Courage and Integrity in UN Leadership

The United Nations’ Precarious Financial Situation Places Missions and People at Risk

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Middle-Power Liberal Internationalism and the Future of the United Nations

The future looks post-Western. But will it also be post-liberal?
LOUISE RIIS ANDERSEN, in assessing how and by whom liberal internationalism may be sustained in the coming order, provides a critical and historically grounded analysis of the role of the United Nations in the fading US-led order and the ordering potential and role of middle powers.
Writing in International Journal, she suggests that in the current interregnum of global governance the conventional distinction between traditional and emerging middle powers is increasingly unhelpful. “What matters is not their past history but their present proclivity for seeking multilateral, negotiated solutions.” It is this pragmatic version of liberal internationalism that may have a future in a post-Western world, and open up a more pluralist, inclusive approach to global governance.
“The world order is in flux. That much we know. The shape of things to come, however, remains anybody’s guess,” ANDERSEN states in her essay titled ‘Curb your enthusiasm: Middle-power liberal internationalism and the future of the United Nations’. The emerging order could be multipolar or bipolar or end up taking on new and unforeseen forms of multi-order, multiplex, networked arrangements that defy easy categorization.
Debating the future of the UN is interesting in its own right, the author states. “Here it provides a prism for understanding the crisis of liberal internationalism, including the suggestion that the crisis has been brought upon liberals themselves through their own post-Cold War triumphalism.” The problem is not as much liberal excess as it is liberal amnesia: liberal internationalists have forgotten the pragmatic, even realist, roots of the rules-based world order that has the UN at its center.
If liberal internationalism is to be sustained in the coming order, it must be in a revised form that brings out and revitalizes pragmatism and the will to compromise as a key element in international affairs. Such a revision – if it is to come – is most likely to emerge from middle powers who have the strength and authority to act independently of the great powers, yet whose limited capabilities and inability to dictate outcomes or decisions make them prone to favor negotiated solutions over the use of force.
Noting that the crisis of the current order is mostly debated on US terms, ANDERSEN states that emphasis is placed on questions related to hegemonic decline, imperial overreach, and the rise of rivalling global powers (notably China). While one cannot and should not underestimate the role played by the US in firstly establishing and now undermining the post-1945 institutional order, a broader and more nuanced perspective is needed if we are to, firstly, understand the dynamics that have brought the existing order into its current crisis, and, secondly, contemplate in which forms – and by whom – elements of liberal internationalism might be sustained in a future order.
Turning to the middle powers, she states that the debate is conventionally shaped by a distinction between traditional, Western middle powers – widely conceptualized as stabilizers and legitimizers of the existing US-led order – and emerging, Global South middle powers more prone to revisionist and counter-hegemonic behavior. This distinction is increasingly unhelpful. When the hegemon itself is determined to destroy the institutional order established under its reign, ‘traditional’ middle-power liberal internationalism becomes counterhegemonic, while the revisions suggested by emerging powers emerge as stabilizing.
The essay looks, firstly, to the past to revisit the constitutional process that spurred the establishment of the UN in 1945 as an inherently paradoxical and limited instrument. Secondly, it looks to the present to outline the troubled position held by the UN within the US-led world order, and how this relates to the current crisis of liberal order. Finally, in conclusion, it looks to the future to identify how a revised, pragmatic middle-power liberal internationalism centered around the UN may help stabilize the current interregnum.
“The fluidity of both the players and the plot is part of what makes the interregnum of global governance so difficult to grasp,” ANDERSEN states. Revisiting and restoring a more statist, pragmatic version of liberal internationalism may, however, help bring back some of the predictability and stability that middle powers tend to favor.
Emphasizing negotiated rather than imposed solutions, and the importance of dialogue and compromise in politics and diplomacy, opens a space for a more pluralist and inclusive approach to global governance and international rulemaking. “While this will not sustain the liberal order of the post-Cold War era, it will surely be necessary to stabilize the transition from a US-led order to a post-Western world.”

