Introduction
This short essay argues that, seven decades after its creation, the United Nations as a global governance body has not been entirely successful in attaining the expectations of its founders. This has been true at both the international and regional levels. The failure to meet its objectives has been a result of both a perceived lack of legitimacy by those it has purported to help and therefore a lack of acceptance and cooperation by those groups, which are critics that we agree with. Where some tangible success has been achieved by UN agencies, it has been predicated upon the acceptance and support of local political leaders, officials and communities.
With a specific focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this essay discusses the difference in approaches and actions of the ‘two’ United Nations, i.e. ‘first’ tier UN councils governed by world states, and the ‘second’ UN organisations comprising the various agencies which undertake global missions. The former bodies are fundamentally the fora in which states make decisions, and the latter essentially the international civil service (Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2009). Both groups may not always interact successfully, and several scholars on this topic have argued that each has a convenient scapegoat in the other (Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2009). Within the DRC these bodies are represented by the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation du Congo (MONUSCO), the UN peacekeeping mission which has operated in the Congo since 1999, and the United Nations International Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) one of the several UN agencies in the DRC which has undertaken humanitarian programs in the country since 1963.
Firstly, the essay will provide an historic overview of UN operations within the DRC and its relationships with major regional organisations including the African Union. Subsequently, the essay will discuss the differences in the “two UN” operating in the region over the past three decades, MONUSCO and UNICEF, and will conclude by provoking further thoughts regarding reforms to the ‘first’ UN modus operandi in order to boost its legitimacy with countries’ officials; improve acceptance by participating communities, and therefore increase the impact and success of its operations.
History and Dynamics of the UN and the African Union: The Effect of Power Imbalance
Created in the 1920s, the League of Nations was the ever first global intergovernmental organisation created with the aim of maintaining world peace and security. However, despite a few early successes, it was weakened by the lack of interest and cooperation of key players and ultimately failed due to the onset of the second world war. The end of war led to the creation of the United Nations with the same core mission of maintaining international peace and security, and its charter outlines a broad set of principles, concepts and operational frameworks such as ‘humanitarian intervention, which contain an inherent tension between the intervention-proscribing principle of state sovereignty, and the intervention-prescribing principle of human rights. (Thakur, 2008).
After seven decades of its existence, the UN has failed to resolve this tension fully and still faces problems. Particularly, it suffers from a lack of will to take collective action and to engage and cooperate meaningfully with its member states to tackle and eradicate issues and conflict. Some pose that the organisation was created to serve the interests of some large states and that, to this day, it remains their ‘creature’ (Barnett and Finnemore 2012). The United Nations’s power is exerted through six principal organs: The General Assembly; The Security Council; the Economic and Social Council; the Trusteeship Council; the International Court of Justice; and the UN Secretariat. Further large state influence is exercised via a multitude of specialised agencies such as the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Additionally, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other agencies are granted consultative status to undertake and participate in the UN’s operations.
While the task of establishing peacekeeping missions like the MONUSCO operation in the DRC is solely under the set prerogative of the UN Security Council, the General Assembly through a Security Council mandate can occasionally, on an ad hoc basis, bring reflections and proposed solutions to the debate of international concerns. For example, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was established to settle ongoing debate between those that value normative/ liberal concepts such as humanitarian intervention, translated by the ICISS into the ‘Responsibility to protect’ concept, and those who believe in the sovereign equality of all UN members as outlined in the original charter. The commission concluded its work stipulating that: ‘where a state fails to act to avert serious harm to those within its borders, through either lack of capacity or will, that the responsibility to protect then shifts to the wider international community’ (ICISS at ¶¶ 2.31; 8.1). In the case of most African nations, such issues would be addressed either to the several regional organisations recognised by the African Union, or directly to the AU itself before being escalated to the UN Security Council. This would be undertaken as designated by the UN charter with reference to members share of responsibility and regional arrangements contained in Chapters VI and VIII.
Like the United Nations, the African Union emerged from the ruins of an earlier organisation, the Organisation of African Unity, which was created in 1963. Launched in 2002 with original main objectives of eradicating the remnants of colonialism and racial apartheid throughout Africa, the continent’s leaders further aimed to reorient and reformulate the AU’s vision toward an amplified global collaboration and one of ‘An Integrated, Prosperous and Peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena.’ This is fully highlighted in the organisation’s Constitutive Act of the African Union and the Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union. Again, like the United Nations, the AU operates through several principal decision-making organs: The Assembly of Heads of State and Government; the Executive Council; the Permanent Representatives Committee (PRC); Specialised Technical Committees (STCs); the Peace and Security Council; and The African Union Commission.
As a regional organisation, the African Union has legal and legitimate acknowledgement from the UN under Chapter 8 of its charter but this contains some limits on its power in that the Security Council shall, where appropriate, utilise such regional arrangements or agencies for enforcement action under its authority. In effect, no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorisation of the Security Council. (UN Charter, Chapter 8; Article 53,1). Collaboration between the two organisations, mostly through their subsidiary agencies and organs, is essential for the successful maintenance of peace and security and where this is lacking, failure can occur. Both institutions recognise that while the AU is an important source of political authority for addressing peace and security challenges in Africa, it lacks the necessary material and financial capabilities to take decisive action alone to resolve these problems (Arthur Boutellis and Paul D. Williams, 2013).
