“More and more we see that the separation between war and peace is not as clear-cut as it used to be,” says Jean-Marie Guéhenno in this podcast. Guéhenno, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, was head of United Nations peacekeeping operations from 2000 to 2008, the longest-serving person in that post. In this podcast, he talks about his toughest peacekeeping operation, his best results, and why a political process is so important to the success of peacekeeping operations, all themes in his latest book, “The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

Also in this episode, Governance Studies Fellow John Hudak explains what’s happening in Congress.

Show Notes:

• The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century
• United Nations peacekeeping fact sheet
• Crisisgroup.org

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

       

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations at the United Nations, reflects on what peacekeeping means to the UN today, and what he expects for the future, as it turns 70 years old. Read more in his memoir published by Brookings Press, “The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century.”

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Inter Press Service News Agency on May 21, 2015.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, there was hope the U.N. Security Council would be able to take decisive action to create a more peaceful world. Early blue helmet successes in Cambodia, Namibia, Mozambique, and El Salvador seemed to vindicate that assessment.

This optimism was tripped up by the tragedies that followed in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Rwanda. U.N. peacekeepers were bystanders to horrible atrocities. Peacekeeping shrank rapidly. 

By the end of the 1990s, common wisdom was that such missions were a thing of the past, and that from now on regional organisations would take charge. 

Pundits were proven wrong, and in 1999 U.N. missions were deployed in quick succession to Kosovo, East Timor, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

In terms of legitimacy and force-generation, they showed that the U.N. still had comparative advantages over all other organisations. But it was not at all clear if this was enough to allow the peacekeepers to succeed. 

This was the turning point when I assumed the post of U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations in 2000. Over the next eight years, I learned that reviving and rebuilding U.N. peacekeeping was much more than a managerial and military challenge. 

Today’s peacekeeping is a political enterprise whose success rests on the support of major powers, a viable political process between the parties to a conflict, and a wise and limited use of force. 

This all came into vivid focus around the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Security Council was divided, the U.N. was besieged by scandals and the U.S. administration was at best indifferent to the United Nations. Yet the renewed expansion of peacekeeping continued unabated. To this day, it has not been reversed, and some 107,000 peacekeepers are presently deployed in 16 missions. 

In 2000, a panel of experts led by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, had made recommendations to avoid a repetition of the disasters of the 90’s: strengthen and professionalise peacekeeping, and don’t deploy peacekeepers where there is no peace to keep. Fifteen years later, U.N. peacekeeping is more professionally managed, and yet, it is still in a very precarious situation. 

The demands on peacekeeping have grown too fast, the operational role of the U.N. is clearly ahead of its capabilities, and most peacekeeping missions are deployed in places where war has only subsided, not ended. The U.N. has reached a new turning point. Should the world double down on its investment, or cut its exposure before significant losses appear? 

The reality is that the U.N. cannot just cut and run: in South Sudan, more than 100,000 people are sheltered in U.N. compounds, and their lives would be at risk if the U.N. were to pull out. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the state remains very weak, and there is little confidence that the country would not slide back into chaos if the mission was abruptly withdrawn. What is to be done? 

First, acknowledge that force indeed matters, and can provide indispensible political leverage. That means a further strengthening of the operational capacities of the U.N. An 8.47-billion-dollar budget looks enormous, but the fact is that the world is doing peacekeeping on the cheap. This apparently high figure is but a fraction of what the U.S. and NATO were spending in Afghanistan. 

But subcontracting U.N. operations to organisations like NATO is not a viable strategy for the future: it is very costly, and politically discredited by the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. Peacekeeping is all in the art of implementation, and when the U.N. is left outside the military chain of command, it quickly loses control over the political strategy. 

There is no alternative to a direct U.N. operational role if peacekeeping is to retain a reputation of impartiality, but specific capacities are needed to be effective. 

Western militaries, which have largely shunned U.N. peacekeeping since the end of the nineties, need to re-engage with U.N. peacekeeping in a significant way, either as blue helmets, or through ad hoc arrangements that will allow for the provision of quick reaction forces and dedicated assets. 

Second, return to politics. It is unrealistic to expect a U.N. force – or any force for that matter, as the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences show – to impose a peace. An exclusive focus on military operations to protect civilians, as in Congo, can become a diversion. 

An extensive definition of terrorism, which enrolls the U.N. in the so-called “war on terror”, is shrinking the political space in which it should operate. The most important contribution that the U.N. can make to peacemaking is not fighting; it is to support inclusive political processes. 

