Preventive Diplomacy
British forces in Greece being a threat to
EDWARD JOHNSON
Birmingham City University, UK
Preventive diplomacy is an approach to peace
which arose with the development of the
United Nations during the period of the
Cold War, but whose manifestations have
continued into the post-Cold-War era. The
concept can most conveniently be associated
with the second UN secretary-general Dag
Hammarskjöld, who saw an opportunity for
the UN to cultivate a role in the Cold War
when, like the League of Nations before it, it
was threatened with irrelevance in bringing
security to world politics. The term “pre-
ventive diplomacy” does not appear in the
UN Charter nor does the idea have any
formal role in the structure and organiza-
tion of the UN, yet it has been a significant
factor in rescuing the organization from
the institutional torpor which threatened
its role in international politics in the early
1950s.
When the United Nations first convened
in 1946, the hopes for it to play a key role
in the maintenance of international peace
and security were high, especially within the
United States and Britain, but perhaps less
so in the Soviet Union. However, within a
matter of days of the first meetings of the
UN Security Council, it became clear that
the cooperation and amity which had been a
feature of the Grand Alliance of the Big Three
in defeating the Axis powers in the Second
World War was not something which could
be relied upon to continue into the postwar
world. Relations between the British and the
Soviet Union deteriorated sharply over the
continued Soviet occupation of northern
The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy. Edited by Gordon Martel.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118885154.dipl0377
Iran and from the Soviet criticism of the
international peace and security. The three
major powers had different conceptions of
what the UN should do in the postwar world
and thus their expectations created friction.
The Soviet Union undoubtedly saw the UN
Security Council as something which would
not always act in its favor and therefore was
extremely liberal in its use of the veto to
ensure that the nascent UN did not take any
actions which might undermine its interests.
There were numerous occasions when the
UN could not act because of the Soviet use of
the veto in the early days of the organization,
where it placed its interests above the collec-
tive one of peace and denied it the possibility
of acting as the founders had anticipated. But
the authors of the charter also recognized
that the veto was an expression of realism;
they accepted that if the wartime alliance of
the Great Powers did break down after the
Second World War, which it did, then the veto
was an acknowledgment that their interests
would predominate and that the UN would
be prevented from taking enforcement action
against any of them. To have done so would
have meant the permanent members would
be taking arms against each other and in the
nuclear era, that could spell Armageddon.
But, the very public casting of vetoes in the
first few weeks of the UN’s birth was a sure
indication that the cooperation of the major
powers, on which the anticipated success
of the organization had rested, was to be a
very fragile foundation on which to build a
postwar world order.
And yet, this was the bedrock of think-
ing on the UN’s role in the postwar world;
that the Great Powers would be united and
that they would act collectively to maintain
security. This concept, collective security,
2 PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY
that aggression towards one UN member
would be considered as an attack on the
whole international community, rested on a
number of assumptions which were absent
from the relationships of the Great Powers
after 1945. Not only did they have different
interests, they also saw aggression and its
causes in different ways and therefore did not
always wish to use the UN to maintain peace.
In addition, the UN Charter had been writ-
ten to expect that the major powers would
commit a section of their armed forces to the
creation of a UN army under Article 43 of the
UN Charter, yet this never materialized. As
the major powers could not agree on when
the UN should act, it was always unlikely
that they would empower the UN with its
own armed force. Thus the assumptions of
collective security were absent in the postwar
world. It would be accurate to note that by
the end of 1948, there was little doubt that
the UN was seen as increasingly irrelevant
to maintaining security, at least where the
interests of the Great Powers were concerned,
and a period of institutional inertia set in.
The one time in which the UN was able to
act was in response to the invasion of South
Korea by North Korea in 1950. Then, the
UN Security Council did authorize a force
to intervene to defend South Korea, but this
was only possible because the Soviet Union
was boycotting the council at the time in
protest against the failure of the Communist
Chinese government to be allocated the
Chinese seat in the Security Council. In the
Soviet absence, the council was able to act
without the threat of the veto and the force
was launched. However, it was not a UN force
in the sense that the UN did not pay for it;
it was not under the executive command of
the United Nations and the UN Secretariat
played no part in its formation, organization,
and deployment. The force commander,
General Douglas MacArthur, reported not
to the UN secretary-general or the Security
Council but to the American president, Harry
S. Truman. The UN operations was thus, “a
mere anointing of the existing United States
Far East Command, a sanctification as it
were of its personnel and its commander”
(Nicholas 1966: 538). Yet the fortuitous cir-
cumstances which allowed the UN to act over
Korea did not provide a model for future
action. On the contrary, permanent members
would be more attuned to ensure that by
chance the UN did not intervene in conflicts
or disputes where their interests were to be
protected.