MONUSCO and UNICEF in the DRC: A Matter of Legitimacy and Acceptance
It is important to stress that some of the subsidiary organisations of the United Nations predate the founding of the organisation itself as they were previously part of the League of Nations structure. As such, these organisations have a relationship which differs from the agreements between other specialised agencies and the UN as established under Articles 57 and 63 of its charter.
The success or failure of the ‘first’ UN is governed by individual governments’ perception of their vital interests and the accompanying political will, or lack thereof, to move ahead within a multilateral framework. (Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2009). While in most cases field work is delivered via a collaborative approach, there are several cases where UN peacekeeping missions have failed to deliver in accordance with their mandate and logistical capabilities.
The largest of the current fourteen global peacekeeping missions is in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has an estimated budget of $1.11 billion and employs more than 20,000 personnel, including over 18, 000 uniformed personnel. Operational in the DRC since 1999, the assignment subsequently transformed into an offensive mandate in 2010 with the objective of stabilising the political situation through the creation of the United Nations Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) under UNSC resolution 2098 passed in 2013. The FIB was the first UN peacekeeping operation specifically tasked to carry out targeted offensive operations to ‘neutralise and disarm’ groups considered a threat to state authority and civilian security. The force operates primarily for civil protection without the support of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and is focused in the North-Eastern region of the country, an area which has long been destabilised by armed conflicts. Since its commencement, the mission has suffered 173 fatalities of blue helmet personnel in over two years, but since April 2017 420 violent deaths of civilians have been recorded within the region of Beni (Kivu Security Tracker). These have been carried out by armed groups attacking homes, some of them located within one kilometre of FIB camps, even although this region is also under constant joint patrol of the MONUSCO and FARDC forces.
The success or failure of the ‘first’ UN ultimately depends upon governments’ perceptions of their own vital interests and the accompanying political will, or lack thereof, to progress within a multilateral framework. It is this aspect of the United Nations that is most often the locus of evaluation by the public and scholars alike (Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2009), mainly because the officials of these countries often feel that they are subordinating a great share of their sovereignty. In contrast, several of the agencies of the ‘second’ UN, in conjunction with countries’ officials, agree that the needs they serve go beyond political pride embedded within the concept of sovereignty.
The 10th Ebola outbreak in the eastern DRC since 1976 was the world’s second largest Ebola epidemic on record. It claimed 2,287 for 3,470 recorded cases between 1st August 2018 and 25 June 2020. Amongst several other factors, insecurity caused by armed conflicts made the response more difficult than in previous outbreaks, particularly in North-Kivu and Ituri, the two provinces which host the military operational offices of the UN mission MONUSCO as well as its offensive brigade, the FIB. In January 2019, the World Health Organisation synchronised efforts to halt further transmission of the disease. This included strategic coordination of technical expertise at the DRC’s Ministry of Health with the Epidemiological Analysis Unit, UNICEF-DRC, for the implementation of the ‘Cellule d’Analyses en Sciences Sociales’ (CASS) programme. The CASS is a social sciences analysis cell comprises of local social researchers, set up by UNICEF and operated under the strategic coordination of the Ministry of Health (MoH) for the 2018 Ebola response in North Kivu and Ituri. The CASS was set up to provide real time social sciences analysis to better understand the social and behavioural factors and provide potential explanations for various epidemiological trends in the outbreak.
Reforming the UN
In analysing the present and future course of the UN, Paul Kennedy proposed that a complete collapse of the United Nations is unlikely as so many nations and people have invested so much in it to prevent that from happening (Parliament of Man, 2016). However, the basic point remains that world economic and power balances are changing faster than at any time since 1890, and if the UN remains encrusted in its 1945 constitution, it will become increasingly anachronistic and ineffective.
There are a number of options which would make the Council more representative and which could circumvent political rivalries and the practical problems of having an over bureaucratic Council with a plethora of nations, and therefore be no more effective than it already is. One of the longstanding and perhaps fewer problematic options is the proposal to increase the number of non-permanent seats on the Security Council from ten, coupled with a creation of permanent non-veto seats. This could be achieved without disturbing the privileges and veto rights of the permanent members as established in 1945. Such seats could be awarded on the basis of economic weight, population distribution, regional representation, culture, religion, civilisation and democracy, and would correct the absence and under representation of Asian, African and Latin American nations (Thakur, 2010).
