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Jemma Challenger

Different colours, same hats? UN vs. non-UN peace operations

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The AU/UN Joint benchmarking team led by the Head of the African Union Peace Support Operations Division head Mr. Sivuyile Bam Bam, poses for a poto with senior AMISOM officers in Baidoa on April 18, 2015. AMISOM Photo / Abdikarim Mohamed

From the period of June 1948 to December 2000, non-United Nations (UN) actors implemented 53 peacekeeping operations, a figure identical to that of the number of operations deployed by the UN during the same period. Since the turn of the century, moreover, the number of peace operations deployed by regional organisations and coalitions of states has surpassed that of those initiated by the UN. This historic, and burgeoning, proliferation of non-UN peace operations has solicited an enduring and seemingly strategically important research agenda seeking to determine whether UN or regional peace operations are better-equipped to intervene in civil wars. This article contends that the prevailing conceptual dichotomy between UN and non-UN peace operations is in large part an illusory one. Through an analysis focussed primarily on regional/UN operations on the African continent, the article posits first that an increasing level of UN support for regional operations blurs distinct analytical lines between the two. Second, regional and UN peace operations often operate according to a de facto division of labour, meaning some comparative statements pit UN/regional operations against one another according to false standards. Third, the increasing regionalisation of UN peace operations renders the UN/non-UN dichotomy a weak one.

The UN/non-UN Playoff

While large-n quantitative studies charting the track record of UN vs. regional peace operations can identify valuable broad-scale patterns, these studies reap often inconsistent results. This is in part due to the fact that such investigations are ultimately contingent upon how authors define and code peacekeeping operational success, amongst other variables. For instance, one quantitative analysis argues that, controlling for ‘mission difficulty’, UN and non-UN operations have a similar ‘success’ rate, yet a similar study finds UN operations to be more successful than non-UN operations whilst controlling for the same variable. Furthermore, a 2020 study concluding that only UN operations curb violence against civilians committed by non-state actors is contrasted by recent research finding that non-UN peace operations limit rebel-caused violence.

Speculative theoretical stances attributing innate premiums to either regional or UN peace operations are similarly contradictory. Primordialist accounts recite the UN’s alleged intrinsic global moral authority over peacekeeping, premised upon its unique mandate for the maintenance of international peace and security, claims to the UN’s transcendent impartiality, and the belief that, ultimately, ‘peacekeeping is UN business’. In contrast, proponents of regional solutions to regional problems tout the inherent pre-eminence of non-UN intervention based on the idea that the people and governments of one region have a natural affinity with others in that region and an intrinsic distrust of external intervention. Ultimately, advantages in political will, legitimacy, and rationalist-material factors are ascribed equally to either regional actors or the UN, depending on who is doing the ascribing. One common theme throughout these conflicting inferences, however, is that they subscribe to a binary UN vs. non-UN taxonomy of peace operations. In practice, this taxonomy is much more convoluted.

Past the Regional/UN Dichotomy

Whilst the UN has sought its own resource-based support from some regional organisations – the European Union, for example – it provides an increasing degree of quasi-institutionalised support to regional peace operations on the African continent. For instance, the United Nations Support Office for the African Union Mission in Somalia (UNSOA) uses assessed contributions for peacekeeping to directly support a non-UN peace operation: the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Mounting debates over the creation of a similar support office to finance the G5 Sahel Joint Force coalition using assessed peacekeeping contributions point to a more widespread, growing interconnection between UN and non-UN operations. Indeed, some forewarn of a new type of UN peace operation, led by the Department of Operational Support, as a result of this trend. Thus, while the case of the hybrid African Union (AU)-UN operation in Darfur epitomises explicit UN-regional organisation cooperation, relationships between the two operate on a much broader scale. Unprecedented support structures emerging from the UN dictate that more regional peacekeeping also effectively means more UN peacekeeping; the two are by no means divorced from one another.

Furthermore, there often exists to some extent a temporal division of labour between UN and regional peace operations. The AU, for example, has often demonstrated a clear preference to deploy interim operations that act deliberate precursors to UN intervention. AU operations in Mali (2013) and the Central African Republic (2014) were recast as UN missions within one year of their deployment, and the AU explicitly demanded the deployment of a UN follow-up mission to the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) within six months of AMISOM’s implementation in 2007. That this did not come to fruition does not alter the reality that the AU at least conceives of its peace operations as short-term measures. As such, assessing regional operations directly against UN operations fails to account for key differences in mandated objectives and the comparative advantages held by each in line with this temporal division of labour.

