13

UN PEACEKEEPING AND THE

IRONY OF STATEBUILDING
Richard Gowan

In February 2010, the London Guardian accused the UN peacekeeping force in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (MONUC) of signing a ‘pact with the devil’ (Smith, 2010). The supposedly
Satanic figure involved was Bosco Ntaganda, a former militia commander being pursued for war
crimes by the International Criminal Court. Ntaganda had, however, agreed to integrate his
forces into the Congolese army and now held the rank of general. While the army was already
notorious for its indiscipline and appalling human rights record, MONUC continued to give it
support. While the mission’s leadership insisted that it did not have contact with Ntaganda, the
Guardian warned that its cooperation with a military that included such a man was ‘another
shameful chapter in UN peacekeeping that ranks alongside the impotent displays in Srebrenica
and Rwanda.’ The Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) in the Congo, Alan
Doss, penned a rebuttal. He argued that it was wrong to ‘assume that when peacekeepers are
invited into a troubled country, all shortcomings and responsibilities for law and order default
to the United Nations’ (Doss, 2010):

Governments remain responsible for their security forces, civilian protection and the
integrity of borders, natural resources and public institutions. We assist the DRC in
many of these areas, but we cannot impose our will on the government.

Bosco Ntaganda remained at large, going on to cause considerable further instability and trauma
in the eastern Congo. But Alan Doss’s defense of MONUC in 2010 offers a useful starting point
for considering how UN peace operations have tackled the dilemmas of statebuilding in recent
years. His invocation of Congolese sovereignty was simply an adaptation of the opening para-
graphs of the Security Council mandate then in force for MONUC, which affirmed the
government’s ‘primary responsibility’ for national security and civilian protection. Similar
language can be found in the preambles to the mandates for other recent large-scale UN missions.
Critics of UN operations question the sincerity of these words. But Doss and other UN mission
leaders have struggled to balance their commitment to building up fragile states’ sovereignty with
concerns about how governments exercise their sovereign powers.
This is troubling, because peacekeeping has increasingly been equated with statebuilding over
the past decade. As Jake Sherman has shown, many peacekeeping mandates not only promise
respect for sovereignty but charge peacekeepers to help governments ‘extend state authority’ –

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a phrase first applied to the UN peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in 2000
(Sherman, 2012, 13–14):

In certain cases, the extension of state authority has been geographic, i.e. extending the
territorial writ of the government. In other cases, it entails strengthening the capacity,
effectiveness, and legitimacy of state institutions in key sectors, such as assisting the state
to obtain a monopoly on the use of force. Most often, extension of state authority
involves a combination of these aspects.

This chapter reflects on how UN peacekeeping has evolved, and sometimes failed to evolve,
to manage these tasks. In doing so, it draws on the author’s work on the Annual Review of Global
Peace Operations – a volume first published by the Center on International Cooperation in 2006
– and the work of other scholars associated with the Review, especially Sherman and Ian
Johnstone.1 Nonetheless, it largely describes the UN’s operations in Africa – which, it argues,
have become the organization’s strategic center of gravity – and does not cover all recent UN
missions. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and its counterpart in Iraq, although
technically political missions rather than peace operations, are notable omissions here. And the
chapter’s thematic focus is also deliberately narrow, concentrating on military operations and
high politics of peacekeeping. This inevitably excludes important aspects of UN missions, such
as the role of international police in maintaining public order. But this narrow focus has a purpose:
to explore the connections between force and politics in peace operations and to show why UN
military deployments have had unintended and sometimes tragic consequences.
As peacekeepers have taken on increasing security roles in support of weak governments –
often in tandem with ill-trained, abusive, or politically divided security forces – the UN has had
to sustain large-scale operations for unexpectedly long periods. In 1998, the UN had only 12,000
troops in the field. As of late 2011, it had over 80,000 military personnel and 14,000 police
officers deployed worldwide. The vast majority of these were serving in missions with ‘extension
of state authority’ in their mandate. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, this has proved problematic.
Some of the largest operations – including MONUC, which had over 20,000 troops in 2010 –
have been less effective than the raw data about their size imply. And, as the Bosco Ntaganda
controversy suggests, UN officials have often been deeply frustrated by the governments that
they are authorized to assist. In some cases, the UN appears to have been engaged in strengthening
state structures that are dangerous to citizens. Weak governments have repeatedly threatened to
withdraw their consent from UN missions – and some have carried through on this threat. This
chapter aims to explain how these problems have arisen, and concludes by suggesting that they
may be an unavoidable part of all statebuilding projects.