While the ‘first’ UN heavily relies upon conceptualised theories and the experiences gained by blue helmets in prior crises, and which influence all future peacekeeping missions, such an approach does not consider such issues as local cultural sensitivities and the requirement for bespoke approaches to each situation. This has led to anomalies such as having Muslim peacekeepers from foreign armies operating within a zone under protracted attack and mass civilian killings perpetrated by jihadist affiliated militia. A further lesson from the peacekeeping operations of the past fifteen or so years is that it is invariably a mistake to assume that the restoration of collapsed states can be achieved in a relatively short timescale and that all that is necessary is to send a military force to defeat the ‘bad guy’ and then commence civilian reconstruction to be followed by democratic elections and a smooth withdrawal from the scene whilst claiming another success (Kennedy, 2006).
Failure of such an approach is perfectly reflected in the current situation within the DRC where, despite the implementation of a peace and stabilisation plan since 2010, there is a trend of instability and backsliding but, despite this, the emphasis of the UN debate is now on a withdrawal plan.
However, some scholars continue to argue that, above all, the UN should intensify rather than scale down efforts to engage with the politics of post-election DRC. This would help the government to build legitimate political institutions whilst harnessing regional, donor and diplomatic support for the consolidation of peace. A longer-term approach is required to achieve this, and it is unlikely that such objectives can be achieved within the current UN withdrawal timescale of three years (Berdal, 2019). In contrast, the concept of the ‘second’ UN advocates community-based approaches to operations, importantly by offering scope for societies to participate and implement solutions and take greater ownership of the relevant issues.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the UN has failed, but not by as much as its critics’ claim. It has, to date, helped to avert full-scale war between the major powers although has been unsuccessful in preventing proxy wars on their behalf, most notably those in Africa, Asia and South America during the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc. Neither has it always succeeded in preventing a relatively stronger state going to war against a weaker one. Most notably, the USSR and the USA are guilty of incursions into countries considered to be in their ‘sphere of influence’, or of political or strategic importance. It has also failed in thwarting state governments acting against sections of their own populations by breaching key UN regulations and legitimising their actions by abusing concepts such as the responsibility to protect. In such instances, states have legitimised their actions whenever their interests have been at stake, but have remained paralysed when not. This was apparent in the tragedies of Rwanda in 1994 and the then director of peacekeeping Kofi Annan subsequently conceded ten years later that: ‘I could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support’ (DRC Report Mapping 1993 – 2003). Perhaps the same could have been said regarding the conflict in the Balkans, and particularly in Bosnia. As Secretary General, succeeding the pro-French Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Annan pushed hard to make the ‘Responsibility to protect’ an official policy of the United Nations. However, on the next important occasion to exercise that responsibility, in the DRC, the UN and the international community in general failed again (Turner, 2013). After two decades of heavy presence in the DRC, the failure continues. In the age of non-state violence and aggression, the UN has also often proved ineffective in its response to armed groups and militias.
Apart from conflict situations, the UN has a key role in alleviating poverty and in improving the health and wellbeing of the world’s population. There is now greater global economic integration, and levels of poverty have dropped dramatically in the last couple of decades due to many of the initiatives and effectiveness of the ‘second’ UN.
However, significant poverty and inequality still exists in some regions of the world. This is often as a result of a lack of stability and peace, and therefore failure in the politics of the ‘first’ UN directly impacts on the prospects for success in raising global standards of health, wealth, education and wellbeing.
Finally, if the United Nations is to become more successful in achieving its objectives, it needs to review its decision-making processes and methods of operation: the issue of finance also needs to be addressed to make the organisation and its agencies less reliant on major donors. Greater cooperation between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ UN structures also needs to be addressed. This necessitates a review of the original structure of the Security Council which was driven by the post- 1945 power balance. Global economic power balances have shifted since then, as have regional population volumes and environmental concerns. This needs to be reflected in a revised and more democratic council with a modernised vision of how best to solve global issues with the involvement of the communities concerned. An example of both the failures and the successes of the UN have been highlighted in the case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Henry-Pacifique Mayala
Social Scientist Analyst & Researcher (Statecraft)
Chevening Scholar
Global Politics Msc. – Birkbeck University of London
Deputy National Coordinator YALI-DRC
2017- Mandela Washington YALI Fellow
Pro-Democratic & Non-Violent Activist (LUCHA-RDC)
Safety & Security GIS Analyst
Independant Consult MEAL Expert
Environmentalist & GIS Practitioner
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References
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Kullenberg, Janosch. (2015). Congo by Thomas Turner. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. 240pp., £15.99, ISBN 978 0 7456 4844 6. Political Studies Review. 13. 10.1111/1478-9302.12101_106.
Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore (1990) The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 699-732: The MIT Press Stable
Mats Berdal (2019) IS THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO READY FOR PEACEKEEPERS TO LEAVE BY 2022?, Available at: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/is-the-drc-ready-for-peacekeepers-to-leave-by-2022 (Accessed: 30th November 2019).
Paul Kennedy (2016) The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations, 2006 edn., Random House: Random House.
Ramesh Thakur (2013) The Use of International Force to Prevent or Halt Atrocities : From Humanitarian Intervention to the Re sponsibility to Protect, Dinah Shelton edn., The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law : oxford.
