nificant proposals and proposes, in addition, significant reform of the
UN’s human rights machinery to create a human rights council on par
with the organization’s other organs, or as a direct subsidiary of the
General Assembly.
The burden of reaching consensus on these proposals and their
implementation rests with member states. Although UN delegates tend to
regard the UN as their preserve, rather than theirs in trust for humanity,
and to see the organization evolving by incremental reform and not rad-
ical overhauls, many outsiders, not least at the political level, hope to see
this reform process lead to fundamental change. Tinkering at the margins
will be viewed as failure. Ultimately, however, it will be member states
346 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

that determine how to take these proposed solutions forward. It is only

member states that can breathe life into the proposals.
The strictures of the Cold War conditioned Bunche’s tremendous
contributions to developing techniques for multilateral mediation and to
creating UN peacekeeping. These no longer apply and have been suc-
ceeded by new challenges. The High-Level Panel has proposed modest
steps toward a framework for dealing with the challenges of terrorism,
weapons of mass destruction, state failure, and related economic and
social phenomena. Now it rests with member states to make that frame-
work real. Without such solutions, we risk squandering Ralph Bunche’s
legacy, failing to move the UN “toward digging up the deeply imbedded
roots of war.”60 

Notes

James Cockayne is a graduate scholar at the Institute for International Law and
Justice at New York University. David M. Malone is assistant deputy minister
(Africa and the Middle East), Department of Foreign Affairs Canada. This arti-
cle was completed prior to Malone’s return to the Canadian Foreign Ministry. It
does not necessarily represent that ministry’s views on peacekeeping or other
topics addressed. The authors thank Brian Urquhart and George Sherry.
1. Many sources cite 1904, rather than 1903, as Bunche’s year of birth. He,
in fact, appears (incorrectly) to have inclined toward 1904. See Brian Urquhart,
Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 25–26.
2. Comments by Ralph Bunche on Palestine delivered to the UN Secre-
tariat, 16 June 1949, quoted in Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, p. 187.
3. George Sherry has recently revealed that Bunche “expressed interest in
the possibility of invoking Article 40” of the UN Charter as a basis for peace
operations. Peace operations would have formed a “provisional measure” taken
by the Security Council under Chapter VII, giving those peace operations a
greater independence of their hosts, but at the cost of those operations being
more tightly controlled by the Security Council. By choosing not to go down
this route, Bunche imprinted Secretariat control over peace operations. Sherry
interview, New York, 26 March 2004.
4. UNTSO, established in 1948, Palestine.
5. UNEF, 1956–1967, was the first to supervise withdrawal of forces fol-
lowing the Suez crisis, then to act as a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli
forces.
6. UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), established in 1964, was mandated to
prevent a recurrence of fighting and to contribute to the maintenance of law and
order and a return to normal conditions.
7. UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), estab-
lished in 1949, monitored the cease-fire in Jammu and Kashmir; and the UN
India-Pakistan Observation Mission (UNIPOM), which operated from Septem-
ber 1965 to March 1966, and supervised the withdrawal of Indian and Pakistani
troops in Jammu and Kashmir.
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 347

