Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Good afternoon.
Today, I'd like to talk to you about United Nations Peacekeeping,
specifically, how and why UN peacekeepers have changed
since peacekeeping began, in 1948, until today,
and what this change means for us
in our increasingly globalized and polarized world.
Now, a big part of what I study is change, so I am going to start with that.
In my field, I do a lot of research, and I read a lot of reports -
reports from governments;
from NGOs, from nongovernmental organizations;
from international organizations.
And so many of these reports start out with the phrase,
"Since such and such a day, the world has changed."
"Since World War I," "World War II,"
"Since the end of the Cold War, the world has changed."
And all of these statements always seem so surprised,
like this change is somehow unexpected and baffling.
But I never really thought anything of it.
I continued to do my research; the world continued to change,
and we continued to be vaguely surprised by it.
Until one day I was talking with a colleague, and he said,
"Shannon, I know that you're studying UN Peacekeeping and how it's changed,
but have you thought to ask why?
Why has peacekeeping had to change at all?"
And he reminded me of a quote
from a fairly well-known peace scholar named Kenneth Boulding, who said,
"We are as we are because we got this way."
A lot of you have the exact same look on your face that I had at the time,
something along the lines of "I have no idea what that means."
But the more I thought about it, it started to make sense.
We're not surprised by change because it happens quickly;
we're surprised by change
because it happens slowly, and we just notice it all at once.
It's the process of change, the causes of change that we often don't see.
But these changes can tell us some key things about ourselves.
So, United Nations Peacekeeping -
I know you're asking, "Well, what does peacekeeping have to do with us?"
I realized I had been asking the wrong questions.
I was looking at "How have they changed?"
but I needed to ask, "Why had they changed?"
I could see where peace operations had begun,
and I could see where we were now,
but I needed to ask,
"How did we end up here?
How did we get this way?
And more importantly,
what does that past journey tell us about where we might be headed
in peacekeeping and our understandings of peace and security in the future?"
After all, what does UN Peacekeeping have to do with any of us?
For many of you, it's probably a fairly abstract concept.
Maybe it brings to mind pictures of soldiers in blue helmets,
much like these men and women.
Or maybe even these.
You probably know that they work in some of the most dangerous places on earth.
But what you may not know
is that there are 125,000 UN personnel
currently on UN peace operations.
125,000!
That makes UN forces the largest forces in the world,
and these men and women come from 128 different countries,
so they are truly a global force.
Now, peacekeeping missions exist
to help the United Nations maintain international peace and security,
and they do this by acting as the will of the UN,
which is about as difficult as it sounds it is.
The United Nations is where the world comes together,
and it's where we articulate our highest ideals,
our ideas of democracy, equality, sovereignty.
But the United Nations, despite its name,
is not as unified of an organization as we would like to think.
In fact, it's this constantly evolving entity of 193 different countries,
193 countries with their own power dynamics and national interests.
I don't think it's going to come as a surprise to any of you
that these countries sometimes have different points of view,
and as a result, within the UN we get these different values and ideas,
and they conflict with each other,
they compete with each other.
So we have ideas of traditional sovereignty and nonintervention
that rub up with our ideas
of humanitarian intervention, international human rights
and our responsibility to protect citizens in conflict
regardless of what country they live in.
Now, all of these ideas exist in the UN at the same time,
and so when it's necessary for us to apply them in the field,
say in a UN peace operation,
what we end up with
is sort of this best-negotiated compromise of all of them,
and this is what's given to the peace operation
to make a reality on the ground.
So if the UN is where we articulate these ideas,
peace operations are what make them a reality.
So not only do we have competing ideas in the United Nations,
these ideas also change over time.
A perfect example of this are the big ideas of peace and security.
These two ideas, peace and security,
are big and complicated and incredibly messy,
and they're made more complicated
by the fact that though the UN is tasked with maintaining them,
the UN Charter, oddly, never actually defines what they are.
Instead, peace and security
have always been defined by the prevailing ideas of the time;
they change in response to the world around them.
In fact, you may be surprised just how much they can change.
And oftentimes, we don't tend to notice.
So, what does this tell us about peacekeeping?
We've got all of these ideas,
these ideas that are competing against each other,
these ideas that are changing,
so it's hard to keep track of what the world is thinking.
But if we look at UN peace operations,
we can actually follow
our changing understanding of the key ideas of peace and security.
This allows us to look back and see where we're coming from,
but it also gives us a pretty good idea of where we're headed.
So in the Cold War,
the United Nations understood peace and security
as maintaining the balance between the world's superpowers,
by respecting sovereignty.
And so UN peace operations focused on establishing strong frontiers
and acting as a buffer force between conflicting states.
So in this photo, we've got a peacekeeper on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
But even before the end of the Cold War,
the international community began to see peace and security
as something more than just a strong state.
After all,
a country where citizens are in danger from each other or from their governments
can hardly be called at peace.
