Moral Dilemmas and Political Tradeoffs in Peacekeeping Operations

BRIAN MATEO: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Mateo, and I serve as deputy director of programs and partnerships at Carnegie Council. To begin, I would like to welcome you all to the first event in the Council’s “Ethics Empowered: Leadership in Practice” series, which convenes scholars and practitioners to discuss pressing moral issues, reflect on their careers, and offer insights to young leaders. During today’s panel we will have the opportunity to explore the moral dilemmas and political tradeoffs that UN peacekeeping operations present for both multilateral actors and local communities.

It is my pleasure to now introduce our moderator for this event, Juris Pupcenoks, an associate professor of political science at Marist College and member of Carnegie Council’s Next-Gen Leadership Initiative advisory board. We are also honored to welcome panelists Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and former United Nations under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, alongside Jennifer Welsh, professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security and director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies at McGill University.

Following the event, our team will publish the full event as a video, podcast, and transcript alongside additional educational resources and discussion questions that can be leveraged in the classroom. As I join you from the Council’s Global Ethics Hub in New York City, I want to welcome you again and will now pass the program over to Juris.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Thank you, Brian. For the next 40 minutes we will explore moral dilemmas and political tradeoffs in peacekeeping operations with our two distinguished panelists. After that, for about 15 minutes or so at the very end, we will do a Q&A session. As Brian already mentioned, please submit your questions at any time via the chat feature.

This event overall is designed as a conversation, but I am going to ask certain questions to our panelists as we engage with nuances of peacekeeping ethics. I want to start very broadly with a general question to Jennifer: What are the most common ethical dilemmas that peacekeepers face in conflict zones?

JENNIFER WELSH: Thank you so much, and it is wonderful to be here with you.

I think to start we need to remember that peacekeeping is an activity guided by principles. It is “principled action,” if you will, and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that challenges and dilemmas should accompany it. I will single out four of those:

The first relates to the principle of impartiality that underpins peacekeeping. UN operations are designed to treat all parties to a conflict fairly and without bias and be evenhanded in their contact and implementation of the mandate—not necessarily be neutral in the execution of their mandate but impartial with respect to the conflict parties. In part this is to ensure that no single state’s agenda dominates the mission.

The multinational composition of the UN peacekeeping missions—there are personnel from a broad spectrum of countries—further reinforces that impartiality. Secretary-General Guterres has recently described impartiality as the UN’s strongest asset, but one of the key dilemmas is: How do you remain impartial in the use of force in peacekeeping?

We can take as an example the Force Intervention Brigade that was authorized in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013 as part of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), and in large part that was to assist in the Protection of Civilians (POC). Here concerns were raised about the mandate’s language, which instructed MONUSCO to neutralize a particular armed actor, and also concerns about the Brigade’s close alignment with the Congolese armed forces and regional involvement in that particular aspect of the mission.

Issues related to impartiality were also prominent in Mali, where the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) was aiming to stabilize the country after a coup and insurrection. Many saw that mission as blurring the lines between peacekeeping and peace enforcement, and expectations from the host government and actually some of the countries in the region were that MINUSMA would engage in offense counterterrorism operations. The mission was not mandated to do that, but MINUSMA nonetheless operated alongside French forces that were engaged in counterterrorism efforts and was co-located with them in some cases. That dilemma is around impartiality, and I am sure we can discuss it more.

The second dilemma relates to the way in which peacekeeping operations today, those that have Protection of Civilians mandates, manage the objectives of protection with the pursuit of political solutions to a conflict, which is the core of peacekeeping.

In some instances we can see that there can be tensions between what is sometimes referred to as the “primacy of politics” and the protection of civilians, for example, when advancement of a mission’s immediate political goals makes civilian and uniformed personnel in a mission reluctant to confront national or local authorities over actions that threaten or harm civilians. In particular conflict parties and host governments often retain significant leverage and agency, which can limit the UN’s ability to fully implement the mandate. This is something that is a constant tension for peacekeepers.

