The United Nations security council – the most powerful body of the UN – is the institution that is primarily responsible for maintaining international peace and security. But it’s facing a credibility crisis because of its failure to address the world’s biggest conflicts.
One arena in which it’s come under scrutiny is the way it represents Africa: poorly.
African countries number 54 of the 193 members of the UN and account for 17% of the world’s population. And in the last 30 years African issues took up nearly 50% of the security council’s meetings and 70% of its resolutions. But, as political scientist Sithembile Mbete points out, Africa is the only region without a permanent seat on the council.
As articles published by The Conversation Africa have illustrated, the global body’s peace and security apparatus has failed to bring peace to some of the continent’s worst conflict zones.
One area of the apparatus that stands out is peacekeeping. About half of the current UN peacekeeping operations are simple cease-fire monitoring missions, and the others are more complex state-building efforts in civil wars.
Why are these not working?
Researcher Alexandra Novosseloff argues that for three decades, UN peace operations have been falling into the same traps because stakeholders don’t want to tackle the fact that peacekeeping missions have to meet multidimensional mandates and minimise casualties while working with increasingly tight budgets.
For his part, peace operations scholar Alexander Gilder argues that part of the problem lies with their “stabilisation” mission.
Several UN peace operations have had “stabilisation” included in their title. These include operations in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and the Central African Republic.
But it’s not clear what activities fall under stabilisation. Missions end up with one major similarity: they are instructed to support efforts that extend state authority.
Similarly, peace operations expert Jenna Russo argues that the issue lies in the peacekeeping approach. Stabilisation approaches to peacekeeping – which have been pursued in countries like the Congo, Mali and the Central African Republic – are characterised by efforts to neutralise non-state armed groups and extend state authority.
Such approaches have proven largely ineffective, in part because they fail to take into account local drivers of conflict.
Researcher Delphin Ntanyoma also shares this position. He argues that UN experts reduce the very complex causes of violence in the eastern part of the DRC to inter-communal violence. This widely disregards armed groups’ motivations to resort to violence.
The world’s costliest and deadliest peacekeeping mission, in Mali, drew to a close in December 2023.
The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (Minusma) was set up in 2013 when the Malian state was on the verge of collapse after assaults by terrorist groups and Tuareg rebels.
Conflict researchers Moda Dieng and Amadou Ghouenzen Mfondi point out that the end of Minusma will have many negative implications. For instance, though Minusma was not very effective in protecting civilians – 2020 was the bloodiest year for civilians in Mali – it had a human rights division that played an important role in supervising and investigating violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
What needs to change
But there is hope.
As war and peace scholar Lise M. Howard emphasises, UN peacekeeping remains an important instrument of peace.
Adam Day, an expert in peace operations, explains that, to improve peacekeeping operations, we can learn from what has worked in the past and refocus the UN on the more limited – but achievable – tasks that peacekeeping can deliver.
Alexandra Novosseloff argues for a more nimble approach: missions with less ambitious and more achievable objectives, which would place more responsibility on other actors (national, regional, parallel forces) to shore up basic security in trying to find a path to peace.
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