And so these ideas of popular sovereignty, democracy, human rights -
ideas that had existed
but had been pushed underneath the need for a strong state during the Cold War -
these ideas began to bubble back up to the surface.
And by the mid 1990s,
a country was expected not just to govern its people,
but to protect them and to guarantee their human rights.
And if a state couldn't or wouldn't do these things,
then it became the responsibility of the international community to do so.
So peacekeeping adapted.
And for the very first time, you had peacekeepers intervening in countries
not to protect the state, but to protect the individual.
And by 1998, almost every single peacekeeping mission
had a protection of civilians mandate.
And for many of them, it was their number one priority.
Now, with the events of 9-11
and this attack on the world's only military superpower,
obviously our ideas of peace and security changed,
and the world began to rethink some things.
Quite naturally,
terrorism became a core security concern for the United Nations,
but the countries within the United Nations,
with all of their 193 different viewpoints,
began to interpret how to counter terrorism differently.
And some countries saw this as an opportunity to reinforce human rights;
they wanted to protect the things that they saw terrorism as attacking.
But other countries, fearing for their very stability,
used the war on terror to justify violations of human rights,
by criminalizing legitimate opposition groups
or even condoning the use of torture.
And the result of all of this is we have ended up
with these two conflicting ideas of security within the UN:
this idea that we have to protect the individual,
but the need to protect the state
even at the expense of individual human rights.
And both of these ideas show up in UN Peacekeeping at the same time.
A perfect example of this is the UN mission in Mali.
This mission is going on right now.
So these peacekeepers have several tasks,
but two of the key ones are to support the government -
particularly in its fight against terrorism -
and to protect civilians.
The problem in Mali is that oftentimes
the people who are committing the human rights violations
are the governmental forces.
They've been accused of things such as arbitrary arrests
to extrajudicial executions
of people they suspect being members of terrorists groups.
So this mission now has a conflicting mandate:
it's been told to support the sovereignty of a country,
yet, at the same time,
it needs to prevent that country
from using its authority to oppress its own citizens.
Now, this dilemma on the ground
is simply mirroring this battle of ideas that we have going on in the UN.
Now, what does this all mean for United Nations Peacekeeping?
With all of these changes,
UN peacekeepers have gone from unarmed observers, in 1948,
to something that looks a lot more like a regular military unit.
And some of these peacekeeping missions -
say the ones in Mali, the Central African Republic
and the Democratic Republic of Congo -
they're not even called peace missions anymore.
They're actually called stabilization missions
because where they're going, there is no peace to keep.
So their job isn't to keep the peace;
their job is to make the peace.
And in order to do this,
they've been authorized
to do everything from using force to neutralizing armed actors.
Now because of this posture,
they have to operate from an us versus them paradigm.
They can no longer be peace builders.
So this closes the already very small space for peace
that we have in these conflicts.
And it makes it much harder to protect civilians
because first you have to identify who the civilians are versus who the enemy is.
So we should ask ourselves,
"If it's the kind of peace we have to enforce,
is that a kind of peace that's going to stay?"
Now, all of these changes mean for the international community
that our idea of peace has shifted
from protecting governments to protecting individuals,
and now we appear to be headed in the direction of securing individuals.
This is a UN Peacekeeper protecting a refugee camp in South Sudan.
Is this how we see peace?
Or is this how we see security?
Because the way that security is being defined now,
they cannot be the same thing.
We are more secured, but less secure.
We're more protected than we've ever been, but we're somehow less safe.
And I'm not talking about changes
that just show up in UN peace operations and conflict zones.
This impacts every aspect of our lives.
What started out as a fear of terrorism
has expanded to impact security everywhere.
This is the airport in Turkey.
Here's the Metro in Paris.
This is a sporting event in the United States,
and this a school here in Australia.
Our new secure world has so closed the space that we have
for dialogue, for negotiation, for inclusive processes
that this is often as far as peace gets.
And we need to ask ourselves,
"Is that an outcome that we're willing to accept?"
We are as we are because we got this way.
So right now, we're struggling with finding a balance
between governments that are strong enough to protect us from terrorism
but can also give us the space for diversity and legitimate dissent.
And the outcome of these debates matter
because this is how we define peace and security.
And as you've just seen,
these definitions do become a reality on the ground,
both in our countries and through the United Nations.
So, if we take time to look back where we've come from
and notice where we are,
we can take control of where we're headed in the future.
Our local ideas of peace and security,
they travel up and they have a global impact -
ideas matter!
And particularly, these big ideas that we often take for granted.
So, as we craft these ideas through the policies we support,
the way we vote,
the very rhetoric that we decide to use,
we need to think beyond this fear to this bigger picture.
Is our new secure world actually making us any safer?
And in this secure world, is there any space left for peace?
A few armed actors shouldn't be able to dictate
the kind of security that we want to live in
or the peace that we want to make.
And we owe it to ourselves
and the people who are going to follow behind us
to take back control of these ideas
and make sure that we choose a direction
that's going to take us beyond just being secure
to something bigger,
to something more lasting,
to something like peace.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)