The UN was rescued from this institu-
tional paralysis and revived, largely through
the actions and approach of Dag Ham-
marskjöld when he assumed the post of UN
secretary-general in 1953. Hammarskjöld
was concerned to bring the UN back into
the center of international affairs through
the role of preventive diplomacy. He saw
the organization as having a key function
in insulating conflicts in parts of the world
from the ideological competition of the Cold
War; the UN was to be about preventive
action rather than corrective measures. This
preventative role had to be one which the
permanent members of the Security Coun-
cil, but essentially the United States and
the Soviet Union, did not oppose and in
his 1960 Annual Report he noted that pre-
ventive efforts, “must aim at keeping newly
arising conflicts outside the sphere of bloc
differences” and where conflicts were on
the margin of the ideological blocs, the UN
should seek to localize them and prevent
their proliferation (Urquhart 1972: 256).
To achieve this preventative role, he was
fully prepared to extend the boundaries of
the secretary-general’s responsibilities in a
way that his predecessor, Trygve Lie, had
been unable to do without raising the oppo-
sition of many of the permanent members
of the Security Council. Hammarskjöld saw
Article 99 of the UN Charter as the means

by which a more political and demonstrative
international role could be justified. Article
99 bestows on the secretary-general the right
“to bring to the attention of the Security
Council any matter which in his opinion may
threaten the maintenance of international
peace and security.” For Hammarskjöld, this
gave him explicit as well as residual pow-
ers to act at times without reference to the
other organs of the UN or some of the major
powers who might oppose his interpretation
and actions. Thus Hammarskjöld was not to
be a glorified clerk, he was to be a political
actor in his own right. He demonstrated this
approach first in 1955 over the question of
a group of US airmen who had been shot
down by the Communist Chinese during
the Korean War and held captive. Ham-
marskjöld managed, through his discussions
with the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, to
secure their release and made it clear he was
conducting these on the basis of his own
position as UN secretary-general and not
as the cypher of the Security Council or the
General Assembly.
He also considered that the UN should
seek to protect the smaller powers in the
international system and this gelled with
the expansion of the UN in membership: as
many as sixteen states joined in 1955 alone.
In attempting to remain aloof from the ide-
ological divisions and tensions of the Cold
War, many newly independent states saw the
UN as a forum for the expression of their
political, economic, and social problems.
They gave support to, and had faith in, the
UN as the protector of their interests and in
return Hammarskjöld saw the future of the
UN, “very much as one of an organ which
primarily serves the interests of smaller
countries which otherwise would not have a
platform in world affairs” (Hammarskjöld’s
reply to Khrushchev, June 26, 1961, cited in
Urquhart 1972: 257).
PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY 3
Hammarskjöld was assisted in expanding
his role by an institutional adjustment that
had been made after the decision to orga-
nize a force for Korea. The United States,
along with Britain and France, seeing that
the absence of the Soviet Union and its veto
from the Security Council was unexpected,
acknowledged that such circumstances were
unlikely to be repeated and took steps to
permit the General Assembly a greater role in
the peace and security functions of the orga-
nization. The Western powers introduced a
resolution into the assembly in November
1950, which allowed questions of interna-
tional peace and security to be transferred
from the Security Council to the General
Assembly. This was anticipating the future
use of the veto, which had been absent at
Korea, preventing the council from exercis-
ing “its primary responsibility” and thereby
conferring on the assembly the right to act
in its place. This was the “Uniting for Peace”
resolution which was resolutely opposed by
the Soviet Union, which saw it as a device to
replace the council by the assembly, where
there was no veto and where at the time the
United States and Western powers were in
political control. These international and
organizational factors coalesced with Ham-
marskjöld’s belief that the UN had to find
a new role in world politics if it was not to
go the way of its predecessor, the League of
Nations.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PREVENTIVE
DIPLOMACY THROUGH UN
PEACEKEEPING
The opportunity for Hammarskjöld and the
UN General Assembly arose during the Suez
Crisis in 1956 through the creation of its first
major peacekeeping force, the United Nations
Emergency Force (UNEF). Here, the “Uniting
for Peace” resolution was used for the first
4 PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY
time, ironically against two of its main propo-
nents: Britain and France. They had created
deadlock in the Security Council by casting
vetoes to defend their military action against
Egypt and the question was then transferred
to the assembly through the “Uniting for
Peace” procedure. In that situation, there
was sufficient political support without the
veto to pass a resolution which invited Ham-
marskjöld to examine the possibilities of
creating a UN force. With the assistance of
Ralph Bunche, his under-secretary, and the
Canadian minister for external affairs, Lester
Pearson, he worked on the details of the
mandate, the force’s operating principles, and
the appropriate contingents to comprise the
force which was then deployed into the Canal
Zone within a matter of ten days to assist in
the disengagement of the invading troops.
