The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

48 MAY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FEATURE Does peacekeeping have a future? Here’s a discussion of the fundamental challenge it faces today. BY DENN I S J ETT Dennis Jett is a professor of international affairs at Penn State University. His 28-year career in the Foreign Service included assignments as ambas- sador to Peru and Mozambique and in Argentina, Israel, Malawi and Liberia. The second edition of his book Why Peacekeeping Fails has just been published. T he United Nations was not even three years old when it launched its first peacekeeping mission in 1948. Since then, for the last 70 years, it has been continuously involved in such opera- tions, often with mixed results. Over that time peacekeeping and the wars to which it has been applied have changed. The challenges peacekeep- ers face have evolved from relatively straightforward missions to assignments that are highly complex and, more recently, impos- sible to accomplish. To understand why peacekeeping today is destined to fail requires a discussion of what peacekeeping is, the conditions it requires and how today’s conflicts do not meet those conditions. WHY PEACEKEEPING FAILS This history also explains why, in each of the seven decades of United Nations peacekeeping, the number of peacekeepers who died on duty has grown, with the total now more than 3,800. Today there are 14 U.N. peacekeeping missions employing nearly 100,000 soldiers, police and civilians at an annual cost of almost $7 billion. The United States is assessed 28 percent of that cost, but the Trump administration has announced it will cover only one-quarter of the bill in the future and is pressing to shut some of the operations down. The current missions reflect the three stages of peacekeep- ing’s evolution. The oldest among them, launched in response to wars between countries over territory, can be described as clas- sical peacekeeping. The second stage involved multidimensional operations, in which peacekeepers have undertaken a wide vari- ety of tasks to help countries recover from civil wars. The most recently launched operations exemplify the third stage—protec- tion and stabilization missions—in which peacekeepers have been given a mandate to protect civilians and aid governments that are threatened by violent extremism. To understand where peacekeeping is today requires con- sidering each of the three stages and how this evolution has affected what is being asked of the peacekeepers.