The rhetoric of peacekeeping has been ahead of its reality, and we should not oversell it. It is an enormous responsibility to intervene in the life of others, and the path between irresponsible indifference and reckless activism is narrow. 

To gain domestic support for foreign interventions, peace operations have been presented as opportunities to reengineer countries. As outsiders, we should be more modest. 

A genuine international community, based on shared values, should remain our goal, but it will not exist unless we can shore up the imperfect states that are its building blocks. Many are crumbling faster than new structures can be built, but the international order is still based on their primary responsibility. 

For an organisation of states like the U.N., this is an existential challenge. For the people who are the unwitting victims of collapsed states, this is a matter of life and death. Even if the risk of failure is always there, abstention should never be the option of choice.

Learn more about “The Fog of Peace“

       

On Friday, May 15, the Project on International Order and Strategy hosted a discussion about the current state of geopolitics and international peacekeeping. The conversation, a part of the Foreign Policy program’s Order from Chaos project, featured Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former United Nations’ undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations. Guéhenno discussed his new memoir “The Fog of Peace: How International Engagement Can Stop the Conflicts of the 21st Century” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). In his role as the U.N.’s lead peacekeeper, Guéhenno oversaw the largest expansion of peacekeeping missions in U.N. history. His insights into peacekeeping, international diplomacy, and great-power relations illuminated some of the challenges we face today, including the crisis in Syria, Russian aggression in Ukraine, and the accommodation of rising powers in a new world order.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #FogofPeace

Photo by Paul Morigi

       

No small number of books laud and record the heroic actions of those at war. But the peacekeepers? Who tells their stories?

At the beginning of the 1990s, the world exited the cold war and entered an era of great promise for peace and security.Guided by an invigorated United Nations, the international community set out to end conflicts that had flared into vicious civil wars and to unconditionally champion human rights and hold abusers responsible. The stage seemed set for greatness. Today that optimism is shattered. The failure of international engagement in conflict areas ranging from Afghanistan to Congo and Lebanon to Kosovo has turned believers into skeptics.

The Fog of Peace is a firsthand reckoning by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the man who led UN peacekeeping efforts for eight years and has been at the center of all the major crises since the beginning of the 21st century. Guéhenno grapples with the distance between the international community’s promise to protect and the reality that our noble aspirations may be beyond our grasp.

The author illustrates with personal, concrete examples—from the crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Sudan, Darfur, Kosovo, Ivory Coast, Georgia, Lebanon, Haiti, and Syria—the need to accept imperfect outcomes and compromises. He argues that nothing is more damaging than excessive ambition followed by precipitous retrenchment. We can indeed save many thousands of lives, but we need to calibrate our ambitions and stay the course.

Read a review of The Fog of Peace in the New York Review of Books.

Listen to Jean-Marie Guéhenno discuss his book on the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast.

On May 11, 2015, Jean-Marie Guéhenno discussed The Fog of Peace on MSNBC’s The Cycle.

Advance Praise for The Fog of Peace

As can be expected from an author of Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s experience and prescience, The Fog of Peace captures well the moral conundrums and diplomatic obstacles that the United Nations and its Department of Peacekeeping face in the post–cold war era.  At a time when the international framework established to curtail conflict and human suffering is under increasing pressure, his book provides valuable insights and timely advice on how to strengthen our global security architecture.
—Kofi A. Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, 1997-2006

In Afghanistan and Sudan I shared with Jean-Marie Guéhenno the accomplishments and the frustrations he portrays in The Fog of Peace. This honest and probing account captures the realities of peacekeeping in the twenty-first century. It is a first-hand recounting of some of the most difficult work the United Nations has undertaken.
—Lakhdar Brahimi, former UN Special Envoy to Syria and special representative to Haiti, South Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq

Jean-Marie Guéhenno is a scholar-diplomat of immense integrity, intelligence, judgment, and charm. He won international respect during his eight-year stewardship of UN peacekeeping—no mean feat given those years coincided precisely with George W. Bush’s presidency.  What shines through this thoughtful and detailed account is the admirable way in which Guéhenno maintained his own moral compass amid a swirl of competing pragmatic and political imperatives, never succumbing to the weary cynicism that so often afflicts international public servants. We could have no better guide to navigating the “fog of peace.”
—Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister of Australia, 1988–96, and President of the International Crisis Group, 2000–09

       

On September 29, the Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted the first public remarks in Washington by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the new president of the International Crisis Group and former undersecretary-general of the United Nations for peacekeeping. Guéhenno discussed the conditions in fragile states that provide fertile ground for conflict and for risks of international terrorism.