A related dilemma around this has surrounded the need for the United Nations to respect the core operating principle of host state consent. Peacekeepers are there with the consent of the host state, but in some cases maintaining that consent can require what we might call “soft-pedaling” any confrontation with national authorities with respect to their human rights violations. That is another area of tension that we can think about, and we can perhaps come back to whether that is a necessary tension or one that arises in practice.

A third set of dilemmas I would refer to as “the challenge of managing unintended consequences.” We can really see this in the UN’s Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). In December 2013, with the outbreak of civil war in South Sudan, tens of thousands of people who were targeted due to their ethnic backgrounds and perceived affiliation sought refuge in the UNMISS bases, and UNMISS established what were called POC sites in and around those bases. At their peak they sheltered over 200,000 people including many women and children. It was referred to as “the decision to open the gates,” and it was a very powerful symbol of the UN’s commitment to protect populations.

This policy, as you can imagine, introduced a lot of challenges with unintended consequences. They were originally intended to be temporary shelters, but they evolved into long-term refuges, straining resources from other priorities and raising considerable expectations about the scope of protection and the range of needs that the mission would fulfill. We might even say as a final point here that UN peacekeepers veered into substituting for a state in its protection role as opposed to supporting a state.

A final tension is the tension that comes with partnering with other actors. If any of you read the secretary-general’s A New Agenda for Peace or have been paying attention to the Pact for the Future, you will see that one feature of our current era is the increasing number of situations that feature collaboration with non-UN missions and actors, many of which are regional.

Part of the attraction of these lies in the perceived ability of these regional or other actors to provide more flexibility and more rapid responses to address insecurity in a state and help to back a state to exert control. These partnerships can help UN troops reduce violence with fewer blue helmets.

However, there are some dilemmas here that can accompany these sorts of parallel deployments or partnerships. They can create challenges in terms of local perceptions and trust-building because the local population might not distinguish between these different uniformed actors and their roles, and if we return to the idea of impartiality there is also the risk that support for non-UN missions, particularly if they are subregional, will implicate the United Nations in supporting governments to fight particular opponents, and I am thinking here of the G5 Sahel Joint Force. Some of these forces are also heavily reliant on only military personnel and have been described as engaging in “overly securitized responses” that can be problematic and even counterproductive over the long term.

When we think about this as a dilemma it has many faces, including the complications that arise if these forces are engaged in committing grave human rights abuses in the course of their operations.

Those are four dilemmas to get our conversation started. I think in more recent years there have been other principles and normative ideas that have come to the fore, including the importance of local agency in peacebuilding or the need for more hybridity between international and local actors, and there are additional challenges related to those that we could come back to.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Thank you, Jennifer, for this very comprehensive response. You have given us a lot to think about.

I would like to now switch gears a little bit and talk about organizing peacekeeping and dilemmas there. Who would be better to answer this question than Jean-Marie, who used to serve as the United Nations under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations?

Jean-Marie, what are key ethical dilemmas that senior political leaders face when they organize peacekeeping missions?

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: Much of what Jennifer just said applies also to senior leaders—dealing with other partners and balancing political goals with operational necessities. The senior leaders have to confront all that, but I would say the most difficult dilemma is that, as Jennifer said, peacekeeping is a principled activity. It has to be ethical, but it operates in a very political environment, and the Member States, without which there is no peacekeeping, have their own political goals and are not just there for the good of humanity. They have their own national interests.

As you put together a peacekeeping operation you have to manage that. That is, you have to be respectful of the Member States, you have to understand their goals and objectives, and in some ways, yes, you have to accommodate them, but at the same time you must not lose your ethical compass. You are not there just to serve the interests of the Member States; you are there to harness them to support a greater goal for the international community and the good of humanity. That is quite complicated and difficult.

It raises questions on the level of ambitions you can have. Indeed when you see a conflict situation very often if a state is broken there are deep roots to that tragedy, and you would want to address all of them. You know that you will not have the full support of Member States to do that, so you have to do a kind of “political triage,” so to speak. You have to see what that market will bear. That is difficult. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong.