Andersen, L. R. (2019). Curb your enthusiasm: Middle-power liberal internationalism and the future of the United Nations. International Journal, 74(1), 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702019833739

Prevention Calls for Strengthening Development, Humanitarian, Peace ‘Triple Nexus’

BEYOND BLUE HELMETS: Promoting Weapons and Ammunition Management in Non-UN Peace Operations

More than 25 organizations apart from the United Nations have deployed more than 100 peace operations to date. These non-UN organizations face the same challenges as the UN in securing their contingent-owned equipment (COE) and the lethal materiel they recover. Non-UN peace operations may even be more vulnerable to these challenges than UN operations, according to a new report.
Thousands of small arms and light weapons as well as millions of rounds of ammunition have been lost in recent years as a result of attacks on fixed sites, patrols, and convoy movements, according to the report, ‘Beyond Blue Helmets: Promoting Weapons and Ammunition Management in Non-UN Peace Operations’. Forced abandonment of COE, burglary, theft, corruption, as well as poor discipline and practices also contribute to diversion of materiel.
The report, published by Small Arms Survey last month, focuses on defining key terms, identifying the actors undertaking non-UN peacekeeping operations, and analyzing the challenges they face as well as the control measures that exist to mitigate the risks and reduce the loss of arms and ammunition.
Written by ERIC G. BERMAN, ‘Beyond Blue Helmets’ also highlights efforts some of these actors are presently undertaking to develop more effective checks and balances to enhance weapons and ammunition management practices in peace operations and suggests additional measures that could be undertaken towards these ends.
“Some regional organizations have undertaken to create or implement existing controls to reduce the chances of such diversion,” according to the report. Given overlapping memberships, some regional organizations (such as the Lake Chad Basin Commission) can benefit from the commitments their member states have made as part of other arms control frameworks (such as the Economic Community of West African States Convention).
“This assumes an attention to detail and a congruency among organizations and arms control frameworks that currently do not exist but may be changing,” BERMAN states. “The UN can benefit from commitments its member states have made as part of regional frameworks that are more stringent than the UN’s requirements.”

UN Mediation Effort in Yemen at a Crossroads

Financing UN Peacekeeping: Avoiding another Crisis

Close Cousins in Protection: the Evolution of PoC & R2P

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) in peacekeeping and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) populations from atrocity crimes are two norms that emerged at the turn of the new millennium with the aim of protecting vulnerable peoples from mass violence and/or systematic and widespread violations of human rights.
The development of the two norms and their interrelationship, however, continue to be shaped by failure: failure to consider situations as requiring concerted international action; failure to respond in a timely and decisive fashion to protection crises; and failure to fully implement what mandates prescribe, write EMILY PADDON RHOADS and JENNIFER WELSH.
“While some of these failures represent deficiencies in capacity and political will, some have also been shaped by behavioural contestation of the two norms, as states ‘act out’ their dissent by blocking or hampering efforts to protect populations,” they contend in ‘Close cousins in protection: the evolution of two norms’, published in the May 2019 issue of International Affairs.
On the PoC side, the authors state, some might argue that this failure can actually be productive, given the norm’s more operational focus. The United Nations’ willingness to be transparent and frank about what has gone wrong in past peace operations also presents opportunities for the organization to bring member states together in efforts to improve doctrine and practice.
With respect to R2P, the impact of failure works in different and more complex ways. At the micro level, efforts to build state capacity to protect and to address risk factors leading to atrocity crimes are a powerful, if less visible, testament to the commitment to learn from past failures, the authors state.
But at the macro level, inaction in the face of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity—a quarter of a century after their perpetration in Rwanda and Srebrenica—raises doubts among some about the utility of a political principle, despite its unanimous endorsement in 2005, particularly in an international environment where unity among the major powers continues to prove so elusive.

