The Politics of Action for Peacekeeping

The Declaration of Shared Commitments on UN Peacekeeping Operations emphasizes “the primacy of politics” to conflict resolution. The phrase, popularized by the 2015 High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, is now standard UN language. But what is the main political problem that Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) is supposed to solve?
“The A4P process is an opportunity to overcome the division between the political worlds of headquarters and the field, although it is not clear that all members of the UN are 100% committed to its success,” writes RICHARD GOWAN in ‘The Politics of A4P’, a policy brief published by the Challenges Forum.
The negotiation process leading up to the Declaration was a step in the right direction, as UN officials used a series of seminars to lay out field-level problems to New York based diplomats, GOWAN states. As a result, many diplomats showed a little more sympathy for field perspectives.
“A4P has at least created a minimum of inter-governmental consensus about the need to address the politics of peacekeeping at both the headquarters and field levels.”
But what can those countries that want to see real change, and their allies in UN system, do to build on this?
“Even if Member States and the UN system put their combined weight behind implementing A4P, the process of designing mandates will always be haphazard. ‘By definition, crisis management is a disorderly and imperfect political business that can be improved at the margins but not made into a science,’ as I concluded an earlier study of the Security Council and peacekeeping. 'The Council will never truly escape its constraints.’”
The growing range of actors involved in crisis management – most obviously regional organizations and coalitions, duly acknowledged in the Declaration (para 18) – only adds to the complexity of the world the UN faces, GOWAN states. “But if both diplomats and UN officials in the field are willing to work together a little more closely they may mitigate some of the recurrent tensions that make the politics of peacekeeping hard at all levels.”