I was not at the United Nations at the time, but, under pressure from Member States, the concept of “safe areas” was invented in Yugoslavia. That was a sort of promissory note to people that they would be protected in some specific areas. In order to protect people you need a certain quantity of troops, and of course the Member States were not prepared to give those troops in the numbers that would have been appropriate, so you had to balance the need to have support from the Member States and so not expose them too much with the operational realities. Obviously there the United Nations got it wrong and accepted a compromise that was terrible because the promise could not be kept. That is a very difficult dilemma that one has to face.

I will end by saying that there is a broader issue, which is that peacekeeping is about intervening in the lives of others, so there is in a way the question of “consequential responsibility” that you have because you know the attention span of the international community is limited and its will to engage in following up on commitments is always uncertain, so you know that at some point you will leave the people you have come to help to their own future, and it is their future and not your future.

You have to define the goals of the mission so that when you leave it does not all fall apart and so that you have not overpromised. In some ways that is one of the most difficult ethical dilemmas that you face as a senior leader.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Absolutely. Jean-Marie, if I may, a quick follow-up question: You mentioned already that protection of life of others is a key if not the most important mission of peacekeepers. How do peacekeepers balance this need to protect civilians against grave human rights violations with the principle of state sovereignty, especially if they are conducting a peacekeeping mission in a state that is reluctant to have them?

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: It is a problem that they face all the time. We see, for instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that the security forces of the state commit a lot of crimes, but they are the state.

Can you confront the state? It is not easy. The fact that the United Nations has multiple faces and that there is an office—the High Commissioner for Human Rights—allows for some distribution of roles because you can give hard messages to the host nation that are not necessarily carried by the peacekeeping mission but by other parts of the United Nations. It is quite important that these messages be uttered and that the host country be confronted with the things it does not do right.

This question of Protection of Civilians arose after the tragedies of the 1990s in the sense that if you do not protect civilians, then why are you there? It is a highly political question because you can think of protection in physical terms. What Jennifer was describing, for instance, for the destitute people who were protected by the United Nations in huge camps in Sudan, that is one aspect of it, but long-term protection is protection that will come from the country itself when they have reliable political institutions.

The dilemma that you have is that often you focus on the short term, on immediate protection, which in a way relieves the country of its duty to build the capacity to protect, so that when you see a policeman or a soldier you do not see them as a threat but as a reassurance. Too often you see that policeman or that soldier as a threat.

The host country too often thinks, Okay, it’s the responsibility of the United Nations to do the protection. Meanwhile, the replacement when the United Nations will leave should be prepared but is not being prepared, and that is very dangerous because it means that when you leave, yes, you will have saved lives, but everything can fall apart because there are no institutions left behind to protect the people.

In a way that is what we see in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there has been a quarter century of a UN presence. Is there a reliable security sector in which the population has trust? No. So the UN mission is criticized for not doing enough, which is in some ways true, but at the same time it has not prepared its exit in an effective way, and the government has not prepared for that exit in an effective way.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Turning to Jennifer, I know your research has touched on this, but let me ask head-on: Why do many think that peacekeeping is ineffective, especially in this country, and is it so?

JENNIFER WELSH: It is a great question. I think it partly relates to something that Jean-Marie mentioned about the almost tyranny of the immediate crisis and the way in which particular episodes of instability or civilian harm will grab headlines and distract attention from the other things that a mission is doing not just in terms of immediate protection but building a protective environment and also pursuing political solutions. We need to remember in thinking about effectiveness that peacekeepers operate in some of the most difficult conflict contexts.

Jean-Marie has huge knowledge of the context in the Congo. I was there at the end of November and could see the myriad of different situations even in one country that the mission was trying to grapple with over a very wide geographic scope, and—let’s be honest—with very limited resources. Yet what’s interesting from the research is that the presence of peacekeepers really does correlate with a decrease in civilian casualties and targeting, a reduction in the geographic scope of a conflict, and certainly reductions in subnational conflicts. This results from many different things that missions do—advocating with the parties, monitoring, patrolling, but also in some cases through action that actually separates combatants and tries to damper down battlefield activities that will trigger harm against civilians.