Emily Paddon Rhoads, Jennifer Welsh, 'Close cousins in protection: the evolution of two norms', International Affairs, iiz054, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz054

A Necessary Voice: Small States, International Law, and the United Nations Security Council

UN Police and the Challenges of Organized Crime

Amid the rapidly changing landscape of peace operations, organized crime has become a significant and growing factor in conflict-affected countries, including as a source of funding for non-state armed groups. Organized criminal enterprises finance armed conflict and, after conflict has abated, undermine good governance and sustainable development. “While much recent attention has focused on ‘the primacy of politics’ in peace operations and political dialogue, there has been little linking of that discourse to the rule of law, organized crime and corruption,” MARINA CAPARINI writes.
The UN has begun to incorporate a focus on organized crime in some of its peace operations work, primarily through the efforts by UN Police towards the capacity building of host state police. These are laudable, the author states in a discussion paper for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, but the UN and its partners must go further in developing a truly comprehensive and holistic approach to confronting the complex challenges to security and governance posed by organized crime within many conflict-affected host states—the effects of which often reach far beyond in a globalized world.
The UN requires a strategic framework on organized crime, and those missions with a mandate to counter organized crime require operational guidance, CAPARINI writes in the paper titled ‘UN Police and the Challenges of Organized Crime’. Much more is needed to develop a coherent, strategic and systematic approach to serious and organized crime and corruption that spans the security, development and human rights pillars, and that incorporates a preventive dimension. There must also be an effort to understand organized crime’s role through each phase of the conflict cycle, and to shape interventions to prevent its entrenchment in symbiotic relationships with corruption and feeding of new cycles of conflict.
There is, thus, a growing need for UN Security Council mandates to address organized crime, illicit economies and corruption. Lacking an explicit mandate to counter organized crime, mission leadership will be reluctant to engage in related activities, and donors and partners will be unlikely to fund them. A peacekeeping mission should be mandated to confront this issue from the beginning of the mission in an approach that counters organized crime from the earliest stage, not later when criminal groups have consolidated and possibly penetrated the state administration.
Further, a mandate to counter organized crime must necessarily address efforts at different stages along the chain of justice—investigation, evidence gathering and prosecution. Finally, such a mandate must be properly resourced in human and material terms, and, due to its sensitivity and implications for corruption, would require high-level political backing from the mission leadership and UN Headquarters.
Arriving at a more integrated approach should involve the UN’s Global Focal Point for Police, Justice and Corrections (a joint initiative of the UNDP and the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, since renamed Department of Peace Operations) since 2012 that has sought to coordinate system-wide UN rule-of-law responses to complex security and governance challenges), and greater attention to the drivers of such challenges would be an important step.
More widely, CAPARINI continues, a rethinking of internal security and its requirements in a time of growing challenges posed by organized crime is required by the UN and its member states. If it is recognized and accepted that the rule of law is integral to security, a Chapter VII mandate, usually applied in protection of civilian contexts, could be interpreted to include upholding the rule of law. That is, if organized crime and corruption are interpreted as posing a sufficient threat to the peace process, security and stability of a host country, Chapter VII’s ‘all necessary means’ could be invoked.
Measures necessary to combat organized crime in such cases, such as criminal intelligence gathering, investigations and prosecutions, and the existence of an independent justice system, would probably need to be specified in the mandate and operationalized by the mission until the host state capacities were sufficiently developed to take them over. “However, in the current international political environment, the application of a Chapter VII ‘all necessary means’ mandate is unlikely as UN peacekeeping missions are under pressure to downsize and restrict their mandated tasks.”
Each setting is unique and requires local contextual understanding in order to anticipate threats posed by organized crime, corruption and other complex drivers of violence, and to develop an appropriately tailored strategy. To this end, CAPARINI states, a political economy analysis of the economic drivers of conflict and its links to criminal networks and corruption should be undertaken as part of the preparation before a mission is deployed, and regularly updated to reflect changing dynamics among armed groups, criminal organizations and networks, and political elites and state officials.
Such analyses should examine the types of illicit economic activity that have thrived during the conflict and, by extension, who has most to lose from peace. Depending on the country and region, this will differ. But it is often overlooked, despite the importance of identifying potential spoilers in a peace process. A political economy analysis should not be oversimplified and should help understand the subjective and elusive drivers of violence such as ethnicity, religion, ideas and historical sense of grievance.
Addressing the political economy dimension as part of a broader conflict analysis may help to provide a better understanding of post-conflict violence and its drivers, and can feed into the drafting of more specific, contextually grounded guidance. Police and other law enforcement experts need to be integrated in assessments and analyses from the earliest stages of pre-mission planning.
Some UN observers feel that the police component continues to be perceived as a mostly technical part of a peace operation that mostly teaches host state counter-parts how to fight crime, CAPARINI notes. However, the police perspective can provide insights into how the political economy of crime operates in a given context, and how it impacts governance and the rule of law more broadly. UN police experts provide an understanding of what will be needed to support the development of resilient state institutions that can provide the host population with a basic minimum of security, safety and justice.
