United Nations Involvement Research Articles

Exploring, Overreaching, Giving Up: The UN and International Conflict Management in Kashmir, Congo, and East Pakistan

This essay examines the attempts of the United Nations (UN) to become an active force in Cold War politics. It explores three major moments of crisis that triggered UN involvement: Kashmir (1947–1949), Congo (1960–1965), and East Pakistan (1971). The essay demonstrates how in the Kashmir crisis, UN negotiators initially benefited from a malleable international environment and sincere support by both India and Pakistan to solve their territorial dispute. Yet as the UN explored its role as conflict “manager”, it soon faced the limits of both its power and its legitimacy in attempting to overcome national suspicion and the insistence on state sovereignty. In contrast to Kashmir, the Congo Crisis was a case of overreach. Under the lead of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, UN officials transformed an intervention to assist the Congolese government in ending Belgian interference to an overly ambitious exercise in state-building. The East Pakistan crisis reveals that the UN had by then given up on playing an active overt role in the political settlement of international crises. As millions of East Pakistanis, accused of separatism, fled a massive military crackdown by the West Pakistani government into neighbouring India, the UN confined its reaction to expressions of concern, offers of mediation, and provision of humanitarian aid. UN officials’ subsequent attempts to use humanitarian assistance and impartiality as a cover to achieve a covert solution deepened the crisis rather than contributing to solving it. The essay argues that by the early 1970s, the UN’s ambitious approach to international conflict management and foreign intervention had given way to a pragmatic focus on the “humanitarian” aspect. This adaptation by the UN to a difficult international environment in shying away from the overt pursuit of political solutions has had lasting consequences for the UN’s role in the international system.

The ‘deterrent argument’ and the responsibility to protect

States have presented a range of arguments against the expansion of human rights law into the extra-territorial military sphere. This article focuses on one argument in particular – the ‘deterrent argument’. This is the idea that if states are expected to uphold human rights obligations during extra-territorial military operations, it will deter them from contributing troops to United Nations (UN) peace support missions, which would naturally include those sanctioned under the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine. This article considers how the European Court of Human Rights' jurisprudence could actually apply to such military operations in practice and whether states should logically be deterred from participating in such missions. We argue that the involvement of the UN and the types of missions undertaken under R2P should not deter states from participation, but rather that UN involvement neutralises or mitigates many of the negative issues states fear in this area, reducing the likelihood of human rights liability for states.

United Nations Peacekeeping in Timor-Leste

This article seeks to elucidate many of the avoidable difficulties that the United Nations (UN) face when intervening in a given conflict. The article begins with a review of the UN's capability to act, fund, cooperate, and coordinate in peacekeeping missions. The UN's capability to respond to conflict is, in theory, boundless; however, it is limited by the realities of operating within the UN's vast bureaucracy and the possibility of member states having competing national interests. The article then proceeds with an analysis of the UN involvement in Timor-Leste, focusing first on the United Nations Mission in East Timor – the referendum monitoring mission – and then covering larger operations such as the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor and the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor, and finally analyzing more recent missions: the United Nations Office in Timor-Leste and the ongoing United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste. The article concludes that the UN's performance is dependent upon a steady commitment to supplying resources and the ability to properly assess and appropriately respond to specific realities within the context of a peacekeeping operation.

Ten Years After: (Re) Assessing Neo-Trusteeship and UN State-building in Timor-Leste

A decade after achieving independence, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (DRTL) continues to rely upon the United Nations (UN) directly and indirectly to carry out functions typically ascribed to the state. This dependency raises the specter of what scholars concerned with the breadth and extent of recent and ongoing UN operations in places such as Timor-Leste have dubbed “neo-trusteeship.” This research advances an empirical accounting of, and explanation for, the emergence and persistence of neo-trusteeship in Timor-Leste. Careful scrutiny of the UN involvement in Timor-Leste betrays the origins and sources of the neo-trusteeship arrangement and suggests that neo-trusteeship is better understood as a by-product of the disjuncture between mandate overreach and organizational incapacity playing out within complex post-conflict environments rather than any intentional manifestation of “post-modern imperialism.”