Does this correlate at all with numbers? Certainly if you look at the first decade of Protection of Civilian mandates, it certainly shows that the capacity to protect is strengthened with more peacekeepers there because it enhances the effects of all those activities I talked about, but it also signals the UN’s resolve both internally and with other audiences.

I think we also need to consider more recent research, which shows that it is not so much the overall quantity that matters but rather the troop-to-population ratio in an area and the way in which perpetrators of violence are actually confronted. So the determinacy of what works is much more micro. I guess we can think of the contributions of peacekeepers if we are thinking of armed peacekeepers as creating security through presence; deterrence.

We should remember that non-military parts of a mission are important here because of the relationships they form with local actors and with the dialogue they are engaged in, so that presence is not just about troops or police. More recently there have been efforts through training of troop-contributing country’s contingents and commanding officers, trying to encourage them to be less static with staying in their bases and more proactive in how they conduct peacekeeping, so we have also heard the term “protection through projection” more recently.

I think the caveat here—and Jean-Marie alluded to this—is that when you look at least at the protection effects they are not equally distributed. A peacekeeping presence enhances effectiveness against abuses by non-state armed groups more than it does in terms of harm perpetrated by host state forces, so it is a little uneven in terms of the effects I have discussed.

Lastly, on the political side I would say that there are many factors that affect whether a peacekeeping mission is going to succeed in terms of reaching its political objectives, and Jean-Marie indicated this. It does not depend on the mission alone; it also depends on those countries in the Security Council or neighboring states, so it is hard to know what is the mission itself and what are the surrounding factors.

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: If I may follow up on what Jennifer just said, what strikes me is that if you look at a country—let’s stay with the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a minute. It is a country that is bigger than the whole of Western Europe, and the peacekeeping mission at its highest had about the same volume of forces that the New York Police Department has for a city of 8 million people. What is miraculous actually is that sometimes it has an impact.

That makes the point that Jennifer was making, that you have to have a very wise and smart use of force and intelligence so that you “pick your fights,” so to speak, so that in a way peacekeeping in that context has an element of bluff because in reality it cannot protect the whole population that it is expected to protect. It has to make strategic choices that reverberate throughout the country and build credibility, and over time it gets harder and harder.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Jean-Marie, if I can pose a question to you regarding the Security Council, you earlier mentioned how the Security Council plays a role obviously in organizing peacekeeping missions—they have to be authorized through the Security Council. You also mentioned the importance of state interests when it comes to gaining support for peacekeeping missions. Can you tell us about the political considerations between UN Security Council members when they design peacekeeping mandates? Can you share some gossip from the Security Council?

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: The problem with the Security Council is that often when it turns to the United Nations for a peacekeeping mission—and in recent years it has done much less of that because the key Member States want to save money, and I think that is certainly not going to change with the new American administration—it wants to show it is doing something. That pretense is sometimes quite disconnected to the reality of what it is prepared to support.

There is a lot of hypocrisy in the Security Council. In Libya, for instance, where there were no troops but only a political process, the Security Council kept saying, “Oh, we support the special representative; we want him to succeed.”

The same members of the Security Council who were saying that were torpedoing the process by supporting one or the other party, so this hypocrisy of the Security Council, which claims that it is acting for the good of humanity, in too many situations is just pursuing narrow national goals. Now that I am no longer working there I do not have to be cautious in my words. To be honest, that hypocrisy is sometimes infuriating.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Do you think this is due to the fact that certain states don’t want to get involved, stay out of it, and want to only play lip service to a need to intervene, but once it comes to organizing missions or taking more of a stance they don’t authorize missions?

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: Each situation has a different explanation. In the case of Libya, which was not really peacekeeping but was a political mission, there were different political goals. You had Member States that were keen to support General Haftar and others who were keen to support the government in Tripoli. In other situations it is the unwillingness to take risks, and that is one of the big issues of the Security Council, the difference between the countries that take the decisions and the countries that take the risks.

During the Yugoslav Wars there was an overlap. The Europeans were greatly engaged in Yugoslavia, but the Americans, for instance, were only in the air but not on the ground and that was already a big problem because they were not taking risks in the air that the Europeans were taking on the ground.