Peacekeeping: Expanding yet struggling?

To understand how UN operations stumbled into these difficulties, it is first necessary to survey
the way in which peacekeeping grew so rapidly from 1999 onwards. The speed of this growth
threatened the UN with overstretch from the mid-2000s onwards, laying the seeds for future
challenges to operations. Yet in the mid-to-late 1990s, it seemed very unlikely that blue-helmeted
peacekeeping had any future at all, let alone one characterized by rapid expansion. The disasters
of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda were still very fresh memories. The crises in Kosovo and Timor-
Leste marked a turning-point, however, as the Security Council mandated UN civilian officials
to administer the two territories. These episodes did not necessarily signal a significant expansion
of UN military operations. In Kosovo, NATO deployed ground forces while in Timor-Leste an

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Australian-led force undertook the initial stabilization operation (although it then handed respon-
sibilities to UN troops). Instead, a new set of peacekeeping missions in Africa from 2000 onwards
created the conditions for the UN to re-emerge as a military actor.
The first of these African missions was in Sierra Leone. The Security Council initially
mandated 6,000 troops to deploy in 1999 to replace an earlier West African force. The UN
mission deployed slowly and was ‘far too patchy to be effective; many troops were inexperienced
and unmotivated; logistics were poor; and even maps were out of date’ (Adebajo and Keen, 2007:
262). In May 2000, rebels launched an offensive that threatened to overwhelm the mission –
500 UN troops were taken hostage – until a British intervention restored order. The Security
Council approved a major expansion of the mission, which eventually numbered over 17,000
personnel. After this episode, UN officials and Security Council diplomats began to rethink the
military dimension of UN operations. The Council mandated larger UN forces and asked them,
as Ian Johnstone noted in 2006, ‘to use force for a range of purposes beyond self-defense,
including the protection of civilians and maintenance of public security’ (Johnstone, 2006: 2).
By the time Johnstone wrote, there were just over 62,000 UN military personnel worldwide
(Center on International Cooperation, 2006: 138). Fifty thousand (82%) were deployed in Africa,
where numerous missions had mandates involving the extension of state authority, including
those in Sierra Leone, Liberia (launched in 2003), Côte d’Ivoire (2004), and Burundi (2004).
But the primary test of the UN’s capability to provide military support to a weak state lay in the
Congo, to which MONUC deployed in 1999.
MONUC was initially a small force, primarily devoted to monitoring. The Congo was
emerging from an appalling civil war that had involved its neighbors and by some estimates
claimed over three million lives. The government of President Joseph Kabila had little or no
control of much of the country, where militias roamed freely. By the end of 2002, the UN still
only had 4,300 troops on the ground. Over the year that followed, the mission shifted toward a
far more assertive military posture, in part in response to an upsurge of violence in the eastern
province of Ituri in the second quarter of the year (Boshoff, 2004: 140–141). MONUC was
unable to cope, and the Security Council mandated the short-term deployment of a European
Union (EU) rapid reaction force to restore order. Although the EU operation was a success, it
withdrew after three months and MONUC was given a new mandate and extra troops to
maintain stability in Ituri. By the end of the third quarter of 2003, the mission had over 10,000
troops in the field, including a 4,800-strong ‘Ituri Brigade.’ This new formation’s commander
warned that his troops were ‘now enforcing peace, as opposed to keeping peace’ and ‘the brigade’s
capacity is enormous’ (Boshoff, 2004: 142). The ground forces were backed by attack helicopters.
MONUC expanded the range of its robust operations to other provinces in the eastern Congo
– notably North and South Kivu – and the mission would eventually surpass 20,000 personnel.
As we will see in the next section, these numbers were deceptive: MONUC was sometimes
too thinly spread to have a decisive impact. This would prove true of other missions, such as that
in Darfur. Nonetheless, UN peace operations had not merely been resurrected after the failures
of the 1990s but had also begun to adopt a new attitude toward providing security in weak states.
Beyond Africa, UN missions contributed to the extension of state authority in a variety of ways.
In Haiti, Brazilian-led forces used the mandate as the basis for anti-gang operations in the slums
of Port-au-Prince. After the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the
Security Council instructed the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to ‘take all necessary
action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities’ to help the
government ‘exercise its authority throughout the territory.’ This was a code for a crackdown
on Hezbollah, which proved impossible to put into practice. Nonetheless, the deployment of
nearly 15,000 troops – primarily but not solely from Europe – did manage to stabilize the

