Presentation for Contemporary Diplomacy

This presentation will address on the terms relating to Peace Operations: namely
Peace Making, Peace Keeping, Peace Building and Peace Enforcement, and is
there any overlapping or differences between all 4? First part of the presentation, I’m
going to briefly explain the terms of these peace operations and on the later part, I
will deal with the questions whether they are overlapping, or they are in actual fact
distinguish between each other.

What are Peace Making, Peace Building and Peace Enforcement?

Chapter VI of the Charter sets forth a comprehensive list of such means for the
resolution of conflict. These have been amplified in various declarations adopted by
the General Assembly, including the Manila Declaration of 1982 on the Peaceful
Settlement of International Disputes and the 1988 Declaration on the Prevention and
Removal of Disputes and Situations Which May Threaten International Peace and
Security and on the Role of the United Nations. They have also been the subject of
various resolutions of the General Assembly, including Resolution 44/21 of 15
November 1989 on enhancing international peace, security and international
cooperation in all its aspects in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Peace Making
Between the tasks of seeking to prevent conflict and keeping the peace lays the
responsibility to try to bring hostile parties to agreement by peaceful means.
Peacemaking is action to bring hostile parties to agreement,

"Peace making...combines negotiation with non-military tools of coercion to achieve

a resolution of a conflict. When these tools are inadequate, military tools may be
used to establish and maintain, forcibly if necessary, a cessation of hostilities. ...
peacemaking constitutes the political framework for application of military force.
Without a peacemaking effort, peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations will
always fail.

"Even if military force is authorized by the United Nations, all military operations
involve continuous negotiation, with all parties, and at many different levels.
Peace keeping
The UN Peace keeping objective is to help countries torn by conflict create the
conditions for lasting peace. The first UN peacekeeping mission was established in
1948, when the Security Council authorized the deployment of UN military observers
to the Middle East to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab
neighbours. Since then, there have been a total of 63 UN peacekeeping operations
around the world.1

Peacekeeping is not expressed anywhere in the UN Charter. It was born during the
Cold War; it was used as a means to prevent the two superpowers from becoming
embroiled in localised disputes.

Less agreement can be ascertained among the member states of the United Nations
on what actually ‘peace keeping operations’. In a wider sense, the concept
designates everything, from the one man ‘presence’, through mediatory and
conciliatory missions, observer and investigatory groups, truce teams, and on up to
the formally organized peace keeping forces. In a stricter sense, peace keeping
operation concept designates those operations which are carried out by organized
armed forces of the United Nations acting, as a rule, with the co-operation of the
parties involved in the political or military conflict which caused the organization of
the operations.”

According to the United Nations, peace keeping is defined as:-

“...a peacekeeping operation has come to be defined as an operation involving
military personnel, but without enforcement powers, undertaken by the United
Nations to help maintain or restore international peace and security in areas of
conflict. These operations are voluntary and are based on consent or cooperation.
While they involve the use of military personnel, they achieve their objective not by
force of arms, thus contrasting them with the ‘enforcement action’ of the United
Nations under Art. 42”2

1
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/ - Assessed on 5 th March 2010
2
Dan Cioubanu
In essence, the main function of peacekeeping is “to facilitate the transition from a
state of conflict to a state of peace,” which has earned it the appellation, “a halfway
house between peace and war.” Those missions consisted of military observers and
lightly armed troops with monitoring, reporting and confidence-building roles in
support of ceasefires and limited peace agreements. To distinguish the
peacekeeping operations from enforcement and other forms of action, Alan James
argues that it is based on 4 essential elements:-

a) Personal deploy for the peacekeeping operation have to be of a military

nature;
b) Values: The peacekeeping operation, despite being military structure, has to
be non-threatening;
c) Content of their mandate: Impartial peacekeeping forces are placed to
potentially be able to defuse tensions in area of crisis. Once defuse, they are
responsible for the stabilization of the situation which may then be enable for
political negotiation to take place;
d) Context within which they are placed . The context includes the following
provisions:-
i) Operation must be taken by a competent authority be it in an
international organization or regional body;
ii) Operation must have adequate support in form of finances, personnel
and equipment;
iii) Presence of consent by host state;
iv) Must obtain political cooperation of all parties to the dispute. Otherwise,
it is unlikely to fulfil its mandate successfully.

Born at the time when the Cold War rivalries frequently paralyzed the Security
Council, UN peacekeeping goals were primarily limited to maintaining ceasefires and
stabilizing situations on the ground, so that efforts could be made at the political level
to resolve the conflict by peaceful means. 

The nature of conflicts has also changed over the years. Originally developed as a
means of dealing with inter-State conflict, UN peacekeeping has been increasingly
applied to intra-State conflicts and civil wars. Although the military remain the
backbone of most peacekeeping operations, the many faces of peacekeeping now
include administrators and economists, police officers and legal experts, de-miners
and electoral observers, human rights monitors and specialists in civil affairs and
governance, humanitarian workers and experts in communications and public
information.

Peace Building
In contrast with peacekeeping, peace building or “Post Conflict peace building” (as it
was originally known) is a new concept of which the UN first took note in 1992. The
term peace building came into widespread use after 1992 when Boutrus Boutrus
Ghali the then UN Secretary General announced his Agenda for Peace. Since then
‘peace building’ has become broadly used and widely accepted part of UN missions.