Now in most peacekeeping missions you see relatively few Europeans, and most of the risks are taken by troops from countries from the Global South, who are not happy with that. They believe—and they are not wrong—that the Security Council is giving them very tough mandates in situations where there is not much peace to keep, but the same members of the Security Council are not prepared to share in the risks, so there is a feeling that they are just there to be hit.

That worsens with troops from the African Union. You have seen in Somalia the difficulty of that because an urban environment, Mogadishu, is very difficult, very dangerous. All armies of the world know that. The Western countries don’t want to take those risks.

They want to stay away from that. They had that experience in the 1990s, and they don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. They leave it to troops that are often much less well trained or equipped to face the risk. That creates a very unpleasant situation in the Security Council, this disconnect between those who pay, those who decide, and those who take the risks.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: I would like to bring up another ethical dilemma in peacekeeping, prioritization of peace over justice. Should peacekeepers prioritize peace over justice? Let’s say they are in a fragile environment. Should they be going after war criminals or violent parties knowing that this could derail fragile peace processes? What are your thoughts? This could be a question for both panelists.

JENNIFER WELSH: I think it is a great question. I always think in this dilemma it depends a bit about how you think about justice and what forms of justice we can see in a society. Of course criminal accountability and criminal forms of justice are only one manifestation of what justice can mean.

There have been situations where individual members of missions, the special representative of the secretary-general has faced the decision of do we comply with a request from either if we are looking at a country where the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not present as an international criminal tribunal or the ICC to arrest individuals who have been alleged to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing.

I think these are difficult decisions because they can in this instance affect the impartiality of a mission in a slightly different way. It isn’t so much that the mission would be accused of treating parties in a way that is unfair between them but rather that the mission is somehow operationalizing an international commitment to pursuing a certain form of justice in a conflict. We have seen real variations in the degree to which individuals and missions have been keen to do that or willing to do that, even in the same context.

I think this gets to a question of the individual judgments that those operating in missions have to make, and Jean-Marie alluded to this. In a sense all of the dilemmas we have talked about—values may seem to conflict; you may have tradeoffs —if you are an official in a peace operation you have a role responsibility that comes with your position, and in some cases, if you are a special representative of the secretary-general you are responsible for the welfare of others in your mission as well and you have to think about the longer term. If participating in an action to arrest someone can put parts of the mission at risk down the road because they are perceived as being partial, that is a consideration you weigh. These are not easy decisions.

This is a slightly different point, but I think it illustrates this. We saw, for example, in Sudan in Darfur after certain civilian actors were asked to help provide information that would assist in the execution of arrest warrants they were booted out of the country, they were made persona non grata. So these are difficult, but we have seen individuals in peace operations take those difficult decisions in support of an ICC arrest warrant. In real terms it can happen, but I don’t want to minimize how difficult those choices sometimes are.

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I would make a difference between international justice and national justice. I think in all conflict-affected countries it is of great importance to help rebuild a credible judiciary so that people have a sense of accountability and you begin to rebuild trust among the people that there are responsibilities and people are accountable. International justice is much more complicated. The example of Sudan was just mentioned.

For instance, prosecuting Bashir over time certainly helped diminish his credibility, and you can say that international justice played a role in weakening his grip on the country and eventually leading to his downfall.

At the same time, when you go that way and you are not prepared to go all the way—because certainly, as we discussed earlier, if the international community is not prepared to provide the troops that, let’s say, would affect regime change in Sudan, neither now nor then—you can weaken both justice and peace. You weaken justice because it is for everybody to see that it is not being implemented, and you weaken peace because if you accuse someone of the most serious crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity, that makes any negotiation more difficult, so you deprive yourself of an unwieldy but maybe inevitable course of action where you would negotiate with actual thugs without having the capability to remove those thugs. That is an issue.