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Israeli–Lebanese border. By the mid-2000s, therefore, the UN had re-established its credentials
as a credible military actor, in spite of numerous setbacks along the way.
This was accompanied by an increasing emphasis on peacebuilding and especially institution-
building in the security and justice sectors. There was a focus on developing ‘integrated missions’
and integrated planning processes, giving the SRSGs in charge of peacekeeping operations the
power to coordinate UN funds and agencies. This initiative, supported by Secretary-General
Kofi Annan but distrusted by many UN humanitarian and development officials, resulted in
innumerable bureaucratic turf wars and almost as many policy seminars on better integration. In
late 2005, Barnett R. Rubin quipped that ‘the main instruments of strategic planning often remain
endless “coordination” meetings among rival organizations, and the stapler, which serves to
assemble those organizations’ programs into a single “plan”’ (Rubin, 2005: 93). But if impro-
visation was often the norm in the field, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO)
in New York began to place greater emphasis on learning and collating lessons across missions,
and even released a peacekeeping doctrine in 2008. The goal of this endeavor, which encountered
considerable resistance from DPKO old-timers, was to develop ‘uniform practices and procedures’
to guide day-to-day UN work (Benner et al., 2011: 44).
The new generation of heavy UN military operations thus offered a framework for improving
and coordinating civilian contributions to post-conflict peacebuilding. A central civilian and
military concern for almost all new peace operations was the management of post-conflict
elections. UN officials were haunted by early post-Cold War operations, notably that in Angola,
where peacekeepers had overseen elections but then withdrawn, precipitating more violence.
Nonetheless, the Security Council continued to insist on national elections as an operational
priority, and DPKO now calculates that the UN has overseen votes in countries ‘with populations
totaling over 120 million people, giving more than 57 million registered voters the chance to
exercise their democratic rights’ (UN, 2012: 2). These polls included presidential elections in
Sierra Leone (2002), Liberia (2005), Burundi (2005), Haiti (2006), and the Democratic Republic
of Congo (2006). Although UN peacekeepers deserve a great deal of credit for securing these
processes – especially where, as in Haiti and the Congo, there was serious unrest associated with
the polls – they frequently resulted in new political challenges for the UN.
Recalling previous failures such as Angola, the UN secretariat now assumed that the success
of initial post-conflict elections did not guarantee lasting stability. The Security Council was
willing to keep operations in place rather than risk a return to war. In most cases, the UN was
also able to persuade newly elected leaders to acquiesce to this arrangement. For many of them,
the peacekeepers represented a source of political and personal security. The main exception was
Burundi, where the election winners believed that the UN mission (ONUB) had supported their
opponents and duly maneuvered to have it withdrawn in 2006. Yet even where governments
accepted the UN’s continued presence in theory, relations were not always easy in practice. As
the veteran UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and DPKO official Salman Ahmed argued in 2008,
there was likely to be ‘an inverse relationship between the longevity of the peace operation and
the room for it to play an effective political role’ (Brahimi and Ahmed, 2008: 4). Leaders were
able to use their fresh popular mandates to gain leverage over international officials. Johnstone
concludes that peace operations often rest on bargains with political elites that have ‘built-in
obsolescence’ as conflicts recede and domestic politics develop (Johnstone, 2011: 174–175):

Typically, the UN starts out dealing with weak transitional governments, as in Haiti,
Burundi and the DRC. The governments need the UN (and other external actors),
especially for security and development assistance, and are therefore willing to tolerate
significant external interference in exchange. But as the host becomes stronger, it

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becomes less tolerant of international tutelage – content to accept a small peacebuilding

presence if that means greater economic aid, but less interested in a military presence
and governance advice.