In establishing the principles behind
UNEF, Hammarskjöld was laying down
the basis for all UN peacekeeping forces in
the Cold War era, and two years after the
deployment of UNEF, he wrote a summary
study derived from the experience. In it he
identified the key principles of UN peace-
keeping, which distinguished it from other
forms of military action. These were: that
in UN peacekeeping the consent of the host
state or states is required for the deployment
of a force and for it to perform its func-
tions; the force could not become involved
in internal affairs of the host state; it had to
remain under the political control of the UN
secretary-general; it could only use force in
self-defense; it was to be composed of contin-
gents from outside the permanent members
of the Security Council; and finally any force
must have freedom of movement to perform
its mandate (Higgins 1969: 483–521). While
the question of not using contingents from
the permanent members was breached over
the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFI-
CYP) in 1964 with the inclusion of British
troops and the use of French troops in the UN
Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), these
principles were broadly adhered to during
peacekeeping forces which operated during
the Cold War era.
In terms of clarifying the legal and con-
stitutional basis of UN peacekeeping, it was
not part of the Chapter 7 section of the UN
Charter which covered the enforcement pro-
visions and actions with respect to breaches
of the peace and aggression, and which had
been the foundation of collective security.
But, UN peacekeeping was slightly more
than pacific settlement of disputes which
is what covers actions under Chapter 6 of
the charter. What peacekeeping came to
be seen as were actions under an imagined
Chapter 6 1/2, something which allowed the
UN secretary-general and the Secretariat to
organize an institutional response to actual
or potential conflict without troubling the
permanent members. The difference between
a Chapter 7 force, a collective security one,
and a Chapter 6 1/2, preventive diplomacy,
peacekeeping one, is seen not merely in the
legal basis but also in the function of the two.
A collective security force is designed to repel
and defeat aggression whereas a peacekeep-
ing preventive diplomacy force’s tasks “do not
include that of fighting to frustrate a delib-
erate and systematically organized campaign
of aggression” (Claude 1965: 291). The key
objective of preventive diplomacy is “to abort
the development of situations where the need
for the operation of collective security might
arise, that is to prevent the extension of great
power confrontations that might produce
violent conflict” (Claude 1965: 292).
It is therefore possible to identify a range
of forces which were created using the
Hammarskjöld principles and which were
deployed during the Cold War. The UNEF
force was initially one which assisted the
disengagement of the Anglo-French-Israeli
forces from the Suez Canal zone and which
then went on to be a barrier force operating

on the border between Egypt and Israel until
withdrawn in 1967 at the behest of the host
state, Egypt. In the Congo, the Organisa-
tion des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC)
force was essentially a law-and-order force
aiming to bring stability to the Congo and
prevent civil war. In seeking to avoid civil
war, ONUC then had to end the secession of
the province of Katanga, which it did using
force; in so doing it received criticism from
some states as it appeared to have breached
one of Hammarskjöld’s principles, but in its
defense, ONUC was able to claim that in
order to ensure its freedom of movement it
had to use force, a consequence of which was
the collapse of the Katanga regime.
In Cyprus, in 1964, the UN deployed a
further law-and-order force to maintain
peace between the rival Greek and Turk-
ish Cypriot communities after fighting had
broken out between them. This retained
its functions until 1974, when the Turkish
invasion partitioned the island and led to
the reconfiguration of the UN force as a bar-
rier one between the Turkish state of north
Cyprus and the southern Greek Cypriot state.