Analysis of criminal networks and the building of relationships with host state populations are essential to developing an accurate understanding of the local context and develop appropriate political strategies, CAPARINI states. It is important to investigate and address at an early stage which criminal activities (including illicit resource exploitation and trafficking) have political impacts—by providing revenues to armed groups, empowering a political patronage network, or changing a strategic power balance. Failure to do so risks misunderstanding the situation on the ground and the threats this poses to peace.
Efforts to counter organized crime and state corruption should be part of a mission leadership’s strategy and integrated into the political process. Efforts should be made to build capacity of the organizations responsible for investigating economic crime, as well as judges and corruption investigation commissions.
Mission leadership, particularly Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs), have the opportunity to put organized crime and corruption on the agenda and keep it in the eye of the public and civil society (including churches) and government. Special Representatives must also be made aware of dilemmas faced by other SRSGs in situations where organized crime groups have threatened political stability, and the long-terms effects of compromises or decisions taken.
“Addressing serious organized crime is more than a technocratic exercise, requiring a politically aware approach on several levels,” CAPARINI states, adding that such an approach must recognize that meeting people’s basic needs is necessary to build sustainable peace and development. Illicit economies offer sources of income to impoverished populations, and without providing alternative livelihoods, efforts to counter organized crime and suppress the illicit economy are likely to encounter local resistance that derails state- and peacebuilding efforts.
A longer-term politically aware perspective would assess the potential of serious and organized crime, if allowed to become entrenched, to siphon off states’ resources and foster corruption in key sectors and at the heart of the polity. The political will of local actors and elites to support efforts to counter organized crime must be assessed and monitored.
At a more operational level, CAPARINI writes, the development of effective community-oriented policing practices by host state police is also key in the effort to disrupt and dismantle organized crime networks. Community-oriented policing aims to develop relationships of trust between police and society and is, thus, a foundation for preventing crime, reducing recruitment to criminal gangs and collecting information. Capacity-building activities must be sustainable, that is, integrated into training curricula and courses, such as through training-of-trainers programmes.
Where possible, the UN and its partners should conduct joint training and capacity building of host nation police, financial investigators, border guards, prosecutors and the judiciary in countering organized crime, in order to promote coordination and cooperation among stakeholders.
Corruption and organized crime go hand-in-hand, with systematic bribery or corruption of officials in key public sector areas such as law enforcement, local government and the judiciary being a critical factor in the entrenchment of organized crime. Efforts to prevent and disrupt corruption and organized crime must be pursued in tandem. Anti-corruption efforts may need to be framed in ways that make them more politically acceptable, such as professionalization of the public service.
To better appreciate the impact of corruption and kleptocracy on the daily lives and dignity of ordinary people, those planning and implementing peace operations need to speak not only with political elites or government officials, but also with ordinary people, and listen to their views on public service delivery including policing, justice and governance, and their experiences with corruption among state actors, the author states.
Missions should engage not only with governments, but also with host state populations, including through civil society and other channels. Peace operations need to systematically mitigate risks of inadvertently facilitating corruption and kleptocracy.
Field missions as well as country teams, agencies, funds and programmes should compile their collective knowledge about individuals and organizations, companies and local contractors known to be involved in corruption through top-down payments in patronage–client flows, and also bottom-up flows in terms of gifts, kickbacks, money paid to superiors, and money paid in exchange for public service positions, access or public contracts.
Mission and UN leadership should avoid meeting with officials who are known to be corrupt and avoid dealing with firms owned by them or their supporters.
Unless peace operations and donors conduct due diligence for corruption within police and other state agencies of the host state, they risk inadvertently building the capacities of individuals colluding with organized crime to better evade or subvert law enforcement efforts. The expertise necessary to counter organized crime should, thus, be seen as a ‘dual-use good’ with potential to be misused where adequate anti-corruption safeguards are not in place, and particularly where the state is captured or is at risk of being captured by criminal elements.
Finally, law enforcement efforts in settings where peace operations are deployed have tended to focus on seizing the material goods involved in organized crime, rather than the money generated. In consequence, the enormous profits made on even a fraction of the goods involved enable criminal groups to continue their activities—for example, some 40 per cent of cocaine and heroin are seized globally between production and consumption, compared with less than 1 per cent of the money generated by drug trafficking. Within the European Union, an estimated 98.9 per cent of proceeds from crime remain in the hands of criminals, with only 2.2 per cent seized, and half of that (1.1 per cent, the equivalent of €1.2 billion) successfully confiscated annually.
Confiscation (or forfeiture) of cash, assets or property derived from criminal activity is increasingly considered a key means of disrupting organized criminal groups. Methods of doing this currently being developed within Europe, such as ‘cash teams’ involving police and other agencies that follow the spending of suspected criminals to gather evidence in preparation for prosecution, could be examined and adapted for implementation in host states.
Confiscation mechanisms face considerable challenges in complex conflict-affected settings such as Mali and the countries of the Sahel, where capacity building on asset recovery by actors such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has begun but is not yet regularly practised by states in the region.
Similarly, in Liberia, despite improved interagency coordination and the establishment in 2012 of the Financial Investigations Unit (the main body responsible for investigating illicit financial activities), by 2018 there had been no arrests, prosecutions or convictions for money laundering due to limited law enforcement capacities, inadequate resources for the financial intelligence unit, and judicial corruption.
“These examples argue for earlier and more systemic efforts to build host state capacities at every stage of the chain of justice”, CAPARINI states.