8. UN Yemen Observer Mission (UNYOM), which ran from July 1963 to

September 1964, was mandated to observe and certify the implementation of
the disengagement agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Republic.
9. The mandate of Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) involved
removing foreign forces and preventing civil war and was thus the exception.
10. See, for example, the record of meeting with Abba Eban, 12 Decem-
ber 1956, quoted in Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, p. 273.
11. See Report of the Office of Internal Oversight Services on the Audit of
the Policies and Procedures for Recruiting Department of Peace-keeping
Operations Staff. Note by the Secretary-General, UN Doc. A/58/704 (6 Febru-
ary 2004); the report found that recruiting to DPKO in 2002 took 347 days on
average. See also Jean-Marie Guehenno, “A Plan to Strengthen UN Peace-
keeping,” International Herald Tribune, 19 April 2004.
12. Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, UN Doc. A/55/305-
S/2000/809, 21 August 2000.
13. Ralph Bunche, “The UN Operation in the Congo, 1964,” in Charles
Henry, ed., Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings (Detroit: Univer-
sity of Michigan, 1995), pp. 203–204.
14. See Benjamin Seet and Gilbert Burnham, “Fatality Trends in United
Nations Peacekeeping Operations, 1948–1998,” Journal of the American Med-
ical Association 284, no. 5 (August 2000): 598–603.
15. Urquhart, Ralph Bunche, p. 178ff.
16. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Reality and the Guarantees of a Secure World,” in
FBIS, Daily Report: Soviet Union, 17 September 1987, pp. 23-28.
17. See David Malone, “The UN Security Council in the Post–Cold War
World: 1987–97,” Security Dialogue 28, no. 4 (December 1997): 394.
18. This may be due in part to greater informal coordination by the Secu-
rity Council, making formal vetoes less frequent. We are indebted to an anony-
mous reviewer for this point.
19. We describe internal and civil conflicts as “essentially” so because they
rarely remain strictly internal for long. Neighboring countries spill in (as in the
Democratic Republic of Congo) or the conflict spills over (as with Colombia’s
turmoil spilling into Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela).
20. Multidisciplinary Peace-keeping: Lessons from Recent Experience,
United Nations, DPKO, April 1999.
21. See Thomas Weiss, David Forsythe, and Roger Coate, The United
Nations in a Changing World, 2d ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1997); see also
Michael Williams, Civil Military Relations and Peace-keeping (London:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
22. See Elizabeth Cousens, Chetan Kumar, and Karin Wermester, Peace-
building as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 2001); Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth
Cousens, eds., Ending Civil Wars: The Success and Failure of Negotiated Set-
tlements in Civil War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002); and Chester Crocker,
Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Herding Cats: Multiparty Media-
tion in a Complex World (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1999).
23. See generally David Cortright and George Lopez, Sanctions and the
Search for Security: Challenges to UN Action (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002);
Making Targeted Sanctions Effective: Guidelines for the Implementation of UN
348 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

Policy Options, Report of the Stockholm Process, 14 February 2003, available

online at www.smartsanctions.se.
24. See Philippe Kirsch, John Holmes, and Mora Johnson, “International
Tribunals and Courts,” in David Malone, ed., The UN Security Council from the
Cold War to the 21st Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 281–294.
25. See generally Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State
Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001).
26. ECOMOG is the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) Military Observer Group.
27. UN Security Council Resolution 1556 (2004), S/RES/1556 (30 July
2004).
28. See generally Michael Pugh and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, eds., The
United Nations and Regional Security: Europe and Beyond (Boulder: Lynne
Rienner, 2003).
29. See, for example, Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper, with Jonathan Good-
hand, eds., War Economies in a Regional Context (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
2004).
30. See Shepard Forman and Andrew Grene, “Collaborating with Regional
Organizations,” in Malone, The UN Security Council from the Cold War to the
21st Century, pp. 302-304.
31. See David Malone and Lotta Hagman, “The North-South Divide at the
United Nations,” Security Dialogue 33, no. 4 (December 2002): 399–414; and
David Malone, “L’affrontement Nord-Sud aux Nations unies: Un anachronisme
sur le déclin?” Politique Étrangère 1 (2003): 149–164.
32. See UNSC Resolution 1529 (2004), 29 February 2004.
33. David Malone and Ramesh Thakur, “Racism in Peace-keeping,” Globe
and Mail (Toronto), 30 October 2000.
34. Urquhart argues that Bunche “would have been appalled at the current
tendency of Western governments to allot peacekeeping duties more and more
exclusively to third-world governments.” Brian Urquhart, correspondence with
the authors, 16 March 2004.
35. Other countries are often invited to participate in such coalitions, as
Russia was in both Bosnia and Kosovo, but they often come to represent mili-
tary “afterthoughts.”
36. Confidential interview.
37. Interview with Mexico’s ambassador to the UN Adolfo Aguilar Zinser,
26 January 2003.
38. Interview with Michael Doyle, New York, 16 May 2003, cited in David
Malone, “Conclusion,” in Malone, The UN Security Council from the Cold War
to the 21st Century, p. 644.
39. Urquhart correspondence; see note 34.
40. See, for example, Stephen Livingston, Clarifying the CNN Effect: An
Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention,
Research Paper R-18, Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, June 1997.
41. See Thomas Weiss, “The Humanitarian Impulse” in Malone, The UN
Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 37; and Joanna
Wechsler, “Human Rights,” in ibid., p. 55.
42. See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders:
Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1998).
 James Cockayne and David M. Malone 349

