The United Nations is in the process of enlarging its role in mitigating or preventing armed conflicts in the world. This applies not only to international conflicts, but to internal conflicts as well, as less attention is being paid to the principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs and more to the concern for protection of human rights. The U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has published “An Agenda for Peace” in June 1992, which presents some innovative proposals.
Most of his proposals have merit, especially the possibility for the placing of peace-keeping forces on the territory of a state that feels threatened by an armed attack by another state, at the call of the threatened state only. Previous peace-keeping missions have traditionally been mounted at the request, or at least with the permission, of both belligerents. This proposal seems beneficial because it could be used preventively, before armed hostilities begin, while previous actions have always been sent after a war and after the agreement on an armistice or cease-fire, to supervise the implementation of the cease-fire.
Equally praiseworthy is the Secretary-General’s proposal for instituting a permanent U.N. force, either under Article 43 of the Charter or by using earmarked national contingents standing permanently in readiness. This would obviously be much more efficient than the present ad hoc arrangements for each peace-keeping operation separately, and it is long overdue. However, obviously the U.N. financial position would have to be greatly improved. At least all members should pay up their dues; but also these dues should probably be raised, and other sources of funds for the U.N. should be sought. This is not the place to enlarge on that, but such proposals exist.
However, other proposals raise some doubts. The proposal to send a more heavily armed force to stop an ongoing war before an armistice is arranged could actually escalate or complicate the war, depending on the particular circumstances. The claim of humanitarian intervention, while often valid, would not necessarily excuse an increased toll of human lives. An old rule of the Just War theory is still valid: would the U.N. be causing more damage than it would be preventing? This is called the principle of proportionality, and it is a sort of a cost-benefit calculation. It is not easy to estimate before a risky enterprise such as a U.N. armed intervention is undertaken. I have no trouble with the legal principle of national sovereignty, as this is deserbvedly fading into the background; but the cost of human lives cannot be taken lightly.
In any case, such a more heavily armed U.N. action should not be called “peace-making”. That term has traditionally been used for conflict mediation by the U.N. in an attempt to settle the underlying conflict issues. It is simply confusing to now transfer that terminology to a military action. For the sake of clarity alone, a different term should be used; possibly “humanitarian intervention”, as humanitarian concerns should be the only reason for U.N. intervention ever taking place at all.
I would now like to take a wider look at the stages of an escalating international or internal conflict, and try to indicate what U.N. actions would be appropriate at each stage.
International relations scholars and peace researchers, e.g. J. David Singer and his colleagues in the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan, recognize several stages of conflict. In simplified form, we can consider 4 stages here:
Long-term underlying historical grievances and hostilities. Nations often harbour these for very long times, and forgiveness of past wrongs is seldom practiced. Nevertheless, these smouldering hatreds can be kept under control in the absence of particular precipitating events.
Political or legal disputes about a particular issue, such as location of a boundary, the treatment of each other’s nationals, etc. There is no military involvement at this point, though threats may be made or implied.
Crises, or what the Singer group call “militarized inter-state disputes” (but the concept is transferable to internal crises as well). These events represent a sudden worsening of the conflict, in which military forces may be mobilizing or on the move, but there have not yet been any battles or armed clashes.
Full-scale wars, which Singer defines as involving regular armies on at least one side and causing at least 1000 battle deaths.
Not every historical grievance gives rise to a political dispute, not every dispute produces a crisis, and not every crisis produces a war; so that the number of these conflict occurrences in the international system decreases sharply as we proceed from stage 1 to 2 to 3 to 4.
The main role of the U.N. should be war prevention, i.e. stopping the conflict process preferably before stage 2 (or even earlier) and stopping it with great urgency at stage 3. If this fails, then measures can be applied to stop a war which has already begun and keeping it stopped. Obviously, different types of U.N. action are required at these different stages. What actions would be most appropriate at each stage?
Before a dispute crystallizes out of the matrix of general hostility prevailing in a region, measures of conflict prevention can be taken in 3 inter-related directions:
1.(a) Fostering cooperation, especially on large projects involving superordinate goals. This has been shown in psycho-social experiments (cf. Muzafer Sherif et al.) to deconstruct enemy images and foster friendly attitudes. Superordinate goals are goals which are very important to both sides (such as assuring adequate water supplies) and which cannot be achieved by either side alone, but are achievable if working together.
1.(b) Cultural exchanges, e.g. of students or of scientists and experts in various fields. These are not necessarily beneficial; by getting to know each other better, one may get to dislike each other more, if the mutual experiences are unpleasant or frustrating. Allport has recommended 4 preconditions for cultural exchanges that foster international or inter-group friendship: (i) equality of status (rather than an attitude that “we must teach them something”); (ii) interdependence: each has some resource or skill that the other requires or would benefit from; (iii) common goals in at least some respects; and (iv) official sanction that labels such contacts as legitimate and not “treasonous”.
1.(c) Forgiveness: one should not harbour historical hostility feelings forever. Here too there are preconditions: (i) only the victim of past wrongs can offer forgiveness; (ii) the perpetrator must at least apologize, if not offer compensation. The role of the U.N. in this process would be one of mediation and facilitation. Since it is not always clear who was the victim and who was the perpetrator (this may be the very point in dispute), sometimes mutual apologies for different phases of past events may be in order. For example, Japan might apologize for Pearl Harbor and the U.S. might apologize for Hiroshima.
If a conflict has reached stage 2, that of a particular political dispute, the U.N. again has a choice of methods. All of these together should be called peace-making.