Multilateralism and the Use of Force: Experimental Evidence on the Views of Foreign Policy Elites

International relations scholars agree that states often seek the endorsement or participation of multilateral security organizations when using military force because it increases support for their policies among their domestic publics, and have advanced a range of theories to explain why.

However, this literature has given little attention to the attitudes of individuals who participate directly in the foreign policy process or shape foreign policy debates, contend JOSHUA BUSBY, CRAIG KAFURA, JONATHAN MONTEN and JORDAN TAMA. “Our experimental survey findings contribute to the debate over international organizations, domestic politics, and opinion formation in several ways,” they write in ‘Multilateralism and the Use of Force: Experimental Evidence on the Views of Foreign Policy Elites’, published in the latest edition of the journal Foreign Policy Analysis.
First, their evidence suggests that multilateral approval matters more to foreign policy elites than to the public, including internationalist members of the public. Second, elites who are directly involved in diplomacy or foreign policy decision-making seem to be particularly responsive to multilateralism. “Together, these findings suggest that the views of foreign policy elites may be shaped as much by their specialized expertise and experience as by more general attitudinal characteristics.”
Third, multilateral endorsement has a cross-party effect on the opinions of elites but does not appear to transcend party lines for the general public. “As a result, the opinions of Republican elites are closer to Democratic elites than to Republican members of the public, suggesting that elite-public differences can be at least as important as partisan differences when it comes to international attitudes.”
Fourth, given that elites have more preexisting knowledge about international affairs than the public, it is likely that their greater responsiveness to multilateral backing is motivated mainly by legitimacy or burden-sharing concerns, rather than by the value of a ‘second opinion’.
“A key next step is to further investigate the mechanisms driving elite-public, intra-elite, and intrapublic differences in foreign policy attitudes, particularly with respect to the three families of explanations we highlighted,” the authors state. Future research might also build on this evidence by investigating whether and how the particular multilateral organization – be it the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the African Union, or another institution – endorsing or authorizing a military operation matters.
Additional future work might also examine why certain types of elites or members of the public might be particularly swayed by multilateral cooperation or whether the patterns identified in these surveys differ among elites and publics outside the United States, they state. “Extensions and replication studies like these will be important tests of the robustness of these findings and help assess the nature and extent of the impact of multilateral cooperation on domestic audiences.”