It depends in a way on the strength of the person who is indicted. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo you had some local warlords who were indicted, and that was a good thing in the sense that it deflated them and did instill a degree of fear among other warlords. Justice has to be meted on those who deserve it, but it has to be done in a very careful way. Too often it is done just to feel good rather than to see how it will further the interests of justice and the interests of peace. I do not think it is peace against justice; both can be pursued, but in an intelligent and highly political way.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: Thank you both. I would like to ask you both one more question and then we will take some questions from the audience. We are lucky to have a very engaged audience with some great questions here in the chat.

My last question is about the future of peacekeeping, which we will explore in a minute in the Q&A section: How should peacekeeping evolve to better respond to contemporary conflicts, for example, climate-induced conflicts, which is something we have been talking about for years now? Also, how should peacekeeping deal with challenges represented by cyberwarfare, misinformation, and so on? Could you both briefly reflect on this?

JENNIFER WELSH: I do want to come back to this question because I have seen some comments in the chat around whether our conversation so far really reflects the current global environment. I want to remind everyone who is listening that there are a number of active peace operations on the ground right now. Despite the fact that there have been many global challenges, those missions are still there and the people in them are grappling with the dilemmas we have described. I think this whole question of exit, for example, from some of these missions and how this can be done in a principled way is important, and perhaps we can come back to it.

To your question, I think it has become clear that interference of various kinds with peacekeeping has become very, very common, and there are external actors working both in the physical space and in the digital space to erode the legitimacy of missions and manipulate the political space in which they operate. They limit the effectiveness of peace operations, particularly if they create real disinformation about what the mission is doing or designed to do.

There are a few ways that states that are not host states are contributing to these kinds of interference. One is through the deployment—this is something we have not talked about—of what are known as “parallel security actors,” private military companies, into different mission contexts. We have seen that. We have also seen states spreading misinformation and disinformation in and around a mission context, and we have seen threats to the cybersecurity and integrity of UN-owned information.

As you were alluding to, Juris, these kinds of tactics are undermining some of those underlying conditions for peacekeeping, degrading the trust of the local population, and in some cases restricting a mission’s freedom of moment and access to reliable information—let’s remember that that information helps them anticipate and respond to threats—and it is also offering some of the leaders in the host state alternative security partners that have fewer political and governance demands on them.

Given the UN’s operating principles—impartiality, host state consent, and use of force only in self-defense—it has limited means to fight back against some of these new forms of interference, but we are seeing efforts to do so. For example, in some contexts UN Radio is still very important. You might be thinking, Ah, does this matter anywhere anymore? It does still matter as well as thinking about the content of messages and how misinformation and disinformation are countered, and discussion between the civilian components of missions and local populations.

It is very interesting—again I will come back to the Congo, but we could give other examples—where the perception of the UN mission differs depending on where you are in the country. That is in some cases a reflection of who the mission is partnering with but also in terms of the information that civilians are getting.

The United Nations is trying to catch up to address misinformation and disinformation. There is a term that is used for the way in which the UN mission tries to communicate, and that is through “strategic” communication. That is a field which is experiencing renewed efforts to improve and learn.

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I have two quick points on your question: First, in today’s peacekeeping there is no such thing as a conflict that is limited to one country. In every conflict now there is international interference, either by global powers like Russia or by regional powers depending on where the conflict is. That means that if you do not address the “backstage politics,” so to speak, of the conflict you will get nowhere, and that makes it very difficult because of course the backstage politics when it is about Russia or the international order is not easy to address. It is above the capacity of the United Nations.

The second thing is that cyberwarfare is a new theatre of war. There is a thought that it is only for high-tech countries; that is wrong. When you look at what has happened in the Sahel, cyber was a big factor in shaping public opinion in Mali, for instance, with real campaigns. The United Nations is not equipped to deal with that, and radio is useful but is not enough. If the United Nations is not equipped to deal with those new theatres, it clearly loses.

To be equipped does not mean the United Nations building a whole new cyber capacity. It probably means partnering with countries that have that cyber capacity, which then raises another question that was raised by Jennifer, the question of impartiality. In a battle that is becoming a geopolitical battle, can you counter external manipulation that is done with highly sophisticated means? Can you counter it without yourself relying on some country that wants to counter that interference?