A discussion followed with World Bank Special Adviser Sarah Cliffe, a former assistant secretary-general of the U.N. and an expert on fragile states and conflict zones. Bruce Jones, deputy director of Foreign Policy at Brookings and director of the IOS project, moderated.

       

The Arab revolutions are beginning to destroy the cliché of an Arab world incapable of democratic transformation. But another caricature is replacing it: according to the new narrative, the crowds in Cairo, Benghazi or Damascus, mobilized by Facebook and Twitter, are the latest illustration of the spread of Western democratic ideals; and while the “rise of the rest” may challenge the economic dominance of Western nations, the West will continue to define the political agenda of the world.

In that optimistic scenario, 1989 and 2011 are two chapters of the same story, which connect in a self-congratulatory way the political appeal of democracy and the transformative power of entrepreneurship and new technologies.

In reality, the movements that are shaking the Arab world are profoundly different from the revolutions that ended the Soviet empire. The Arab spring is about justice and equity as much as it is about democracy, because societies in which millions of young men and women have no jobs — and millions live with less than two dollars a day — crave justice as much as democracy.

As I heard one experienced Arab diplomat say, today’s revolutions are against “profiteers” as much as they are against dictators. The movements are also profoundly suspicious of foreign interference, and Western nations, which for many years have had a cozy relationship with dictators and profiteers, will be utilized, but they are unlikely to be trusted or to serve as models as they were in 1989.

The implications for our Middle Eastern policies are wide-ranging. The good news is that the focus on social justice and practical issues of development and redistribution has the potential to move the public debate further away from dreams of a return to the mythical past of the caliphate promoted by radical Islamists.

In the words of the French scholar Olivier Roy, the Arab revolutions may well become the first “post-Islamist” revolutions. But that will happen only if we in the West accept that Muslim values — which have, like Christian or Jewish values, many interpretations — can become part of the political debate, without being at the center of it.

The more we try to polarize secular forces against Islamic movements, the more unlikely it is that secular values will win. We must abandon the illusion that the defining issue in the region is a battle between moderates and hardliners. Europe and the United States could send a strong signal by ending their policy of “à la carte democracy” and start talking to movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah — which does not mean that we in any way agree with their views.

Bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and related organizations into mainstream politics rather than trying to isolate them should be a priority. This is all the more necessary as the aspiration to justice will lead to demands that the present élites — and in particular security establishments — relinquish their grip not only on power, but also on the economy, and that demand may eventually trigger a second wave of upheavals.

A more democratic Arab world is also likely to be less tolerant of the benign neglect with which the international community has often addressed the Israel-Palestine and the Israeli-Arab conflicts since 2000. That should not be seen as a threat by countries that support a resolution of the conflict in accordance with international law and a two-states solution, but it will require a “reset” of the policies of the last 10 years.

Lastly, as we discover that 2011 is not 1989, and that we are no more the trusted reference, we will have to navigate in unchartered waters: our engagement in Libya will probably have less moral clarity at the end than it has had at the start. Political processes will inevitably be messy, and we will be tempted, especially in oil-rich nations, to pick winners and manipulate outcomes.

That would be disastrous for our long-term standing: in a region whose future has repeatedly been decided by foreigners since the end of the Ottoman empire, outside powers will have to demonstrate that this time they are genuinely willing to support home-grown political processes.

The West has to accept that it is not the central player anymore. But it need not be an indifferent and passive spectator. Finding the balance between engagement and restraint will be the policy challenge of this new phase.

In Libya and possibly in some other situations, the active involvement of the United Nations to find a political solution may help us find that new balance by providing the impartiality and sufficient distance from great powers politics without which no political process will have a sustainable outcome.

       

The panelists addressed the Obama administration’s performance in the UN and G20, Ban Ki-moon’s leadership of the UN, the challenge of Iran to the future of international cooperation, and the role of economic interdependence in major power diplomacy.

Watch the event video and read the event transcript on the Center on International Cooperation’s web site.

       

Panelists included contributors Bruce Jones, Brookings senior fellow and MGI director, and Stewart Patrick, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow. Brookings Senior Fellow Jean-Marie Guehenno, former U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, and Richard Gowan, associate director for policy at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University, also joined the panel.

Martin Indyk, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. After the program, panelists took audience questions.

       

On February 17, Brookings hosted a discussion on the future of Haiti, focusing on critical issues of governance and independence. Panelists included Senior Fellows Mauricio Cardenas, director of the Latin America Initiative; Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement; and Jean-Marie Guehenno, former U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Senior Fellow Kevin Casas-Zamora, a former vice president of Costa Rica, moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.