As Johnstone concludes, ‘it is ironic that consolidating sovereign capacity to exercise authority
throughout the state is seen as a desirable end-state in a peace process, but the stronger the host
government gets, the less leverage outsiders have to ensure it does so in a legitimate and sustainable
manner.’ This proved to be a particular problem in the Congo. After winning the 2006 elections,
President Joseph Kabila became an increasingly difficult partner for the UN, courting Chinese
investment and implying that he no longer needed the support of Western powers and
international organizations (although he temporarily moderated his stance during the financial
crisis, when the Congolese state almost went bankrupt and China cut back its offers of financial
support). Kabila also insisted on launching ill-advised offensives against anti-government militias
in the east of the country. These often involved brutality against civilians.
The Congolese military was poorly equipped and the UN provided logistical support. UN
officers admitted that this was a morally complex enterprise, but argued that they had a greater
chance of restraining the army from committing abuses if they remained involved. This strategy
went badly wrong in 2008, when a rebel counter-offensive routed the army and threatened to
overwhelm MONUC forces. As criticism of the UN’s complicity with the Congolese army
mounted, the Security Council approved a ‘conditionality policy’ for MONUC in 2009,
directing the mission to withdraw support from units led by commanders with a history of human
rights abuses (Reynaert, 2011: 19). Although the UN did manage to vet a number of Congolese
officers, MONUC was still unable to bring figures such as Bosco Ntaganda to justice.
In the face of such dilemmas, UN officials began to re-evaluate the principles of peacebuilding
and statebuilding. If the initial expansion of operations after 1999 had fostered a technocratic
approach to peacebuilding – emphasizing ‘integration’ and ‘uniform practices and procedures’ –
the setbacks of the later 2000s stimulated greater interest in the specific political dynamics of
post-conflict countries and the behavior of their elites. (Long-time UN mediators such as Lakhdar
Brahimi had never really caught the technocratic bug anyway.) This new focus on elite politics
has been perceptively summarized by Alan Doss since he retired from UN service. Between 2000
and 2010, Doss had served in a cross-section of the UN’s new generation of African peace
operations, first as deputy head of mission in both Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire and then as
SRSG in Liberia and the Congo. In a blunt paper published in 2011, he reflected on how the
characters of the leaders in each country had affected the UN’s work. He contrasted Presidents
Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia with Joseph Kabila
in the Congo (Doss, 2011: 3). The first two had been constructive partners to the UN:

Both Kabbah and Johnson Sirleaf were at ease (although often frustrated) in working
with the international community. They developed good support networks, within
and outside the region, which proved highly valuable for mobilizing debt relief (for
Liberia) or, in times of trouble, military assistance (Sierra Leone’s case), which helped
in turn to reinforce their political positions at home. Johnson Sirleaf has been particularly
effective in working with non-governmental and business groups, which has broadened
her appeal in and beyond the donor community.

Conversely, Doss found little to praise in Kabila’s personality or track record. In contrast to
his defense of Congolese government sovereignty in the Guardian, he now made his feelings
clear:

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There has been progress (much of the country is relatively stable and some human
development indicators show significant improvement) but Kabila has yet to overcome
an impression of presidential ineffectiveness. He is not at ease in the media spotlight
and is a reluctant communicator, even with his own people. He too is more comfortable
with incremental approaches rather than grand strategy, responding to rather than
leading events. This has been especially evident in his handling of the security situation
in the East and other critical concerns, notably security sector reform and endemic
corruption. He has been very anxious not to alienate the security forces and has only
belatedly spoken out and taken (some) action against notorious human rights violators.

