THE STUDY OF PEACE OBSERVATION AND PEACEKEEPING: A FIRST CUT
The term ‘peacekeeping’ first became common around the time most analysts pinpoint to be the first peacekeeping operation - the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I) in 1956, deployed as a part of defusing the Suez Crisis.
Nevertheless, there were a number of precursors to peacekeeping operations, most notably what are referred to as peace observation missions; such operations generally involved a small number of unarmed personnel, who would report back to the authorizing organization on whichever matters (e.g. plebiscites, cease-fires) were contained in the mandate. Some scholarly attention was paid to such operations, but it was largely embedded in broader studies of the sponsoring organizations, such as the League of Nations. These (e.g. Barros, 1968) were largely historical accounts of the operations, with attention directed primarily to the authorization, budgets, and results of individual missions. The most comprehensive compilation of information on these missions is found in Wainhouse (1966), who reports on 40-plus operations over the period since the founding of the League of Nations through the early 1960s. Although he mixes different kinds of missions (early observer mission with enforcement actions in Korea and a peacekeeping operation in Cyprus), this study is definitive for detailing the bases of the disputes that preceded the operations, the politics surrounding the authorization of the missions, and ultimately a brief evaluation of each operation. Yet this classic and other works that are of the same era and before are primarily useful as secondary sources for researchers interested in particular operations.The first true peacekeeping studies would not appear until peacekeeping as a strategy became more common in the early 1960s, but even then, such works shared significant limitations with their precursors, even as they became more numerous.
Most notably, almost every one of the early works on peacekeeping was an idiographic, single case study. These include analyses of peacekeeping operations in the Middle East, Cyprus, and the Congo most notably (e.g. Frye, 1957; Rosner, 1963;Carnall, 1965;Lefever, 1967;Abi-Saab, 1978; House, 1978). Such works are excellent sources for understanding the backgrounds to the relevant crises as well as the UN authorization and implementation processes; for the latter, Security Council records and UN documents are the primary reference bases.The purposes of these works were not so much to understand peacekeeping as a general phenomenon, but to provide thick description and understanding of the case at hand. All of these studies contain an evaluation of the successes and failures associated with each mission, although few, if any, contain any specific criteria for those evaluations. Generalizations beyond the case at hand are sometimes offered, but it is not clear to what extent they may be applicable beyond that context. In accounting for operational dynamics or outcomes, such studies focused heavily on macro-level factors, particularly those related to the authorizing organization; for example, the clarity of the mandate and adequate resources were frequently cited as key concerns.
A related set of peacekeeping analyses in this same era comes from UN personnel, professional military officers, or organizations that train peacekeepers and conduct operations. These studies are aptly characterized by Paris (2000) as focused almost exclusively on policy issues, rather than on theoretical concerns. Most are dedicated to ‘lessons learned,' a term repeatedly used in the literature. The goal of these analyses is to derive guidelines and policy prescriptions from past peacekeeping operations so as to improve the performance of future operations. Not surprisingly, virtually all of these prescriptions are those at the micro or operational level. These are the elements most familiar to the authors as well as those most subject to policy adaptation.
Accordingly, these studies focus on doctrinal issues, problems in command and control of troops, coordination of multinational units, and tactical aspects of peacekeeping. Memoirs or reflections of former peacekeeping commanders (e.g. Bull, 1973; Allan, 1996) tend to be particularly narrow, indicative of the scope of their experiences, whereas those authored by UN personnel (e.g. Rikhye, 1984) or private organizations, such as the International Peace Academy (e.g. International Peace Academy, 1984), reflect a greater breadth of operational concerns and any guidelines tend to be drawn from a wider set of peacekeeping experiences.What can be gleaned from this practitioner literature? At one level, there are a number of practical guidelines on how to conduct a peacekeeping operation, and some significant convergence on those basic principles. Nevertheless, there are two notable limitations. First, if most of the precepts in these studies were adopted, they would likely affect the efficiency of the operation, rather than determine the ultimate success or failure of those missions. As noted below, those factors that seem to have the
greatest impact on peace operations are not necessarily the ones directly under the control of military commanders. Second, the shelf-life of the conclusions drawn in many of these studies is questionable; this goes beyond serious issues involving the validity of personal observations drawn by a single individual with dubious standards of evidence, considerably below those in scholarly analyses. The transportability of conclusions depends on the similarity of the mission examined and those in the future. This is a questionable assumption even across missions in the same historical era (e.g. the UN operation in Cyprus was quite different than the one in the Congo). Yet, peace operations have changed dramatically in size, mission, rules of engagement, and deployment context, such that it is doubtful that lessons drawn from early traditional operations are at all appropriate for contemporary operations.
Over the last several decades, peacekeeping research has changed significantly, with substantially greater attention given to conceptual, theoretical, and empirical issues.