43. Secretary-general’s remarks at Memorial Conference on the Rwanda

Genocide, New York, 26 March 2004, available online at www.un.org/apps/sg/
sgstats.asp?nid=840.
44. Support of Muslim countries for the NATO strike did much to defeat
criticism of the West at the UN over Kosovo.
45. See Constitutive Act of the African Union, adopted in Lomé, 11 July
2000, Art. 4(h), available online at www.africa-union.org/home/Welcome.htm.
46. For the only clear-cut case in which the Security Council authorized
the use of force to restore democracy, see David Malone, “Haiti and the Inter-
national Community: A Case Study,” Survival 39, no. 2 (summer 1997): 126–
146. See generally Gregory H. Fox, “Democratization,” in Malone, The UN
Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 69.
47. See Simon Chesterman, You, The People: The United Nations, Transi-
tional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004).
48. See Simon Chesterman, “Bush, the United Nations and Nation-building,”
Survival 46, no. 1 (spring 2004):101–116.
49. See Simon Chesterman, “Virtual Trusteeship,” in Malone, The UN
Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 219.
50. See, for example, Chandra Lekha Sriram and Karin Wermester, From
Promise to Practice: Strengthening UN Capacities for the Prevention of Violent
Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
51. To date these efforts have resulted only in a modestly conceived Coun-
cil-ECOSOC Working Group on Guinea-Bissau.
52. See www.iciss.gc.ca/menu-e.asp.
53. One of the key means of securing this cooperative approach to security
governance may be reform of the working procedures—if not the structure—
of the Security Council. See Teresa Whitfield, “Groups of Friends,” in Malone,
The UN Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century,
p. 311.
54. See generally Edward Luck, “Tackling Terrorism,” in Malone, The UN
Security Council from the Cold War to the 21st Century, p. 85; and Andrés
Franco, “Armed Nonstate Actors,” in ibid., p. 117.
55. Bosnia and Rwanda both taught that peacekeepers must be empowered
to defend not only themselves and the mission mandate, but also civilian vic-
tims of war. The UN system learned the hard way that impartiality cannot be
equated with moral equivalence among the parties to a conflict, nor with
unwillingness to intervene to prevent atrocities. See especially Report on the
Fall of Srebrenica, UN Doc. A/54/549 (15 November 1999); Report of the
Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994
Genocide in Rwanda, UN Doc. S/1999/1257 (15 December 1999); and the
Brahimi Report, Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations, which argued
for the primacy of “impartiality” over “neutrality” in peace operations.
56. This expression was used by former French ambassador to the UN
Jean-David Levitte to describe the relative lack of interest some of the most
murderous contemporary conflicts elicit in key capitals.
57. Revealed in early 2004, multiple systemic failures relating to the UN’s
security functions—from multiple lapses in ensuring security for the UN Mis-
sion in Baghdad at the time of the August 2003 destruction of the UN offices
there, to suspected mismanagement of and possible corruption within the
350 The Ralph Bunche Centennial

oil-for-food program in Iraq—undermined perceptions of the UN’s operational

capabilities.
58. UN Doc. A/59/565 (2 December 2004).
59. In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights
for All, UN Doc. A/59/2005 (21 March 2005).
60. Ralph J. Bunche, “Man, Democracy and Peace—Foundations for
Peace: Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 1950,” in Henry, Ralph J.
Bunche, p. 166.