The problems of ‘nation‐building’: imposing bureaucratic ‘rule from above’

With the problems of stabilising Iraq continuing under the ‘fully sovereign’ Iraqi interim government, which formally replaced the United‐States‐led transitional administrative authority on 28 June 2004, many critics have argued that the United Nations (UN) should play a much larger role in the transition process. This article suggests that while imposing an alternative set of external administrative ‘advisers’ might be popular with European powers, it is unlikely that greater UN involvement would make much difference to the people of Iraq. Using the example of the international protectorate of Bosnia, which is also a ‘fully sovereign’ state, where the UN plays a fully engaged role, it is clear that external enforcement can provide little legitimacy for Iraqi institutions. This article challenges the idea that the ‘rule of law’ can be imposed from outside by focusing on two areas of legal activism in Bosnia: constitutional change and property return. It suggests that the ‘rule of law’ approach sees legal or administrative solutions as a short cut to addressing political problems, fetishising the legal framework at the same time as marginalising the political sphere. Rather than more coercive external involvement in the form of pressures for more legislation and better law enforcement, the experience of Bosnia highlights the need for greater levels of political legitimacy, a need that runs counter to the logic of the ‘rule of law’ approach.

Twenty years on: the UN and the ‘Question of Antarctica,’ 1983–2003

The United Nations (UN) has now been involved with the ‘Question of Antarctica’ for 20 years. Divisions within the international community about the most appropriate form of management for Antarctica, which was presented to the UN as a region of global importance, have never completely disappeared, even if the restoration of a consensus approach during the mid-1990s was based upon a broader appreciation of the merits of the Antarctic Treaty System. Both Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties and non-Consultative Parties, pointing to the regime's enduring intrinsic qualities, have adopted an unyielding attitude towards Treaty outsiders advocating a more democratic, accountable, and transparent regime. Even so, the critical lobby, led by Dr Mahathir's Malaysian government, has never gone away. Initially, the ‘Question of Antarctica’ was discussed at the UN on an annual basis, but since 1996 it has been placed on a triennial reference. Following the most recent session in late 2002, the topic is scheduled to be placed on the UN's agenda again in 2005. This article reviews critically the key themes characterising the UN's involvement in the ‘Question of Antarctica’ since 1983, while using successive Polar Record articles on individual UN sessions to provide a framework of reference and an informed basis for further research on the topic.

The United Nations and Somalia: An Examination of a Collective Clientelist Relationship

Numerous scholars have provided different explanations as to why the United Nations (UN) involvement in Somalia failed. Some have searched for an explanation in the structure of the UN and have suggested that lack of resources and inefficient UN bureaucracy were to blame. Others have faulted the anarchic nature of the international system in which the IJN finds itself. Still others have attributed the failure of the mission to the confusion over the respective roles of the UN and the U.S. This article argues that the UN involvement in Somalia is better explained from the perspective of a patron-client relationship. Applying Ravenhill's collective clientelist model, the paper argues that the UN acted as a patron in a collective clientelist relationship even though all of the components that sustain such a relationship were not present. It is further argued that (i) the UN-Somalia relationship was unstable because the UN neglected the development of cooperative horizontal relationships among various Somali factions in favor of a predominantly vertical relationship between itself and the various Somali factions, and (ii) the precipitous decline of the UN-Somalia relationship was unavoidable because of the particularistic motives and varying interests of each participant

The United Nations and Somalia

Numerous scholars have provided different explanations as to why the United Nations (UN) involvement in Somalia failed. Some have searched for an explanation in the structure of the UN and have suggested that lack of resources and inefficient UN bureaucracy were to blame. Others have faulted the anarchic nature of the international system in which the UN finds itself. Still others have attributed the failure of the mission to the confusion over the respecive roles of the UN and the U.S. This article argues that the UN involvement in Somalia is better explained from the perspective of a patron-client relationship. Applying Ravenhill's collective clientelist model, the paper argues that the UN acted as a patron in a collective clientelist relationship even though all of the components that sustain such a relationship were not present. It is further argued that (i) the UN-Somalia relationship was unstable because the UN neglected the development of cooperative horizontal relationships among various Somali factions in favor of a predominantly vertical relationship between itself and the various Somali factions, and (ii) the precipitous decline of the UN-Somalia relationship was unavoidable because of the particularistic motives and varying interests of each participant.