Doss concludes that his experiences in peace operations suggest that institution-building is
still essential in post-conflict environments, but ‘strong institutions also require strong men and
women capable of making a qualitative difference to the way those institutions function’ (Doss,
2011: 5). This raises the policy question of how UN officials should deal with strong leaders who
aim to disrupt or undermine international peacekeeping or peacebuilding activities. Doss warns
that SRSGs will sometimes need to be assertive. In their 2008 paper, Brahimi and Ahmed
advocate a quieter approach: ‘the ground should be prepared with the host government . . . to
assure them that the objective remains for the peace operation to phase out, as quickly as possible,
including on the political front, and that mediation assistance can be provided in more discrete
ways that pose no threat to the government’s authority’ (Brahimi and Ahmed, 2008: 3).
Yet in the mid-2000s, some UN missions found that host governments wanted to erase their
political role completely. A case in point was Côte d’Ivoire. The UN sent a mission (UNOCI)
to the country to support a fragile peace process in 2004 (this paragraph largely follows Piccolino
and Karlsrud, 2011: 453–459). The Security Council initially mandated a force of 7,000 personnel
to monitor the peace agreement – far fewer than had been required to pacify the much smaller
Sierra Leone, and only half the number of troops the UN had sent to neighboring Liberia. This
was partially offset by the fact that France kept a military presence in its former colony. But the
UN had a weak base from which to promote reconciliation, and both the French and the UN
found it extremely difficult to work with President Laurent Gbagbo (a ‘Machiavellian temporizer’
according to Doss). More broadly, the second SRSG in charge of the mission – Pierre Schori,
a former deputy foreign minister of Sweden – reported that he was revolted by ‘the gap between
the misery and powerlessness of the poverty-stricken majority and the glaring riches and arrogance
of the ruling classes’ (Schori, 2009: 27). Gbagbo and his supporters returned this disdain. Planned
national elections were postponed in 2005. UN forces were harassed after the French clashed
with government forces in 2005, and in early 2006 pro-Gbagbo protestors surrounded UNOCI
positions. Nervous peacekeepers killed five civilians. The government launched a successful
political campaign to neuter the UN mission, initiating direct talks with its foes:

Ivorian actors insisted that the peace process was now ‘nationally owned’. Diplomats
close to the Gbagbo regime were candid in admitting that one of the objectives of the
direct dialogue was ‘to keep the UN out’ and it seems that the total marginaliza-
tion of UNOCI was what the Ivorian authorities had in mind and the UN feared.
Eventually, the Ivorian presidency seemed to be satisfied with a solution that implied
curtailing UNOCI’s political influence. The role of UNOCI was redefined as one of
providing financial, and to some extent technical, support to an internally defined
process – according to the meaningful French expression, accompagner le processus de
paix.
(Piccolino and Karlsrud, 2011: 455–456)

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The poor relations between UNOCI and the Gbagbo government exploded into violence
in late 2010, when the long-delayed national elections were finally held – and Gbagbo narrowly
lost. We will return to this episode near the end of the chapter, as it brings operational problems
experienced by other UN missions into extremely sharp focus. However, the neutering of
UNOCI in the early years of its deployment is also illustrative of larger trends troubling the UN
in the mid-2000s (although it is unusual in that the Ivorian government used its leverage to avoid
elections, rather than exploiting electoral victory to gain leverage over the UN, as in Congo).
UN officials faced the prospect of declining influence in a significant number of the countries
where peacekeepers remained deployed. Looking back on this period, readers may ask two
questions. First, if so many UN operations faced deteriorating political conditions, why did the
Security Council not use its diplomatic leverage to reinforce the peacekeepers? Second, if the
UN had invested so much in developing its military capacities since 2000, why did the missions
not gain more political benefits from the large number of troops they fielded?
The answer to the first question is that the Security Council was far from completely passive,
but it often struggled to bring its political weight to bear against recalcitrant governments. The
rush of new missions in the early 2000s – and the need to review their mandates regularly –
meant the Council had to juggle multiple crises. ‘The pressure for these political peacemaking
missions has to come from the Security Council,’ the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for
Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guéhenno admitted in 2007, ‘but there is only so much
time that the key leaders of the world can devote to an issue’ (Mascolo, 2007).
In many cases, Council members were happy to let one or two powers manage policy toward
a specific mission. Britain, for example, was generally agreed to have oversight of its former
colony Sierra Leone, while France played a similar role on Côte d’Ivoire and the US took the
lead on Liberia. If this saved time and energy, it could have curious results: French and American
diplomats often bickered over the relative importance of the Liberian and Ivorian missions, for
example, despite the fact that the fates in the two neighboring countries were obviously
intertwined. Studies by the Center on International Cooperation have also emphasized that
Council members often lose sight of the complex political realities in post-conflict countries,
instead focusing on process issues in New York (Gowan with Whitfield, 2011; Novosseloff and
Gowan, 2012). Although the UN launched a new Peacebuilding Commission in 2006 to take
some pressure off the Security Council and develop long-term strategies to help countries
emerging from conflict, it failed to gain traction. Moreover, the Security Council has frequently
had to bargain with regional organizations such as the African and European Unions over details
of peace processes and peace operations, reducing the UN’s political autonomy. In many cases,
including Côte d’Ivoire, China and Russia have insisted as a matter of ideological principle that
UN officials must respect national sovereignty (Piccolino and Karlsrud, 2011: 456).
Although the Council has spent a huge amount of time debating peace operations, therefore,
the political results have often failed to match the amount of diplomatic energy expended. There
are exceptions: we have noted that the Council imposed a ‘conditionality policy’ on MONUC’s
support to the Congolese military, for example. But some governments – including those of
Burundi in 2006, Eritrea in 2008, and Chad in 2010 – have risked the wrath of the Council and
demanded that UN forces leave their territory altogether. The UN’s room for maneuver has
frequently proved remarkably limited, and missions have shut down. If this demonstrates the
Council’s political flaws, the UN has also had to tackle military limitations.