What is more, UN operations themselves have frequently emerged as a preferred form of regional peacekeeping, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2009, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed that African troops in UN operations were ‘helping to find African solutions to African challenges’, appealing to the popular mantra coined to underscore the benefits of regional intervention. This sentiment echoes an enduring tendency for neighbouring states to supply the bulk of troops for UN peace operations. For instance, in August of 1999, Nigeria insisted upon a phased withdrawal of troops from the regional Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) peace operation in Sierra Leone, offering instead to subsume these troops into a new UN operation (UNAMSIL). The same regional troops were effectively rehatted under the auspices of the UN. In a similar vein, ECOWAS countries plus Chad provide nearly two thirds of the UN operation in Mali’s military personnel, reflecting a tendency for regional states to compose a large bulk of UN troops.

This regionalisation is also reflected in the data. Throughout the 2000s, sub-Saharan African contributions to UN peacekeeping increased significantly. Notably, though, the majority of this increase in contributions was disproportionately channelled towards UN operations within the continent; from 2001-2009, sub-Saharan Africa’s commitment remained relatively stable to an ever-increasing number of military personnel deployed outside the region, with the figure remaining between 680 and 1,120 troops. In contrast, sub-Saharan African contributions to UN peacekeeping within the African continent rose from 8,441 troops in 2001 to 20,677 in 2009, a 145% increase. As such, while sub-Saharan African participation in UN (global) peacekeeping ascended rapidly in the early 21st century, it in fact became more localised and regional.

Conclusion

While failing to acknowledge distinctions between UN and non-UN peace operations is clearly unproductive, increasingly blurred lines between the two divulge a fundamental tension inherent in the conceptual UN/regional peacekeeping binary. There is a spurious homogenisation inherent in arranging a vast and diverse scope of peace operations into a taxonomy of UN vs. non-UN-sanctioned interventions, meaning ‘non-UN’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘UN’ as categories of peace operations require considerable further disaggregation in order to be able to draw meaningful comparisons. Paul Diehl’s 1993 observation that the success of regional peacekeeping is contingent upon many of the same factors as UN peacekeeping has withstood the test of time; regional peacekeeping is not the antithesis of UN peacekeeping and vice versa.

Contextualising the 2020 Malian coup d’état: a view on international intervention

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By Jemma Challenger

Mali, Flag, Map, Geography, Outline, Africa, Country
Outline of Mali in the colours of the Malian flag (Pixabay, 2021)

The coup d’état

On the morning of 18th August 2020, mutinous elements of the Malian Armed Forces stormed a military base in the town of Kati, in what constituted the onset of the country’s second coup d’état in under 10 years. Seized military vehicles then headed to the country’s capital, Bamako, where putschists succeeded in detaining a number of key government officials including President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. By midnight, Keïta had conceded his presidency and dissolved the government. 

Leaders of the coup fired celebratory gunshots as swathes of anti-government protestors rallied around a central square in Bamako to applaud the triumph. The ‘June 5 Movement-Assembly of Patriotic Forces’ (M5-RFP) opposition coalition, formed in mid-2020 to coordinate escalating demonstrations and civil disobedience, supported the toppling; group spokesperson, Nouhoum Togo, announced it constituted “not a military coup but a popular insurrection”.  Simultaneously, however, the mutineers were confronted by a unanimous surge of admonition from the international community. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pressed soldiers to release detained officials immediately, and “return to their barracks without delay”. The African Union’s (AU’s) President, Cyril Ramaphosa, called for the “immediate return to civilian rule,” briefly suspending Mali from the bloc. The fifteen-nation strong  Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) announced neighbouring members would close their borders with Mali, and stipulated sanctions against “all the putschists and their partners and collaborators”. France, the US, China, Turkey, Germany, South Africa and Nigeria were amongst a wealth of nations to publicly condemn the coup independently. 

Several months down the line, the military junta continues to grapple with its commitment to establish a comprehensive transition to democratic rule that adequately conciliates this international community. It remains, therefore, an apt time to reflect upon the protracted role international actors have played in Mali, and to assess their accountability vis-à-vis the latest coup. Indeed, the international community at large has long been directly embroiled within Malian affairs, to the extent that to dissect the country’s political landscape without seriously reflecting upon its external stakeholders is to abandon half the picture. How did the political scene evolve in such a way that posed conditions ripe for a coup that enjoyed such a degree of popular domestic support? And how did these quite cataclysmic developments emerge right under the nose of a corpus of intervenors comprising well over 15,000 international troops in Mali? 