2.(a) Adjudication by the International Court of Justice, if the dispute is of a legal nature (such as a border dispute) and if both nations agree. It would be desirable if all nations recognized the jurisdiction of the ICJ as compulsory in general before any disputes arise, but that is now not yet the case. This method is not applicable to an internal dispute, since the ICJ deals only with states.
2.(b) Mediation, conciliation, good offices, etc. by a specially appointed U.N. mediator. This person could be the U.N. Secretary-General himself, to give this role the greatest possible legitimacy; but an argument can also be made for using a person with the greatest skills in this difficult field. As soon as possible, the U.N. should evolve some permanent peace-making machinery for mediation, something like a permanent Mediation Board, to which disputing parties would be obliged to refer.
2.(c) Arbitration is a more formal method of third-party conflict intervention which the U.N. could carry out. Arbitration differs from mediation in that the arbitrator’s decision is binding on the parties, whereas the mediator’s decision is not. Arbitration is thus an intermediate stage between mediation and court adjudication. However, unlike the ICJ, it could be used for internal disputes and for non-legal disputes (i.e. disputes for which no international law yet exists). As soon as possible, the U.N. should set up an Arbitration Tribunal for this purpose.
2.(d) Where appropriate (e.g. in cases of regional demands for autonomy or independence), the U.N. should conduct or supervise plebiscites, referenda or elections to reach a decision on the dispute. This practical application of democratic methods should be generally acceptable, but the U.N. must scrupulously practice impartiality in supervising the campaigning and voting procedures.
In case of a crisis, the need to act quickly is generally uppermost. Measures of war prevention at this stage can take several forms, preferably carried on simultaneously.
3.(a) An arms embargo should be imposed at once, if arms imports have not been cut off previously as preventive measures.
3.(b) The U.N. Secretary-General or his representative should engage in intensive “shuttle diplomacy” in an attempt to head off threatening hostilities.
3.(c) U.N. peace-keeping forces should be dispatched to the area if either both sides or even only one side requests them. If the U.N. mission is sent on unilateral request, the peace-keepers would, of course, be stationed only on the territory of the requesting state. Such preventive peace-keeping might have been requested, for example, by Kuwait when there was a threat of an Iraqi invasion.
If a war is already in progress, the U.N. can take several measures of intervention in attempts to stop it.
4.(a) Help arrange an armistice or cease-fire and send a lightly-armed peace-keeping force to supervise its implementation and maintenance. This has been the traditional U.N. peace-keeping role. Quite often the cease-fire has held, but resolution of the underlying conflict has not followed, e.g. in Cyprus.
4.(b) Send a more heavily armed U.N. force to interpose between the warring states or groups and stop the fighting. This would involve the U.N. troops directly in the war. It might be difficult to remain impartial, U.N. casualties may be high, and the war may actually be escalated rather than stopped, depending on the circumstances. This action should not be generally recommended, though it may be appropriate in some special cases. Such forces, if used, should always be under U.N. command, not under the command of one nation.
4.(c) Humanitarian intervention, as in the Somalian civil war, could be carried out for purposes of alleviating famine, preventing human rights abuses, or caring for refugees (like the Kurds in Iraq after the Gulf war). This may prove to be beneficial in Somalia, but may be counter-productive in the former Yugoslavia, as several military observers have said. This measure, too, should be used sparingly and with caution. The uppermost question is: would more lives be saved by intervening or by not intervening?
4.(d) Temporary humanitarian armistice, e.g. to vaccinate children or feed starving people. This measure has been used by non-governmental organizations such as “Six Days for Peace”, but could be organized by U.N. agencies. It would not permanently stop the war, but would provide some relief. And it might induce the parties to prolong the armistice and possibly become aware of the benefits of not fighting.
There is another class of U.N. actions, variously labelled as enforcement or collective security, which are not impartial, but take the side of a victim against an aggressor. It is not always possible to identify the aggressor and the victim, and in those cases these methods are not applicable. When they are, as in the case of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. again has a choice of several measures:
5.(a) Economic sanctions, whose effectiveness depends crucially on the total cooperation of all member states. The effectiveness of economic sanctions has been disputed, but the study of past cases usually shows that they have not been applied universally, enough, strictly enough, or long enough. Caution should be exercised in protecting innocent civilians in the country under sanctions, by permitting imports of vitally needed food and medicines.
5.(b) U.N. military action, which, it should be realized, means a full-scale U.N. war. Examples were the Korean War and the 1991 Gulf War, though this was not strictly under U.N. command. The casualties, especially civilian ones, were quite high, and this should not be resorted to in the future.
5.(c) There will be objections: what if sanctions do not work (or do not work soon enough) and military action would be too costly? Do we still have alternatives to reverse the results of aggression?
The recommendation here is the speedy creation of an International Criminal Court, to which national leaders guilty of international aggression or of war crimes could be brought. This would avoid inflicting punishment on innocent civilians. There are serious problems in apprehending national leaders to stand trial, and this requires serious attention and study. Could such extra-legal methods as those used by Israeli Intelligence in apprehending Eichmann be used? Could the U.N. act extra-legally? Perhaps that is not immediately acceptable, but it is still far less costly than war.
As defined by the Charter, the main task of the U.N. is the preservation of international peace and security. There are multiple ways of accomplishing this task; the U.N. is at present equipped for only some of them. It should be the task of future U.N. reform to equip it to carry out all of them.
In doing this, we should keep it in mind that prevention is far better and less costly than cure, and also easier and more likely to be effective and successful. Therefore efforts for maintaining and assuring international peace and security should start as early as possible in the development of the conflict process.