JURIS PUPCENOKS: As we are turning to the chat, I see there are a lot of questions about recent developments, so let’s tackle the hard questions.

Here is one: How are you going to navigate between Trump’s possible defunding the United Nations and also the opposition of Russia and other countries like Russia to UN peacekeeping missions?

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I think there is no doubt that peacekeeping is in a phase of contraction because it is not just defunding; it is lack of political support. In peacekeeping success depends, yes, on concrete commitments of troops, mandates, etc., but it also depends on the measure of political backing by the countries that wield real power, and if that political backing is not there you have a very weak hand. I think the profound divide in the international community means that troublemakers can always play one against the other, so there is going to be much weaker peacekeeping activity of the United Nations in coming years.

Will it disappear? I don’t think so because at the same time there may be areas where there is an interest in joining forces. I think much will depend there on the attitude of China. Russia is disruptive. Russia believes that its best leverage is to create chaos, and maybe that is now also the view of the United States. We don’t know; we will find out, but it looks like it.

China as a global power believes that it needs a predictable world, a world with some order, so it doesn’t like the idea that there are more and more spaces that would become ungoverned and would be chaotic, so China may have an interest in investing in peacekeeping. I think much will depend on whether the European countries, Canada, and China can work out some kind of understanding on the future of peacekeeping. That is where there is some hope, but it is a very difficult moment for peacekeeping.

JENNIFER WELSH: Here it is important for us not to be held hostage by the present and to keep our imaginations alive. We cannot necessarily predict those situations in which it might seem a faraway prospect that Security Council members might come together because their interests might converge to authorize another mission, but we also have regional forms of peacekeeping that are important to consider.

We had a Security Council resolution in late 2023, Security Council Resolution 2719, which was aimed much more at empowering the United Nations to support more regionally led peace operations, and that might be done in active partnership with UN personnel, but it might also be done much more as a form of delegation. I think what we should be watching for is the upcoming Peacekeeping Ministerial Meeting in May that is being held in Germany, where there is going to be a lot of discussion around future models that could be deployed as we move forward, certain tasks that peacekeeping missions have engaged in and how those might be combined in new ways in the future.

We should also remember that missions might not involve blue helmets. They might be what is referred to as “special political missions.” I think the question there, if they are mostly civilian personnel, is whether they can play any kind of role in protection, which has been one of the big novelties of the last 25 years, that peace operations have had protection at their core. I think that is something that is being discussed in the run-up to this Ministerial.

Watch this space. Peacekeeping is still a very, very interesting area of international public policy, but Jean-Marie is right in that the context for it is changing and we might see a contraction in the kinds of missions we have seen but new kinds of configurations instead.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: One of the questions in the chat was about Syria and Ukraine: “Do you see peacekeeping or peacekeeping-like missions in these two conflict areas?”

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I think in Ukraine the Europeans like to talk about peacekeeping forces, but to be honest it is to reassure their public opinion because it is nothing to do with peacekeeping. It is about capacity for Ukraine to deter another Russian aggression. I don’t know if it will happen, but the label “peacekeeping” is a bit misleading. I understand that it is expedient for political reasons, but it is not really peacekeeping.

Syria is a different issue. You have seen what happened in the Alawite part of Syria on the coast. Having some kind of impartial process to broker a stable peace between the various Syrian groups and the Syrian government would be a good thing. Geir Pedersen is the special envoy for Syria of the United Nations and is a very smart and competent envoy.

The problem is that because the United Nations has been around for many years and unable to do anything for a number of years, the credibility of the United Nations is low in Syria. I think in one way it would be very good to have an impartial broker to manage a political process in Syria, not necessarily with troops but maybe just an expansion of the existing special political mission, but at the same time I believe it is not an easy sell to the Syrians.

It is interesting to see how Russia when it had the upper hand in Syria in a way sidelined the United Nations regarding the Astana Process. Now that it no longer has the upper hand it is more interested in the United Nations, so it very much depends on the political interests of the key players in Syria.