This article will demonstrate that key intervenors – the United Nations (UN) and France – are prioritising short-term military, and tacitly pro-incumbent solutions to a highly political conflict. Accordingly, they jeopardise prospects for security, fail to hold leaders to account, and permit political grievances to spiral. It is vital that the 2020 coup is understood against this backdrop. 

The international community in Mali 

For scholar Nina Wilén, the coup is a stark reminder of how local political conflict endures in spite of a weighty external presence. Embodying a ‘logic of its own’, engagement in Mali – that is, a militarily well-endowed French-led counter-terrorist operation, a sizeable and robust UN peacekeeping operation, a United States (US) Africa Command drone base, three European Union (EU) missions, and the creation of a new Special Forces Joint Task Force – is insufficiently cognisant of local realities and dynamics on the ground. The intervention is, by and large, inherently state-centric and military dominated. This fails to differentiate between the needs of a range of complex parallel crises in Mali. It also fails to address local, grassroots grievances and conflicts, which in turn offer a valuable source of mobilisation for the extremists and criminal networks that external actors so committedly endeavour to eradicate. 

For instance, the UN operation was, until recently, situated almost exclusively in line with the explicit jihadist threat in the north of Mali. Meanwhile, localised agricultural conflict plaguing Central communities escalated rapidly for a number of years, into what now constitutes the epicentre of violence in Mali. This is a flagrant missed opportunity for the intervention. In prioritising symptoms over causes, and short-term security imperatives over long-term diplomatic and grassroots political efforts, the UN failed to prevent a dire security crisis from unfurling under its nose. Jihadists were able to successfully draw upon a political vacuum, popular grievances, and cleavages along ethnic lines to mobilise support from occluded rural populations. This rendered UN efforts to ‘impede, impair and isolate’ the terrorist threat’ in the North rather futile. In inadequately responding to grievance-based local conflicts, external intervention has done little to quell the root of popular unrest, whilst adding fuel to the flames of jihadist networks and transnational criminal organisations. 

Simultaneously, the permanent external military presence reduces incentives for the state to engage in crucial reforms and productive political dialogue. In what one scholar of Sahelian politics, Yvan Guichaoua, describes as the ‘bitter harvest of French interventionism’, France’s entrenched armed presence – dominated foremostly by enemy-centric security agendas – is acting as a ‘de facto military guarantor’ of the security of the Malian regime. In doing so, France effectively disincentivises any sitting government in Mali to engage in dialogue with its adversaries in order to reach political compromises. As Michael Shurkin of RAND fittingly suggests, France’s operational objective is, as of now, little more than the creation of ‘strategic possibilities’ that some other partner might be able to exploit. Thus far, the intervention has shown little inclination to hold a sitting regime to account, or push even for the somewhat lacklustre reforms proposed in a 2015 peace agreement. Against this backdrop, external intervention has something to answer for with regards to the popular discontent that paved the way for the coup it denounced so quickly last August. 

The coming months will undoubtedly play a critical role in defining the trajectory of the crisis in Mali. Colonel Major Ismaël Wagué, spokesman for the self-proclaimed National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) military junta, explicitly pledged cooperation with the international community from the outset; for him, the UN and France are “partners in the restoration of stability.” Yet, for all that the CNSP avow their dedication to maintain military collaboration with intervenors, and for all intervenors assure their sustained armed presence on the Sahel, lasting security without popular support and a comprehensive political strategy will doubtless prove untenable. Intervenors in Mali must acknowledge that the crisis of the ‘weak state’ in Mali lies not at the hands of a discontented citizenry, but in the radical social distance between this citizenry and its political class. Viewed through this optic, the coup has but foregrounded longstanding shortcomings of the international community in Mali that must be conceded and transformed in order to make meaningful progress towards stability. 

 

Jemma Challenger is an MA student of International Conflict Studies at King’s College London and a graduate of the University of Leeds, where she studied a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Her central research interests include UN intervention in conflict, peacebuilding and state-building processes, and the qualitative study of comparative civil wars. You can find her on Twitter @jemmachallenger.