In addition to these larger forces, the
UN was able, on a number of occasions,
to deploy small observer forces into actual
or potential conflicts to prevent them dete-
riorating into wider wars. There had been
some small military observer forces estab-
lished in the late 1940s such as the United
Nations Truce Supervision Organization
(UNTSO) in Palestine, and the United
Nations Military Observer Group in India
and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) in Kashmir; these
were very limited in scale, yet did provide
the foundations for Hammarskjöld’s initiative
in 1956. The UN was able to establish small
observer forces when to attempt to deploy
a larger UN peacekeeping force might have
met with too much opposition: this was
the case with the UN Observer Group in
Lebanon (UNOGIL) in 1958 (James 1969:
PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY 5
217–20). There was often no happy distinc-
tion between the observer forces and the
larger peacekeeping forces, although size was
a factor. Some observer forces were com-
posed of individually recruited personnel
whereas the peacekeeping forces recruited
national contingents and the observer forces
were generally unarmed in that only personal
weapons were allowed. Yet, in terms of their
functions, the observer forces were often
executing the same tasks as the peacekeeping
ones: thus observer forces whose functions
were fact-finding and reporting or supervis-
ing a ceasefire were acting in many similar
ways to the barrier forces. An unexpected
consequence of UN peacekeeping – as the
forces in Cyprus and Lebanon testify – is that
it has a tendency to “freeze” a conflict. Thus,
the fighting may end but the overall dispute
remains. In this, preventive diplomacy was
seeking to isolate conflicts originally from the
Cold War competition of the USA and the
Soviet Union but, after 1989, from any major
power rivalry, and its major component,
peacekeeping, was different from other forms
of conflict control.
These three essential types of UN force
were then replicated in various theaters of
conflict during the Cold War. The UNEF
was withdrawn in 1967 but a new UNEF
II was deployed after the 1973 Yom Kippur
War in the Middle East, and in 1978 a bar-
rier force, UNIFIL, was established on the
Israel–Lebanese border. While there were
improvements in logistical support and a
wider group of troop donors was available,
the principles behind the forces remained the
same as those instituted by Hammarskjöld
in 1956. Although this might seem a success
for the UN and the philosophy of Ham-
marskjöld, the approach was one where the
UN’s intervention was unlikely to transgress
the interests of one of the permanent mem-
bers. Where these had a stake in a conflict,
the UN was, in the Cold War period, reduced
6 PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY
either to a small diplomatic part with no
military intervention at best, or at worst,
the status of an interested and sometimes
bemused on-looker. Thus the UN could
not get involved in the Soviet invasions of
Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968),
or Afghanistan (1979), nor did the USA
allow it much of a role in the Vietnam War
(1964–1973). The British were successful
in keeping the UN out of the long-running
problems of Northern Ireland, in spite of four
attempts by the Irish Government to involve
the UN. The British were also able to exclude
the UN from the Falklands War in 1982, in
part because of the support provided by the
American administration of Ronald Reagan:
the United States was sure that failure of the
British to repulse an outright invasion of the
sovereign territory of the Falklands would
have severe repercussions in other parts of
the world and for the British themselves.
There was in addition the case of great
power opposition to a UN peacekeeping
force and by extension to Hammarskjöld and
the UN Secretariat even when it had been
deployed and was operational: this was the
case with ONUC between 1960 and 1961.
The force had at one time generated the
hostility of a number of Western powers but
more significantly the Soviet Union, which
perceived ONUC as being a tool of Western
policy and led to a very public diplomatic
attack on Hammarskjöld, whereby the Soviet
government wished to see him resign and be
replaced by a troika of secretaries-general:
one reflecting Western interests, one Soviet
interests, and the third with a remit for
the non-aligned states in the Cold War. The
Soviet proposal came to nothing, but the
attack did lead to questions as to whether
the force could remain in the field facing
the opposition of one of the superpowers.
Although the ONUC did survive, it reflects
one of the conditions of preventive diplomacy
that both superpowers had to accept: it was
in their interests for the UN to neutralize
any potential flashpoints which might have
led to a confrontation with the attendant
dangers of a spiral towards nuclear war. The
second precondition might be thought of as
the superpowers genuinely seeing the UN as
a neutral force. For large periods of the Cold
War, the Americans wished to see the UN
as a feature of their own foreign policy and
therefore would eschew any idea of neutrality.
For the Soviet Union, the question might be
seen in reverse. If the American government
wondered whether the UN should be neutral,
the Soviet government considered whether it
ever could be so (Claude 1965: 300).
PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY AND THE
POST-COLD WAR WORLD
With the end of the Cold War in 1989,
preventive diplomacy as articulated by Ham-
marskjöld could have gone into decline,
given it was designed to counteract Cold
War tensions; yet their elimination actu-
ally made available the possibilities for a
wider form of UN peacekeeping operations.
There had already been improvements in
relations between the USA and the Soviet
Union before 1989 which allowed the UN
to try to play even more of an active role in
international politics, and the final collapse of
communism and the break-up of the Soviet
Union led to the disappearance of much of
the ideological strain which marked the Cold
War; thus where the UN had been stymied
by the veto and great power reluctance to
allow it to become too involved in conflicts
in which they had interests, the prospect
in 1989–90 was for a new world order in
which the UN might break from the political,
ideological, and organizational binds which
had restrained it for so long. There was now
the possibility that the collective security pro-
visions of the UN as envisaged by its founders
in 1945 might be realized: where an act of

aggression could be recognized by all the
international community and dealt with. The
prognosis looked favorable when, in 1990,
in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
the United States administration of George
Bush Senior was able to utilize the UN Secu-
rity Council to organize a UN-sanctioned
response. The UN approved the use of force
to evict Iraq from Kuwait and in doing so
operated under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter:
this was enforcement as originally intended
by the UN’s architects in 1945. However, the
example was not one which was to be a model
for future action. There were a number of
key factors evident in Iraq which would not
necessarily be reproduced in other conflicts
in the post-Cold-War world: the invasion of
Kuwait was as clear a case of aggression as
could be made; the Soviet Union was in no
ideological nor diplomatic position to oppose
the use of force to evict Iraq from Kuwait; the
Bush administration was extremely careful
in orchestrating support through the Secu-
rity Council and seeking a broad consensus
on military action and many of the Arab
states which might, in other circumstances,
have been suspicious of the USA managing
the crisis through the UN were sufficiently
alarmed at the cavalier approach of Iraq to
a fellow Arab state’s sovereignty as to raise
no complaint and in fact to participate in the
liberation of Kuwait.
These favorable circumstances were not
however ones to be found as a rule and the
first Gulf War did not provide a pointer for
future UN collective security operations. Yet
the stock of UN peacekeeping was high; in
1988 the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed
on it and in the wake of improved rela-
tions between the superpowers there was
a greater willingness to support it. In 1988
there had been approximately 10,000 active
UN peacekeepers and by 1993 the figure had
risen to 80,000 and the amount spent also
reflected the surge in operations, from $364
PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY 7
million in 1988 to $4 billion five years later
(Reinalda 2009: 598). The marked increase
in UN peacekeeping forces was matched by
their assumption of wider responsibilities
than originally envisaged by Hammarskjöld.
The new peacekeeping forces found them-
selves faced by a different set of problems
as envisaged by the founders of the UN
and by Hammarskjöld in his delineation
of preventive diplomacy. Where interstate
conflicts had accounted for the majority of
UN peacekeeping operations before 1989,
the change after the Cold War was marked.
Then, the UN found itself adopting a number
of missions which still aimed to isolate and
prevent conflicts from escalating and encom-
passed a range of problems. On the successful
side, these included assisting states to move
to independence or to achieve democratic
government after a civil war; the transition
forces. But the UN also took on the mantle of
attempting to moderate or control civil wars.
In these, the UN peacekeepers found them-
selves tackling warlords and informal gangs
in states with no legitimate governments,
in effect failed states. The phenomenon of
ethnic cleansing, the deliberate elimination
of one ethnic group by another, either by
killing or by expulsion, became a feature
of the conflicts as did the requirement to
deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn areas
mired in social, economic, political, and even
environmental disaster. In these the record
was less successful and in some cases even
dishonorable.
ASSISTING TRANSITION
In 1989, the UN deployed a force in
Namibia, the UN Transition Assistance
Group (UNTAG), to assist in the process
of Namibia becoming independent from
South Africa. The force not only contained
a military wing but also a civil section of
election monitors and civil police to aid the
8 PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY
country’s move to independence. The success
of UNTAG encouraged the UN to send a
force to Cambodia in 1992 to maintain law
and order and monitor a ceasefire between
warring factions, to observe elections, and to
set up a civil administration as the prelude
to a new Cambodian government coming to
power in the wake of the observed elections.