According to the Secretary-General, peace building consisted of `sustained, co-

operative work to deal with underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian
problems' (UN Secretary-General 1992). However, it was argued that the measures
listed in an agenda for peace, namely disarming, restoring order, destroying
weapons, repatriating refugees, training security forces, monitoring elections,
advancing the protection of human rights, reforming institutions and promoting
political participation, do not carry the notion of being sustained efforts that address
the underlying or root causes of conflicts. A host of other questions and issues were
also raised as a matter of discourse and ongoing discussion on peace building as a
notion.

After considerable debate and disagreement on the exact meaning of peace

building, the Secretary-General modified his position in the 1995 Supplement to an
agenda for peace and suggested that peace building could also be preventive (UN
Secretary-General 1995). This coincides with a somewhat broader view that peace
building is essentially about removing or weakening factors that breed or sustain
conflict, and reinforcing factors that build positive relations and sustain peace.

Hence it could be stated that peace building has evolved from a strictly post-conflict
undertaking to a concept with a broader meaning, and the general consensus would
seem that peace building efforts should (ideally speaking) already be attempted
during the earliest indication of tension in a situation of potential conflict. Against this
background, it could be pointed out that the term `peace building' was gradually
expanded to refer to integrated approaches to address violent conflict at different
phases of the conflict cycle. As far as this article is concerned, the view is taken that
the purpose of peace building is to avoid a return to conflict and that in some cases it
may require ambitious long-term nation building efforts by international actors.

In relation to that , peacebuilding has come to be understood and used as an

umbrella concept reflecting a more comprehensive and long-term approach to peace
and security including: early warning, conflict prevention, civilian and military
peacekeeping, military intervention, humanitarian assistance, ceasefire agreements,
the establishment of peace zones, reconciliation, reconstruction, institution building,
and political as well as socio-economic transformation.

In 2009, there are 12 undergoing political and peace building mission, among others
are United Nations Political Office for Somalia (Somalia: 1995); United Nations
Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Afghanistan: 2002); United Nations Peace
building Support Office in Guinea-Bissau (Rwanda: 1999).

Peace Enforcement

Peace enforcement could be seen often in situations where there is neither ceasefire
nor a peace to keep. Here, the term ‘peace enforcement’ has been used to describe
these operations, complying with the notion of ‘collective security’, as described in
Chapter 7, Article 42, of the UN Charter: ‘the Security Council … may take such
action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore
international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade,
and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of members of the United Nations’.
Peace enforcement thus takes place when the Security Council authorizes member
states to use ‘all necessary means’ to prohibit or check acts of aggression, and deal
with armed conflict or threats to peace, and not always with the consent of the
parties on the ground. Some peace-enforcement missions have been controlled by
leading states, as the USA initially did in Haiti and Somalia, or France in Rwanda.
Peace enforcement operations are authorized by the Security Council only as a last
resort, when all other peaceful means have been exhausted. Command and control
issues become more critical, as does co-ordination with a wide array of actors, and
can account for success or failure of a mission, as was learned in Somalia during
UNOSOM II.

Is there an overlap or can they be distinguish?

These terms of peacekeeping, peace building, peacemaking and peace enforcement
seems confusing. Are there any differences between all 4 or are the different terms
unnecessary since it is the same thing? Can one be distinguish with another?
Peacekeeping - is a non-coercive instrument of diplomacy, where a legitimate,
international civil and/or military coalition is employed with the consent of the
belligerent parties, in an impartial, non-combatant manner, to implement conflict
prevention and/or resolution arrangements or assist humanitarian aid operations.
Peace enforcement - is the coercive use of civil and military sanctions and
collective security actions, by legitimate, international intervention forces, to assist
diplomatic efforts to prevent armed conflict from starting, escalating or spreading or
to restore peace between belligerents, who may not consent to that intervention.
Peace enforcement operations differ from war. In war, the ultimate military aim is to
defeat a designated enemy force. In peace enforcement operations, the military aim
will normally be to coerce the belligerent(s) or potential belligerent(s) into avoiding or
ceasing armed conflict and participating in peaceful settlement
Peacemaking - is diplomatic action to bring hostile parties to a negotiated
agreement through such peaceful means as those foreseen under Chapter VI of the
UN Charter.
Peace building  - is a set of strategies, which aim to ensure that disputes, armed
conflicts, and other major crises do not arise in the first place or if they do arise that
they do not subsequently recur.

Among the four, due to the vast diversity of peace keepings operations, and maybe
the familiarity of the word itself, peacekeeping is usually used to encompass a wide
range of mission that often include peace building and peacemaking. However, the
interrelation between all four of the peace operations is important and these concept
to be integrally inter related is significant, in order for the mission to be successful.
Peacemaking Diplomatic action to bring Requires sustained
hostile/conflicting parties to negotiate commitment
agreement

Peacekeeping Military force is employed to maintain and

restore peace in areas of conflict
i) Non-coercive instrument of
diplomacy;
ii) Involved military force
iii) Despite usage of military force,
it has to be non-threatening in
nature (non-combatant
manner);
iv) Consent of beligerent parties;
v) Grounds of mission: absence of
war, cease fire is in place;

Peace i) Coercive use of civil and

enforcement military sanctions to assist
diplomatic efforts in order to
prevent armed conflict from
starting, escalating or
spreading;
ii) Ground of mission: a state of
actual outgoing combat and the
task is to cause the combat to
cease;
iii) Consent from beligerent parties
may not be present;

Peace building Set of strategies, which aim to ensure Requires sustained

that disputes, armed conflicts, and other commitment
major crises do not arise in the first place
or if they do arise that they do not
subsequently recur.