Though the total number of armed conflicts during the past decade was declining, 2008 has been a critical year for UN peacekeeping. This is the key message of a recent study based on new data on more than fifty international peacekeeping operations. Bruce Jones, Director and Senior Fellow of the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) New York University and main author of the study, introduced the “Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2009” at a DGVN luncheon talk in Berlin on 22 April 2009. The event was moderated by Ekkehard Griep, vice-chairman of the United Nations Association of Germany.

There are only few UN peacekeeping operations without massive problems – this is the case for Haiti and Darfur or the Democratic Republic of Kongo. Poorly equipped troops are more and more involved in military operations and are being pushed up to their limits. Basically, there were no rays of hope in 2008 in terms of successful missions, explained Jones. Grave problems have arisen in regions like Darfur, where there will be no peaceful solution in the foreseeable future. “There is no peace to keep”, diagnosed Jones the situation in Darfur. Only if the concerns of the regional governments are consistent with the concerns of the international organisation, political processes can be successfully supported by peacekeeping operations. If this is not the case, they will be expensive, unwieldy and in most cases unsuccessful.

According to Jones, the UN debate on the expansion of stand-by capacities will continue. He also addressed the proposal of British prime minister Gordon Brown to establish a rapid reaction force for the United Nations. In this context, Jones additionally mentioned the problem, that there were no reserve strength in the range of UN police forces. The author was optimistic about the future cooperation between the UN and the new US administration under Barack Obama.

Peter Schumann, a German UN official, who recently returned from the Sudan, characterized the frustration among UN peacekeepers. He underlined that military interventions were not the right instrument to solve the conflict area’s current problems. In fact, different and new approaches were necessary to get to the root causes of the conflicts.

Peter Wittig, Director of the UN Department of the German Foreign Office, asked about the main culprits of unsuccessful missions – were these the sometimes very quick decisions of the Security Council, which partly mandates too unrealistically, the poorly equipped and badly led UN troops, the understaffed Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), or maybe “the West”? According to Bruce Jones, all four players were malfunctioning and should be reformed or refined.

Brigadier Hans-Werner Wiermann, acting head for military single policy in the operational headquarters of the German armed forces, stressed the necessity of a singular authority responsible for the coordination of the various civil and military actors within the operational area.

Despite the critical course UN peacekeeping operations have taken during the last year, their abolition is not an option. At the time, there are no alternatives, which could more effectively account for global peace than peacekeeping operations.