In the same year, the Security Council was
able successfully to deploy the UN Operation
in Mozambique (UNOMOZ) to monitor
the ceasefire in the civil war there, provide
humanitarian assistance, and to facilitate a
fair electoral process in the wake of the end
of the conflict.
A NEW GENERATION
OF PEACEKEEPING
These successes occurred against a backdrop
of institutional rethinking about preventive
diplomacy. In 1992, the UN secretary-general,
Boutros-Ghali, in reply to a request by the
Security Council, set out how the UN might,
in the new circumstances, play different
roles to assist in the maintenance of inter-
national peace and security. The report
was entitled “An Agenda for Peace” and
in it Boutros-Ghali identified a number of
reforms and improvements to the UN which
would enhance “the capacity of the organi-
zation to respond to the challenges of the
post Cold War world” (Boutros-Ghali 1993:
468). These included a more active preventive
diplomacy role as well as peacemaking and
post-conflict peace-building. In extending
the older Hammarskjöld conception of pre-
ventive diplomacy, Boutros-Ghali included a
set of measures to reflect the more complex
world of international politics after 1989.
The newer version of preventive diplo-
macy now called for some added elements.
First were those confidence-building mea-
sures which would involve the exchange of
information about weapons and military
establishments in states to reduce the like-
lihood of conflict arising by misperceptions
and mistrust. Second, the UN needed greater
access to facts and had to be able to respond
rapidly if required, to provide hard infor-
mation about conditions in states which
might lead to conflict. In addition to this,
Boutros-Ghali recognized the UN was poor
at gathering intelligence and required the
UN to be able to appreciate global economic,
political, and social trends given that, in the
post-Cold War world many conflicts would
have economic and social roots. This revived
form of preventive diplomacy still sought to
isolate conflicts but did not however produce
any standard approach either by the UN or by
the international community. What it led to
was a rather more interventionist approach
with the use of force being more prominent
and enforcement more evident and where
consent was less visible than preventive
diplomacy as articulated by Hammarskjöld.
What transpired was a collection of opera-
tions with no clear or unified approach to the
question of peacekeeping and the record of
some of the operations, especially in dealing
with civil wars and disorder, was more than
disappointing; in three examples it might be
thought of as discreditable.
In Somalia in 1992, the UN authorized a
small force, the UN Operation in Somalia
(UNSOM) to provide humanitarian assis-
tance and aid food supplies in what was a
failed state with no legitimate government.
The operation lacked security and was then
reinforced by a Security Council-approved
force under Chapter 7, the Unified Task Force
(UNITAF), but under US command and
being predominantly composed of US forces.
This brought some stability to Somalia in
early 1993, but once the food aid had been
secured the UN created a new force under
Chapter 7, UNSOM II, to replace UNITAF;
yet contributors to UNSOM II welcomed
a US presence and 4000 US troops were

transferred to serve under UN command,
but a number remained in Somalia under
American control. In June 1993, twenty-four
Pakistani troops were killed in an ambush
by Somali gangs and in October eighteen US
special forces were killed in Mogadishu (the
capital) and their bodies paraded through
the streets and shown on television in the
USA. The public outrage was such as to
have the effect of the Clinton administration
withdrawing from Somalia and indicating its
intention not to serve under UN command
again, a position which undermined the UN.
The reluctance of Western powers to use
the UN was illustrated in Rwanda when, in
1994, as many as 800,000 people, mostly from
the Tutsi tribe, were massacred in under three
months by the rival Hutus in a genocide.
Although the UN sent two forces to Rwanda,
they were never more than 3000 in number
and could not prevent the mass killings. The
UN refused to call the killings a genocide as
this would have committed all parties to the
1948 Genocide Convention to take action,
which was unlikely, and thus the UN averted
its gaze from the events in Rwanda as a
number of member-states refused to act. The
tragedy of Rwanda was a humbling failure
for the UN, revealing that even with the
end of the Cold War, there was insufficient
political will and ready donors to support UN
peacekeeping in dangerous conflicts where
the chances of casualties were high.
This absence of will was demonstrated in
Yugoslavia when, in the early 1990s, it started
to fragment as Slovenia and Croatia withdrew
from the Yugoslav federation leaving Serbia
as the dominant residual part of the old state.