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Overstretch
We have seen that the UN responded to crises in weak states such as Sierra Leone and the Congo
in the early 2000s by expanding military operations. But if this process restored the UN’s
credibility after the failures of the 1990s, it soon brought the risk of operational overstretch. As
the overall number of troops under UN command continued to rise, the organization found it
increasingly difficult to persuade governments to provide sufficient numbers of specialized military
assets – including helicopters and other air assets, engineering units, and field hospitals – to keep
all its operations running smoothly. In 2004, Jean-Marie Guéhenno warned the General Assembly
that operations were at a ‘crossroads’ and severe resource shortages loomed (Gowan, 2008: 456).
When the UN began to deploy a new operation to South Sudan in 2005, it was delayed by a
lack of engineers to build facilities and protection units to guarantee the safety of the nascent
force. By 2008, the organization seemed to be near a ‘systemic crisis’ in which the range of
demands on peacekeepers could no longer be sustained (Gowan, 2008).
This concern was compounded by doubts over the quality and commitment of many of the
forces available to the UN. In the wake of the Balkan wars, Western generals and politicians
remained deeply skeptical of deploying under UN command. Although European troops have
consistently played a prominent role in blue helmet operations in the Middle East (and were
readily available to ship out to Lebanon in 2006), they have generally not deployed to Africa.
There have been exceptions – Ireland and Sweden sent a joint rapid reaction force to Liberia,
for example – but in many years European troops represent between 1% and 2% of all UN forces
in Africa (Gowan, 2009). Similarly, Latin American countries with well-trained militaries focused
on the UN mission in Haiti through the 2000s rather than spreading their contributions more
widely. The vast majority of UN troops in Africa have come from the continent itself or from
South Asia. The quality of contingents from both regions has varied considerably. Some units
have simply lacked basic equipment. In mid-2010, the UN came under renewed criticism for
its performance in the Congo when it was revealed that a militia had undertaken mass rapes
30 km from a peacekeeping base. A UN investigation of the incident revealed that the company
at that base ‘had only one Congolese interpreter, an ambulance and two jeeps’:

Its 80 peacekeepers, who had recently been deployed without any special training on
the protection of civilians and best practices, were unfamiliar with the terrain,
circumstances and the armed groups involved. Furthermore, its response capacity was
further constrained by other operational constraints.2

These operational constraints included ‘the lack of military logistics and telephone coverage’: the
UN had not even had sufficient communications equipment to keep track of events.
Journalists investigating the story learned that the UN was unable to maintain a sufficiently
consistent presence to deter militias. ‘When the peacekeepers approached a village, the rebels
would run into the forest,’ one interviewee explained, ‘but then the Blue Helmets had to move
on to another area, and the rebels would just return.’3 This was not surprising. We have noted
that the UN set up a sizeable brigade to maintain peace in Ituri province in 2003, but it has often
been unable to concentrate its forces so effectively in the Congo. Benjamin Tortolani and this
author previously compared the scale of the UN’s deployment in Sierra Leone in 2001–2002 to
MONUC’s presence in 2008 (when, as we have noted, the mission came under particular
pressure from militia attacks). At its peak, UNAMSIL had mustered 17,500 troops, which
represented one soldier for every 343 members of the population or, on another ratio, one for
every 1.7 square miles of territory (Gowan and Tortolani, 2009: 51). By contrast, MONUC had

