GP Responses: The UNEPS proposal: a novel contribution to an important campaign?

Annie Herro provides a second response to a recent workshop and report on the possibility of a permanent UN standing rapid reaction force. For the workshop's report and other responses please click here.

The subject of a permanent UN standing force is perennially under-researched. It is for this reason that the report “Peacekeeping and Rapid Reaction: Towards the establishment of cosmopolitan capacities for rapid deployment” is so valuable. It contains contributions from new voices on the proposal for a UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) – the latest iteration of a long line of proposals advocating the creation of a permanent, directly-recruited, trained and equipped UN force or service. It also identifies and explores important intersections between the UNEPS proposal and related topics such the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), gender and peace operations more generally. Many of the observations in this report will supply academics and practitioners working on such issues with new insights as well as ideas for further research.

I will consider each contribution in the order that they appear in the report. But before I do, I will say a few words about the use of the term “cosmopolitanism”. It is mentioned in the title of the report and we are told that the concept is germane to each of the contributions. A close reading of the report shows that the word is used to describe the dual commitment to: (1) establishing a permanent military volunteer force (Curran, 5) and (2) protecting civilians from violent conflict no matter who they are or where they are (Curran, 5; Gilmore, 12). The latter specifically applies to national armed forces in the context of peace operations. It would have been helpful, however, to have had a clear definition of cosmopolitanism in the introduction to help the reader navigate the meaning(s) of the term as it appears in different articles.

The first chapter was by David Curran who was charged with setting the scene for the following discussion on rapid-reaction. While his piece identified some important reasons to investigate this topic, such as the emergence of regional experiences of rapid reaction and the absence of a rapid-reaction capacity to operationalise R2P, it left out some obvious ones such as the glaring time-gap between deployment of peacekeepers and the authorisation of a UNSC resolution. This is a principal rationale cited by UNEPS advocates to justify the creation of such a capacity. Curran’s piece also missed some other opportunities to establish a stronger case for the ensuing discussion. He mentions that there is an emerging specialisation of roles that peacekeepers perform. But where is the clear connection to rapid reaction? Are personnel with specific expertise scarce in the initial deployment phase of a peace operation? And how would a standing UN capacity (or something similar) address this? Moreover, Curran highlights the significance of the “transformative” functions of peace operations, such as preventing conflict and other atrocities, providing economic aid and civilian protection.

Yet, for over a decade, peace operations have been multidimensional, engaging police, civilians and troops performing a range of tasks aimed at paving the way for sustainable peace. Long gone are the days where peacekeeping operations were composed of only troops who simply monitored a ceasefire or peace agreement. I am not arguing that such a shift should be taken for granted or overlooked. Instead, I suggest that its significance to the subsequent analysis on rapid reaction could be sharper which would, in turn, mount a more convincing case for why this important research has been conducted.

Melina Lito’s piece on gender dimensions in peacekeeping raised some interesting points about the gap between policies at the UN level and translating these on the ground. It also raised the issue of peacekeepers’ limited expertise as well as the limited resources available to them. Indeed, all three challenges have implications for both the gender dimensions of peace operations – with which Lito is concerned – but also for other dimensions of an operation, such as the protection of civilians against atrocities. The value of Lito’s piece was that many of her observations were based on ongoing consultations with gender advisers and military officials in peacekeeping missions through her role as Legal Adviser on UN Affairs in the NGO GAPW.

Lito does not explore how a UNEPS or similar standing capacity might address the challenge of integrating a gender dimension in peace operations. Instead, her piece reminds us that we cannot divorce discussions about a UNEPS from the broader challenges facing the UN’s capacity to achieve security and women’s empowerment. This is significant because all too often discussions about UN reform proposals such as UNEPS take place in a vacuum without due consideration to structures and processes that already exist.

Jonathan Gilmore continues Lito’s approach to UNEPS by viewing the proposal through a wider lens – in his case, the lens is national foreign, defence and security policies. One of Gilmore’s principal criticisms is that the UNEPS literature does not give enough attention to the challenges facing national militaries. Specifically, he argues that the success of the proposed UNEPS would depend largely on the willingness and the capacity of national armed forces to effectively continue the work that a UNEPS intervention starts. This is a valid point and I agree that it could be given more attention by UNEPS researchers and advocates. Indeed, I suspect most UNEPS advocates would also agree with his recommendation. His piece further contributes to the thinking surrounding the UNEPS proposal by questioning the suggested cost of the capacity – a legitimate query in light of Gilmore’s comparisons with the cost of national defence forces of a similar size. He is also correct to point out that the UNEPS endeavour is stymied in some ways by the undemocratic structure and processes of the UN Security Council. But he does not mention instances where a permanent volunteer service like UNEPS could be an asset despite an unreformed Council. For example, a UNEPS could have helped to addressed some of the political obstacles faced by the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (1993–1994). Specifically, it could have overcome governments’ unwillingness to expose their nationals to security threats in countries perceived to be of little economic, political or strategic significance. Filling this gap might help to alleviate the short-term suffering of the civilian populations until a more robust peacekeeping operation could be deployed and a viable political solution achieved. Acknowledging contributions of this kind is important because it shows that, even without Security Council reform, the proposed UNEPS could be beneficial in certain instances.