The Serbs were seeking to extend their hold
on territory to include a greater Serbia and
lay claim to Bosnia-Herzegovina. It contained
a mix of Christian Orthodox Serbs, Catholic
Croats, and Bosnian Muslims which added
a toxic religious difference to the ethnic
divisions within the putative state. The UN
PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY 9
had already established the UN Protection
Force (UNPROFOR) in order to protect Ser-
bian population enclaves in the new state of
Croatia in 1992. The force was given further
duties under Chapter 7 to protect a number
of “safe havens” in Bosnia from the ethnic
cleansing, torture, rapes, and human rights
violations which were becoming a distin-
guishing characteristic of what became the
Bosnian conflict. In 1995, a group of Serb
militia entered the “safe haven” of Srebrenica,
composed of a predominantly Muslim popu-
lation, expelled the women and children, and
then massacred as many as 5000 men and
boys in the worst postwar atrocity in Europe.
The town had been under the protection of a
Dutch contingent of UNPROFOR, but it was
far too small and lightly armed to combat the
Serb battalion. The Dutch government fell
from power in disgrace and the reputation
of the UN, coming one year after Rwanda,
reached hitherto uncharted depths.
In Sierra Leone in 1999, the UN created
a UN Assistance Mission (UNAMSIL) of
18,000 to monitor a ceasefire agreement in
the civil war but which signally failed to do
so even to the extent of 500 members of the
force being disarmed and held hostage by
the Revolutionary United Front rebel group.
The UN had to be rescued by a contingent of
British troops not part of the force. However,
UNAMSIL was later reinforced to monitor
a new ceasefire, disarm groups, and bring
stability to the state: it was withdrawn in
2005, and thus encompassed abject failure
and success in one mission.
THE REPUTATION OF UN FORCES
DAMAGED
The record of the UN after 1989 was therefore
mixed. The expansion of the number of UN
forces did not correspond with a record of
success in achieving goals and mandates. The
reasons for this can be found in a number of
10 PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY
factors of which the first was the very rapid
expansion in operations itself: the UN was not
prepared to take on the range of tasks it was
presented with in the post-Cold War world.
The troops provided for by the member-states
were of assorted quality, with wide variations
in training and equipment. Where they were
from developing states, and this was within
the Hammarskjöld tradition of at least not
using contingents from the major powers, it
was often the case that service in a UN force
was a luxury with salaries from the UN bud-
get way in excess of what they would receive
while on service in their own states. This gave
a wrong, but perhaps understandable, motive
for developing states wishing to donate troops
and personnel to a UN force.
A second reason can be found in the num-
ber of the operations that were never able to
summon sufficiently well-trained troops to be
able to carry out the mandate: the examples
of Rwanda and Bosnia were cases in point.
There, what was needed were experienced
troops in larger numbers to be able to resist
the depredations of warlords and militias, but
the developed states were unwilling to supply
them in adequate numbers. And the with-
drawal of an American commitment to UN
peacekeeping after Somalia undermined the
claims that a revived UN could drive a path
to a new world order. The relative paucity
of appropriate troops on the ground led in
some cases to their being bypassed or even
disarmed and taken hostage, as happened in
Sierra Leone.
The military proficiency of many of the
troops was not the only questionable quality:
there were examples of UN troops’ dreadful
record of misconduct, exploitation, and tor-
ture. In Somalia there were examples of UN
troops torturing captives; the Italian govern-
ment instituted a commission to look into
the activities of Italian troops in Somalia and
blamed a failure of command and control.
Even in the apparent success story that was
the Cambodia operation, there were numer-
ous claims of sexual exploitation against UN
personnel and, in a number of operations, the
UN forces received an unwelcome reputation
for running brothels particularly involv-
ing children. These excesses were part of a
wider concern that UN peacekeepers were
not doing enough to fulfill their mandates
and particularly ignoring the need to protect
civilians in operations. In 2014, the UN Office
of Internal Oversight Services published a
report which was critical of the reputation
that UN forces had built up in the recent
past and suggested the reasons for the abuses.
These were that in many UN forces there were
dual chains of command, with the result that
contingents took orders from their national
governments and not from the force com-
mander. This was a weakness that was found
at times even in the ONUC force in 1961.
Additionally, the mandates were not always
consistently understood by UN members and
particularly by different troop contributors.