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one soldier for 3,748 Congolese citizens and 54 square miles of territory. When the 2008 crisis
in Congo almost spiraled out of control, and there were calls for the EU to send a rapid reaction
force as it had in 2003, European leaders were shocked to discover that MONUC had only 800
troops in the strategically important eastern town of Goma.
In spite of its earlier expansion, MONUC’s military presence was thus less impressive than it
appeared on paper. A similar situation would emerge in the Sudanese region of Darfur, a case
that dominated debates about the effectiveness of UN operations in the later 2000s. While war
broke out in Darfur in 2003, the African Union initially attempted to manage the crisis. Although
an AU peacekeeping force did manage to ease the crisis on its first deployment, it was soon
overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the region and the complexity of the conflict. The Security
Council discussed deploying a peacekeeping force in 2006 and 2007, eventually approving a joint
UN–AU force (UNAMID) that was formally launched in January 2008. It was ultimately to
involve some 25,000 personnel. But UNAMID suffered from a mix of military defects and
political problems. The Sudanese government went to great lengths to hamper the mission’s
deployment – one standard tactic was to refuse permission for UN aircraft, located at Sudanese
air bases, to fly. Khartoum also exploited a loophole in the mission’s mandate to stop Western
countries sending contingents (unusually, some European countries did want to contribute on
this occasion) and insisted that as much of the force as possible should consist of African units.
This forced DPKO to search for additional military contributions from African armies that were
already heavily engaged in other peace operations. The result was a force that was even less well-
resourced than other UN missions, and militias and criminals preyed on its personnel. UNAMID
lost 28 members to ‘malicious acts’ between 2008 and 2011 – the UN mission in Liberia recorded
just two fatalities of this type from 2003 on (CIC, 2012: 231 and 283).
In both the Congo and Darfur, UN forces were effectively overwhelmed by their operational
environments. UN officials sometimes claim that these two cases are not representative of
peacekeeping as a whole: they distract from the organization’s successes in cases such as Liberia
and Sierra Leone. This is a partially fair defense. However, military flaws have brought missions
elsewhere close to disaster too. To illustrate this, we can return to Côte d’Ivoire. We have already
seen that the Gbagbo government placed significant constraints on the mission there, UNOCI,
in the mid-2000s and repeatedly postponed elections. When the polls finally took place at the
end of 2010, Gbagbo suffered a surprise defeat to a long-time rival, Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo’s
supporters went on a rampage, killing many of Ouattara’s allies in the main city of Abidjan. A
contingent of Bangladeshi peacekeepers distinguished themselves by securing the Abidjan hotel
compound in which Ouattara was staying, ensuring that he was not also a fatality. Yet much of
the rest of UNOCI performed poorly. ‘Pro-Gbagbo regular army forces, youth militia, foreign
mercenaries and special forces have blocked U.N. food and fuel deliveries,’ the Washington Post’s
UN correspondent reported, ‘torched vehicles, heaved Molotov cocktails at U.N. installations,
[and] shot and kidnapped U.N. peacekeepers’ (Lynch, 2011). He added that ‘in many cases, the
U.N. responded to challenges to its freedom of movement by returning to base.’
While UN officials queried this negative reporting – highlighting occasions on which UNOCI
units had managed to protect civilians – it was also rumored that frightened UN staff in Côte
d’Ivoire were failing to keep UN headquarters fully informed of events, and that some local UN
employees were colluding with Gbagbo’s forces. The crisis culminated in late March and April
2011, when the Security Council authorized both UNOCI and French forces in Côte d’Ivoire
to use force to protect civilians under heavy weapons fire in Abidjan. Pro-Ouattara forces swept
into the city and took Gbagbo prisoner. Although Russia accused the UNOCI of taking sides,
the Security Council’s decision was celebrated as a potential turning point for the UN operations:
not only had UNOCI stood up to Gbagbo but it had used force effectively, if only at the last

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moment. But as UN officials readily conceded, it has been a close run thing: they were lucky
that a large number of peacekeepers were not killed. In 2012, seven soldiers from Niger serving
with UNOCI were murdered in an ambush on the increasingly volatile Ivorian–Liberian border.