Joshua Busby, Craig Kafura, Jonathan Monten, Jordan Tama, 'Multilateralism and the Use of Force: Experimental Evidence on the Views of Foreign Policy Elites', Foreign Policy Analysis, orz005, https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/orz005

Negative Surprise in UN Security Council Authorization

UK and French vetoes send valuable information for the general public in deciding if they support a US military action

While authorization of the use of force by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is believed to increase levels of public support for military action, much remains to be understood.
In particular, it is necessary to conduct a further study on ‘failed’ authorization cases, NAOKO MATSUMURA and ATSUSHI TAGO write in ‘Negative surprise in UN Security Council authorization: UK and French vetoes send valuable information for the general public in deciding if they support a US military action’, published in the Journal of Peace Research.
Existing research stresses how the general public can derive valuable information based on which of the permanent members of the Council casts a veto; this in turn affects public attitudes towards the use of force. An expected veto cast by the perpetual nay-sayer would not serve as information for the general public.
However, if the veto is cast by an allied state of a proposer of the authorizing resolution, the negative vote functions as an information short-cut signaling that the use of force presents a variety of problems, thus reducing public support for the military action.
Using online survey experiments, MATSUMURA and TAGO find supportive evidence for this argument. “Our data also suggest that surprising negative information changes the perceptions of legitimacy, legality, public goods, and US interest in a proposed military action, but is unrelated to the perception of costs, casualties or duration.”
The authors hypothesize that an unexpected veto from allies such as the UK or France on a proposed US use of force would significantly increase opposition to the military action among the general public because the public receive negative information from their veto. ‘No’ from either one of the democratic major powers matters to the respondents of the experiments.
“We do not find the same effect for the case of Russian and Chinese vetoes (i.e. non-democratic major powers) and this can be explained by the fact that their vetoes are expected. Also, our experiment, with its series of questions on public perceptions of the use of force, has revealed that the perceptions of legality, legitimacy, public goods, and US interest explain why people support the US use of force under the particular conditions of UN authorization success and failure.” What mattered was not cost, expected consequence, or intention.
It is surprising that there is no difference in terms of cost of the military operations and intention of the coalition leader state even if there is a successful or failed UN authorization. While one scholar has argued that the information on cost and intention will be transmitted to the general public through the successful UNSC resolutions, MATSUMURA and TAGO state that their study shows clearly that it was not the case. “Japanese survey respondents did not consider that it would be a less costly operation and it would be a restricted, less coercive operation if there is a successful authorization by the UN Security Council.”
It is possible that the Japanese experiment participants, who have had the Peace Constitution for nearly 70 years and shared a stable, high level of confidence in the UN, tend to believe in the power of UN authority and attribute more legitimacy to a UNSC resolution than other countries’ citizens. “While we admit that Japan may be a likely case to observe the power of legitimacy, it must also be noted that the conventional wisdom that a UN resolution would engender better perceptions in terms of cost and intentions is somehow denied by the two waves of survey experiments in Japan.” Further studies are needed to see how robust our results are when compared with other countries’ respondents, the authors state.

Matsumura, N., & Tago, A. (2019). ‘Negative surprise in UN Security Council authorization: UK and French vetoes send valuable information for the general public in deciding if they support a US military action’. Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343318809786