There was the further accusation that some
troop contingents had been risk-averse and
evidence that the resources necessary to
meet the mandate were not available, such
as when the use of force was needed: clearly
the case in Srebrenica. A further observation
concerned the claim that UN peacekeepers
must act when host states do not protect their
own civilians, something that advances the
Hammarskjöld principle that there must not
be intervention in the affairs of the host state.
Finally, the report noted that some troop
contributors were concerned about public
repercussions and criticisms of using force if
it later turned out to be in error (UN Office
of Internal Oversight Services Report 2014).
NON-UN LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM
The reputation that the UN had acquired as
a result of the events in Somalia, Rwanda,
and Bosnia did lead to some examples of

the international community eschewing the
body altogether, either because it was seen
to be unable to deliver the required mandate
or because the UN could not get political
support to sanction an operation. In Kosovo
in 1999 the UN could not act to protect the
Kosovans from Serb militias bent on another
wave of ethnic cleansing as Russia would have
vetoed any resolution authorizing a force: the
military action to bring the Serbs to the
negotiating table was orchestrated through
NATO. Later, the UN did approve an Interim
Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) to assist
in the rebuilding of the civilian government in
the state. In Libya, in 2011, the UN approved
intervention to protect civilians from the
Gaddafi regime but the military operation
was driven by NATO forces, whose action
led to regime change and the overthrow of
Gaddafi. When the same possibility arose in
regard to the Syrian civil war in the following
year, the Russian and Chinese governments,
having seen the outcome in Libya, vetoed
the proposed UN sanctioned action against
President Assad.
CONCLUSION
As of 2015, there were sixteen UN oper-
ations in the field comprising 106,000
uniformed personnel and 16,000 civilian
staff. The forces ranged from the large United
Nations Organization Stabilization Mission
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(MONUSCO) with 23,000 personnel down
to the longstanding United Nations Military
Observer Group in India and Pakistan
(UNMOGIP) with only 115 (UN Peace-
keeping Fact Sheet 2015). The record of
preventive diplomacy and UN peacekeeping
as its most notable manifestation is varied.
In the years since the creation of the small
UNTSO force in 1948, the scope of peace-
keeping has widened considerably, especially
since the end of the Cold War. In the days
PR EVEN TIVE DIPLOM ACY 11
when Hammarskjöld devised the concept, the
tasks were essentially straightforward if not
necessarily simple to implement. The Cold
War-era forces were engaged in disengage-
ment, in acting as barrier or as law-and-order
forces. Since 1989 they have encompassed a
more extensive set of functions: delivery of
humanitarian aid, dealing with ethnic conflict
and ethnic cleansing, as well as performing
administrative functions such as election
monitoring, and even acting as civil servants
in ensuring states build the necessary infras-
tructure to be able to operate in post-conflict
situations. Peacekeeping has changed to
take a more interventionist approach where
consent is not always required nor sought,
but the other criteria are still there. The
commitment to isolate the conflict remains,
as does the need for adequate and avail-
able donors of troops; a clear mandate with
political support of the major powers or
at least their non-opposition and sufficient
financial backing to ensure the operation can
survive.
SEE ALSO: Annan, Kofi (1938–); Arab–Israeli
Conflict; Bunche, Ralph (1903/4–71);
Collective Security; Congo Crisis of 1958–65;
Hammarskjöld, Dag (1905–61); Pearson, Lester
(1897–1972); Suez Crisis (1956); United
Nations
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SUGGESTED READINGS
Baehr, P., and L. Gordenker (2005) The United
Nations: Reality and Ideal. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Durch, W. J. (Ed.) (1994) The Evolution of UN
Peacekeeping: Case Studies and Comparative
Analysis. London: Macmillan.
Foote, W. (Ed.) (1962) The Servant of Peace: A
Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag
Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United
Nations 1953–1961. London: The Bodley Head.
Larus, J. (Ed.) (1965) From Collective Security to
Preventive Diplomacy. New York: John Wiley.
Lipsey, R. (2013) Hammarskjöld, A Life. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Roberts, A., and B. Kingsbury (Eds.) (1993) United
Nations, Divided World. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Shawcross, W. (2001) Deliver Us from Evil: War-
lords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Con-
flict. London: Bloomsbury.
Thomson, A., H. Postlewait, and K. Cain (2006)
Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures):
True Stories from a War Zone. London: Ebury
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United Nations (1997) The Blue Helmets: A Review
of United Nations Peace-Keeping. New York:
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Whittaker, D. J. (1995) United Nations in Action.
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