Conclusion
The resolution of the Ivorian crisis was one of a series of successes for UN operations in early
2011 that arguably redeemed peacekeeping after an extremely difficult period (for DPKO, this
had been compounded by the loss of highly regarded UN staff in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti).
These included facilitating an independence referendum in South Sudan and overseeing further
presidential elections in Haiti and Liberia. But serious challenges remained. In 2010, President
Kabila had pushed the UN to submit a proposal for pulling its forces out of Congo. Although
he eventually agreed to let the UN stay on under a new mandate – with an increased emphasis
on supporting the government – the future of the UN presence in the country remained
uncertain. The mission’s military resources were ‘sharply curtailed’ to such an extent that
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon concluded that it was ‘no longer able to implement critical parts
of its priority mandated tasks’ including protecting civilians and dealing with armed groups (CIC,
2012: 46). In 2011, Congo held patently flawed presidential elections that Kabila won – once
again, the UN was criticized for its ties to the president. In 2012, Bosco Ntaganda turned against
Kabila. Forces loyal to him launched new offensives in the eastern DRC that – at the time of
writing in late 2012 – left the national army and UN peacekeepers on the defensive.
The UN’s woes were not confined to Congo. South Sudan’s secession was complicated by
repeated clashes over the demarcation of its border with the north, while UN forces within South
Sudan itself (lacking helicopters) struggled to damp down ethnic violence. In the spring of 2012,
the Syrian crisis created a new challenge for DPKO, which had to deploy military observers in
the midst of a deteriorating conflict – UN officials were relieved when the mission withdrew
four months later without sustaining any fatalities. UN peacekeeping remained in a state of both
high activity and frequent confusion. The mission in Darfur, almost universally agreed to have
been a costly and ugly failure, began to downsize.
By 2012, UN officials predicted that the overall number of peacekeepers was also likely to
shrink gradually in the years ahead – unless new large missions upset their plans. There was a
general sentiment that countries such as Liberia and Haiti had reached a ‘good enough’ level of
stability, and that the continued presence of peacekeepers was unnecessary. Policy-makers in the
UN secretariat – from Ban Ki-moon down – now also questioned whether it would be wise to
launch large military missions on the Congo or Darfur models in future (Gowan, 2011). There
was a new emphasis on UN civilian political missions as a lighter alternative to peacekeeping,
and even stalwart DPKO staffers highlighted the non-military aspects of their work (CIC, 2011).
The era of peacekeeping that began in 1999 and 2000 thus seems to be waning, even though
tens of thousands of peacekeepers remain deployed worldwide. Many academic experts have
already tried to write that era’s epitaph. Alex de Waal has made an especially resonant effort to
summarize what has happened to peacekeeping in Africa – and what went wrong. He posits that
‘the Sierra Leone conflict was resolved through an international military and financial presence
that was so large, relative to the small size and even tinier economy of the country, that it became
the principal source of patronage’ (de Waal, 2009: 107). Such a peacekeeping force becomes ‘the
Leviathan that enforces its will, leading to peace.’ But in more challenging environments such
as the DRC or Sudan, a UN mission ‘becomes just another buyer and seller in the auction of
loyalties, and usually a rather inept one, readily manipulated or bypassed by the better-endowed
and cannier national players’ (de Waal, 2009: 108).

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 Gowan

This chapter has largely confirmed this diagnosis, while also echoing Ian Johnstone’s emphasis
on the ‘ironic’ dimension of statebuilding: UN peacekeepers, and international actors more
generally, invest in securing and supporting governments that then reject outside interference.
The chapter has also underlined the tragic implications of this irony by focusing on the political,
ethical, and operational dilemmas that arise when peacekeepers work alongside weak and unstable
governments. While scholarship on statebuilding continues to focus on technocratic issues, the
recent history of UN peacekeeping suggests that equal attention should be given to human factors
that ensure that all efforts to build up a state go more or less wrong eventually.

Notes
1 The chapter also shows the influence of other scholars involved with the Review, including Bruce D.
Jones, A. Sarjoh Bah, Benjamin Tortolani, Victoria DiDomenico, Andrew Sinclair, Megan Gleason,
and Morgan Hughes. It refers to a sister publication, the Review of Political Missions, on which the author
worked with Alischa Kugel and Teresa Whitfield. None of these experts are to blame for this chapter’s
flaws.
2 Available at: www.ohchr.org
3 Available at: www.startribune.com

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