Peace operations in Africa: preserving the brittle state?

• Author: Malaquias, Assis
• Position: Regional Perspectives

"The failure of peace operations in Africa can only be partly attributed to the agents or modalities of these operations. Such operations fail because they attempt to avert the collapse of illegitimate, rapacious and coercive states."

Increasingly, in the post-Cold War era, African states have become primary targets of United Nations (UN) peace operations. These peace operations have expanded concepts and practices of peacekeeping that dominated UN operations during the Cold War. At that time, due to the ideological tension between the United States and the former Soviet Union, the UN conducted mainly "classic peacekeeping" missions. This type of peacekeeping involved the deployment of small and lightly armed multinational forces to help observe and maintain ceasefire agreements among former combatants. By contrast, in the post--Cold War era, as Dutch notes, the scope of UN peace operations has expanded considerably. (1) These operations now include such functions as preventive border presence, ceasefire observation and force separation, voluntary weapon control, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants into society, refugee or internally displaced-person relief, post-conflict reconstruction, observing/supervising/conducting/certifying elections, human rights monitoring and many others. (2) Unsurprisingly, given their scope and complexity, these operations have produced uneven outcomes.

The UN's mixed results in peacekeeping, this paper argues, are only partly attributable to the nature of the organization. The main problem resides in the nature of the target states and, more generally, the anarchic and state-centric system within which they and the UN operate. Put simply, although several important constraints--financial, political and administrative--have hampered UN peace operations in Africa, they are not the primary cause of failure. UN operations do not guarantee sustainable peace even when a political settlement between the combatants is in place. As the examples of Angola and Mozambique demonstrate, internal factors, not external intervention, determine war or peace. Given their brittle nature and the existence of powerful centrifugal forces, it is reasonable to expect several more African states to fail and collapse into anarchical bloodletting before viable and more inclusive frameworks for nation-state building are found. In other words, Africa will continue to present major challenges for the UN into the foreseeable future.

FAULTY FRAMEWORKS

The UN and the Westphalian Construct in Africa

UN peace operations are generally praiseworthy from a humanitarian perspective in the sense that they help mitigate human suffering. Paradoxically, however, they rarely address the fundamental issues that endanger the viability of many African states and cause this human suffering in the first place--i.e., political instability, economic decay and social dislocation. In other words, while UN peace operations allow brittle and nonviable African states to survive in the short term, they cannot guarantee their long-term stability and viability, let alone democratic governance or economic development. Indeed, peace operations postpone the domestic struggles that inevitably accompany complex processes of state-building. From this perspective, UN peace operations in Africa succeed mainly in promoting and sustaining the Westphalian system in a peripheral region. Such operations do not automatically strengthen African states' domestic relevance or international significance.

The UN's role within the current international system is unsurprising. Indeed, this organization was created after the Second World War as an instrument to stabilize and strengthen the international system that emerged after the end of the Thirty Years War. Ironically, the current international system--based on the principle of state sovereignty that brought peace and stability to Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648--has created serious and unwieldy contradictions in Africa. Specifically, even more so than the post-Westphalian European states, most post-colonial African states are just as artificial as the colonies they replaced. Consequently, ethnonational identities pre-dating colonialism remain mostly intact and act as powerful centrifugal forces that constantly threaten to disintegrate post-colonial African states. For many of these would-be African nations, independence provided the opportunity for reclaiming political, economic and cultural stakes within the new states. Alas, these claims could not be tolerated within the state-centric Westphalian framework where the higher aspirations of African ethnic groups had to be surrendered to modern state-building projects. But such projects often involved unpalatable negative-sum conditions; for example, the post-colonial African state could only be erected upon the ashes of pre-colonial nations.

By adhering rigidly to the Westphalian framework, the UN regularly ignores the complexities that reside at the core of most intrastate conflicts in Africa. Predictably, therefore, the UN has been largely ineffective in deterring, let alone resolving, these conflicts. This lack of effectiveness has, in turn, led to a decline in the legitimacy and credibility of the organization as a relevant partner in Africa's search for peace, stability and, ultimately, development. As a result, neither self-appointed guardians of the Westphalian construct in Africa nor its would-be slayers have much respect for the UN.

Peculiarly, however, even as the UN has faltered and fumbled in Africa, its relevance has increased due to the fundamental shift in the international security system caused by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The UN has been called upon with increasing frequency to manage an idiosyncratic feature of the new international security environment--the rebirth of ethnonationalism and the accompanying violence that threaten already brittle states in many parts of the South, including Africa. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, Africa has been particularly challenged by the prevalence and devastation of intrastate wars. The UN has responded by mounting an increasing number of peace operations, often as desperate measures to arrest, if not prevent, the annihilation of entire communities.

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has carried out peace operations in 11 African countries: Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Western Sahara. Of these missions, the UN has rightfully celebrated its successes in Namibia and Mozambique. However, in both cases the conditions were ideal for success. In Namibia, success was guaranteed by the retreat of the South African apartheid regime--a pariah state that had been governing Namibia illegally--as a result of debilitating international sanctions. Mozambique's success was assured in large part by the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (FRELIMO) regime's willingness to reorganize the state by adopting more inclusive and democratic forms of governance. In both cases, wider international transformations, especially the end of the Cold War, facilitated changes at the internal level. Elsewhere in Africa where the end of the Cold War ushered in new dynamics of conflict--Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia--the UN failed spectacularly. Alas, prospects for peace are also problematic in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia.

No Westphalian Peace for Africa

There have been several efforts to rethink UN peace operations with a view to improving their success rate. The latest and best attempt in this direction is the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the Brahimi Report). This report suggests that the "repeated failures" in UN peace operations are attributable to member states' weak political commitment, institutional deficiencies and lack of financial support. (3) The report proposes, therefore, that "the key conditions for the success of future complex operations are political support, rapid deployment with a robust force posture and a sound peace-building strategy." (4) The Brahimi Report is partly correct in pointing out that the absence of both political will and financial resources as well as the UN's own bureaucratic shortcomings constitute important challenges for peace operations. In fact, to this list, one could add inadequate mandates. (5) There is, however, a deeper and more complex set of problems that are associated with the UN's inability to rid itself of the Westphalian straitjacket. Specifically, UN peace operations in Africa have been severely limited by the very nature of the organization. Although the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations begins with the words "We the Peoples," UN operations have been state-centric, not people-oriented. In other words, the Westphalian concept of sovereignty has taken primacy over more Wilsonian liberal ideals like national self-determination of peoples. Although, in theory, the adequacy of the Westphalian construct for post-colonial Africa has been taken for granted, in practice it has had dreadful consequences because state sovereignty has generally been problematic.

Current theorizing about Africa, especially the kind produced by international relations (IR) theory, provides a faulty framework for understanding the continent's current predicaments and future prospects. Until well into the twentieth century, most IR theorizing about the patterns of state interaction was Western-centric. Intellectual preoccupation with the West could be justified partly because it constituted the heart of the modern state system that came into being in 1648.

The Peace of Westphalia, which formally ended the Thirty Years War, is said to mark the birth of the modern state system because, for the first time...