Gilmore claims that the reasoning behind short-term deployments is not explained by UNEPS proponents, which is not entirely true. The metaphor UNEPS advocates use to describe the proposal is one of a fire brigade. It puts out fires (ideally, it gets to the site before the fire has done much damage). It doesn’t rebuild the house. As mentioned earlier, part of the rationale for establishing such a capacity with a “first-in, first-out” deployment philosophy is to fill the time-gap between a UNSC resolution and the deployment of peacekeepers. Indeed, such a feature is not unique to the UNEPS proposal – it is also present in previous proposals for a standing UN capacity such as those championed by Brian Urquhart (1993), Haynes and Stanley (1994) and the Commission on Global Governance (1995).

Gilmore goes on to note that “the focus on short-term deployment seems to indicate a preoccupation with reactive militarised intervention” This is also not entirely true. Peter Langille, a principal architect of the UNEPS proposal, points out that UNEPS would have “modular structure” where small deployments of specific elements could be used at the earliest stages of a mission. This would allow for simultaneous deployments of military, police or civilian elements to different operations should the need arise. Gilmore then argues that the roles a proposed UNEPS would perform are not specified. But Langille has cited a list of roles and tasks for a proposed UNEPS in his seminal 2002 report “Bridging the Commitment-Capacity Gap: A Review of Existing Arrangements and Options for Enhancing UN Rapid Deployment”. They cover advisory roles, those relating the prevention and protection of civilians, peacekeeping, peacebuilding as well as many others. Perhaps a more helpful question that Gilmore could have asked is: what specific roles and tasks might the proposed UNEPS perform in a given situation and at what points? This could apply equally to its proposed security forces as well as its civilian personnel. Answers to a question would illustrate the potential function and utility of a UNEPS in a particular time and place.

The last short essay in this conference report was by Catherine Jones who examined R2P from an East Asian perspective. Jones makes some interesting points about the power of language in the R2P debate and implies that the term R2P has taken on negatives connotations in the Asian region. My own empirical research supports such a claim. I and my colleague Kavitha Suthanthiraraj have argued elsewhere that the term R2P has triggered defensive reactions from some policymakers from various parts of the non-Western world – not just Asia. The doctrine has been perceived as a tool of powerful states, especially those in the West, and it is seen as indistinguishable from the use of force. We also argued that R2P would be an unhelpful frame in advocating UNEPS and that UNEPS might be an unhelpful frame in advocating R2P. R2P’s negative connotations were unhelpful for UNEPS advocates who are already confronting (mis)beliefs that UNEPS would be manipulated by the West and that it would be an army to intervene coercively in weaker states.

Jones ultimately makes a case – as other academics, such as Mely Caballero-Anthony and Belinda Chng of Singapore and See Seng Tan of Malaysia, have done before her – for localising the R2P doctrine and tailoring it to the concerns and interests of non-Western agents. Such a goal raises the question: what would R2P “look like” if the voices of those from East Asia and elsewhere are actually heeded? For example, Tan explains in a recent edited collection “Norms of Protection: Responsibility to Protect, the Protection of Civilians and their interaction” (2012) that R2P has been appropriated in Southeast Asia in such a way where responsibility is understood in terms of provision rather than protection. This refers to a responsibility of all national governments to provide for the welfare of the people. If they are not able to do this, then it is their responsibility to see what other resources they can garner to help provide for the people. There is absolutely no mention of coercive intervention or pillar 3 capacities in this interpretation. The elephant in the room that Jones does not explicitly address is the tension between those seeking to retain the purity of the doctrine – as agreed upon at the World Summit – and those seeking to widen its interpretation and make it more consistent with their own normative orders. Is this a pragmatic way of getting to the point where states in the region actually accept R2P, as she implies? Or does it deviate from the essence of the doctrine, as many R2P advocates would argue? Due consideration to such ethical and political dilemmas seems important.

Robert Zuber provides a helpful summation of the report’s contribution to the discussion on rapid reaction in peacekeeping. It is encouraging to see so many events and publications on standing peacekeeping capacities and R2P being organised by GAPW and its partners. Most germane to my own research was his suggestion of a comprehensive redrafting of the original UNEPS publication of 2006. It is will be interesting to watch this space and see how the years of research and advocacy on the UNEPS proposal translate into a revised proposal.

Dr Annie Herro is a casual lecturer at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of a forthcoming book “A UN Emergency Peace Service and the Responsibility to Protect” (Routledge) as well as journal articles and a book chapter on related topics.