The Future of UN Peace Operations: Pragmatism, Pluralism, or Statism?
Published in International Affairs, September 2024
Abstract: Although United Nations peace operations have played an important conflict management role for decades, a backlash against the post-Cold War model of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ and other recent developments have called their future into doubt. Some observers contend that a ‘pragmatic turn’ is now underway—a shift away from ambitious plans to transform war-torn societies into liberal democracies and towards more modest and realistic goals. Whether ‘pragmatism’ offers a viable alternative framework for peacebuilding, however, is less clear. This article challenges key assumptions of the pragmatic approach to peacebuilding, including the notion that UN missions can be ‘agnostic’ about the governance arrangements of societies that host these operations, as some proponents of pragmatism recommend. Historical case-studies show that such assumptions are integral features of collective conflict management systems, including UN peace missions. Moreover, a close examination of the pragmatist approach reveals that it, too, is based on such assumptions—namely, that building peace requires the promotion of pluralist societies and states. Pluralist peacebuilding, the article concludes, could offer a compelling foundation for future UN missions in an era of rising statist–authoritarianism, but developing this approach will first require discarding pragmatism's pretence of ideological agnosticism.
Introduction: The number and size of United Nations peace operations have experienced a ‘steep decline’ since the mid-2010s, prompting some observers to pronounce ‘the end of an era for large-scale blue helmet missions in Africa’ and to question the future of UN peace missions more generally. Compounding these doubts, the world body has also faltered in the face of recent high-profile conflicts outside Africa, including the wars in Syria, Ukraine and Gaza. Still, previous predictions of the demise of UN peace operations have proven wrong. The history of this conflict-management tool has been one of constant transformation, marked by waves of increased and decreased activity. Further, there is strong evidence that UN missions on balance have reduced violence, limited the spread of conflicts and improved protection for civilians. The pertinent question today is how UN peace operations might change, not whether they will disappear entirely.
At the heart of this question is a debate about doctrine, broadly defined as the assumptions and principles that guide such missions. Most peace operations during the Cold War—then known as ‘peacekeeping’—undertook relatively straightforward monitoring tasks, such as observing ceasefire lines. This changed at the end of the Cold War with the rise of more complex, multifunctional ‘peacebuilding’ missions that promoted democratic transitions, civil and political rights and market-oriented economies as a formula for peace—an approach that came to be known as ‘liberal peacebuilding’. However, the perceived shortcomings of these missions, including dramatic failures in places such as Rwanda and Afghanistan, ultimately fuelled a backlash against the liberal peacebuilding model. Today's doubts about the future of UN peace operations reflect, in part, a deeper uncertainty about which doctrine (if any) should guide such missions, now that the liberal approach has lost much of its appeal.
The solution, according to some observers, is ‘pragmatic’ peacebuilding, or shifting away from ambitious plans to remake war-torn societies into liberal market democracies and towards ‘more realistic or contextualized approaches to addressing intrastate conflicts’. Pragmatists view the recent proliferation of competing peacebuilding concepts and approaches as a strength, not a weakness, and as a basis for more successful UN missions in the future. They have written about pragmatism both descriptively and prescriptively. As a descriptive label, the term refers to ‘a multitude of embryonic and experimental approaches’—from counter-insurgency techniques to local community reconciliation projects—that depart from the standard model of liberal peacebuilding. What makes these innovations ‘pragmatic’ is their emphasis on finding ‘good enough’ practical remedies for concrete problems in war-affected states, rather than ‘ideal type’ solutions. The diversity of approaches captured under this label, however, makes it more of a catch-all than a clearly defined category of activities.
The prescriptive version of pragmatism, by contrast, has been presented as a conceptual framework and method for future missions. Specifically, its proponents reject preconceived ‘templates, formulas and one-size-fits-all solutions’ and argue that the goals of each mission should be allowed to emerge from a more organic process of trial-and-error learning and societal deliberation—or ‘participatory exploration, experimentation, and adaptation’. According to this view, by setting aside their own ‘normative expectations’ and becoming ‘agnostic about the end goals’ of each peace process, international peacebuilders can serve effectively as ‘process facilitators’ rather than purveyors of particular ideologies of governance.
Does pragmatism offer a workable framework for the next phase of UN peacebuilding, as some of its proponents claim? At first glance, it has considerable appeal. The task of promoting peace in war-affected societies is enormously complex and varied, so why not renounce ‘ideologically driven’ formulas and embrace a doctrine of practical problem-solving? Doing so might not only produce approaches that are better tailored to each society and thus more likely to work; it might also help to insulate UN peacebuilding from rising ideological disputes in international politics over what constitutes ‘good’ governance.
The problem, I shall argue, is that prescriptive pragmatism rests on a faulty premise—the unrealistic assumption that international peacebuilders can become ‘agnostic’ about the end-goals of peace processes. As we shall see, peace operations have always rested on assumptions about what peace means and about the kinds of governance arrangements that are most conducive to peace. Indeed, without such assumptions peace operations would not be possible. A close examination of prescriptive pragmatism reveals that it, too, relies on implicit assumptions about how war-affected states should be organized: namely, the idea that sustainable peace requires a pluralist polity and state.
This observation is important for three reasons. First, peacebuilding doctrines based on flawed premises are doomed to disappoint. Pragmatism appears to be either a descriptive label that encompasses so much as to be virtually meaningless, or a prescriptive concept that promotes pluralist polities and states while claiming to be agnostic about governance. Either way, it offers limited utility as a guiding framework for future missions. Second, this critique of pragmatism nevertheless points to a more promising approach: one that explicitly champions and elaborates the concept of pluralist peacebuilding rather than hiding it behind a pretence of normative neutrality. Notably, pluralist peacebuilding might offer a compelling alternative to authoritarian conflict-management models that have been in the ascendancy in recent years and that seek to impose peace by empowering repressive regimes. Third, at a more theoretical level, this article uses peacebuilding as a window into the relationship between ideas and power in international affairs. It shows how different understandings of peace inevitably favour different forms of governance, and how normative tensions between pluralist and statist–authoritarian conceptions of peace mirror power shifts in global politics. Changing configurations of power and ideas in international affairs, including about the concept of peace itself, have always shaped conflict-management practices, but the rapidity of today's change places particular pressure on UN peacebuilding.
The rest of the article proceeds as follows. In the first and second sections, I shall examine recent pragmatist writings and show how pluralist assumptions about peace, politics and the state are embedded in them. Then, to demonstrate that the pragmatist assumption of ideological agnosticism is unrealistic, I will show how peace missions have always relied on contingent understandings of what ‘peace’ means and how peaceful societies should be organized. Finally, I shall argue that pragmatists would be better off embracing and developing an explicitly pluralist framework, or else risk surrendering the idea of peacebuilding to those who seek to equate peace with repressive authoritarianism.
Read the rest of the article: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae182