JENNIFER WELSH: I just want to add what Jean-Marie said. When we are thinking about Ukraine and the discussions there right now we are really talking about a deterrent force. If you think about the principles that we outlined at the beginning that lie behind peacekeeping, that is not the kind of force being discussed.

It is interesting that cloaking the idea of peacekeeping in that appeals to political discussions at the moment, but I think we need to be clear about what force would be and how it would be designed for that objective. Even though the mandates of peacekeeping operations are often very unwieldy because they are the product of compromise they have a purpose and an objective, and that comes through. I think in the discussions around Ukraine we can see that deterrence is what those discussions are aimed at.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: There is another interesting question in the chat about ethical dilemmas, about how to navigate challenges of cultural sensitivity over universal norms in peacekeeping. One audience member writes: “For example, in some parts of Kenya female genital mutilation is a tradition,” and then how to navigate peacekeeping in such an environment. How do you navigate local cultural challenges or norms versus universal human norms in an environment if peacekeepers operate in it? Are there ethical dilemmas there?

JENNIFER WELSH: I definitely think there are. There are some risks, I would say.

Firstly, there is some very interesting research that shows that language skills and cultural affinities in the makeup of mission personnel, particularly military components, can actually make a difference in effectiveness. I did not get into that before. It is quite modest research, but it is fascinating.

On the question of local and global I think I can give you an example to highlight this. Again, I would describe it as a tension. What you see now is a normative idea not just in peacekeeping but in humanitarian action and refugee protection and that is this idea of localization, that local actors should be at the forefront, owning their solutions.

Sometimes what this looks like in a peacekeeping mission is UN military but mainly civilian personnel trying to support the creation of community-based protection mechanisms and local dialogue committees, all of which I think is positive, but what you also sometimes see is that those committees can reinforce preexisting hierarchies or forms of exclusion, so they can be created either with some very significant gender imbalances—women are not included as part of these committees—or they are done in such a way that they reproduce some of the identity-based or ethnic conflicts. I think that is a real dilemma for support of those.

In my view—and this is not to take anything away from the United Nations—I think some of the nongovernmental organizations that are involved in conflict contexts like the Center for Civilians in Conflict, Oxfam, and others are actually a bit better at navigating some of these risks because their field presence is more sustained and more embedded in local communities. They have the opportunity to affect some of those dynamics in more productive ways, but it is a dilemma.

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I have nothing to add to that. I think there is a permanent dilemma between building under local norms and injecting some kind of universalism, and finding the balance between the two is incredibly difficult.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: We are almost out of time, so I want to see if our two panelists have any final remarks before I thank everyone and we close this event.

JENNIFER WELSH: I think the chat has been fascinating about our listeners’ and viewers’ anxieties about the future of peacekeeping and their worry about the geopolitical environment, but there were also a couple of comments made about the harm that missions can sometimes do, including through sexual exploitation and other examples of mission behavior and in some cases unintended consequences of action. I think this is important to keep in mind, that any time—and Jean-Marie made this comment at the start—you are inserting yourself in a local conflict context with external actors, and these are some of the really difficult consequences, that while you were trying to make a difference you could also at times do harm, and we should make sure we acknowledge that.

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO: I think peacekeeping has reinvented itself several times in its long history. It needs to reinvent itself today. It needs more imagination.

I think there is a need to find different ways of operating, maybe more in supporting countries in their own difficulties so that they have more ownership with all the issues that come with getting closer to a country that you want to help, but I think at the moment there has to be more planning for the future, more revolutionary thinking. The multidimensional missions that were in a way the standard missions of the time when I was leading peacekeeping is over, but I don’t think that means that peacekeeping is over.

JURIS PUPCENOKS: I want to thank both of our distinguished panelists for extremely insightful remarks. In roughly one hour we were able to touch on so many different nuances and aspects of peacekeeping with regard to ethics past, present, and perhaps future. I think we are all leaving this meeting with a much better understanding about peacekeeping and the ethics surrounding it.

Also I want to thank the audience. It is always a wonderful thing to have an active audience as we have had today, and I hope all these audience members will stay tuned for future virtual Carnegie events like this addressing important issues in ethics in the contemporary world.

Thank you.