Peacekeepers under the glass

When it comes to keeping the peace, many Penn students' concerns reach no further than the borders of West Philadelphia. Yet the world was at issue when Princeton Professor Michael Doyle addressed an audience of about 30 students and professors on "The United Nations in War and Peace" last Thursday in a packed Anspach Lounge at Stiteler Hall. In a classroom-like lecture -- complete with handouts and transparencies -- Doyle appraised the abject failure of the UN's attempts at fighting wars and its qualified successes in underwriting peace. Doyle himself recounted how he had been dispatched by the UN to many conflict-zones, notably to Cambodia in 1993 as an election observer. "I've had gunfire go over my head but they were never shooting at me," he said. Drawing on the post-Cold War conflicts of the 1990s, Doyle described the "fundamental infirmities" the UN faced when it was "in effect engaged in making war." When there was no peace to keep, like in the Bosnian, Somalian and Rwandan conflicts, the UN's activities at all levels were hamstrung by the ineffective coordination and lack of political will endemic to the multinational organization, Doyle said. Doyle singled out the Security Council for criticism as a "political institution that too often looks at rhetorical solutions to CNN's problems," noting the "fantastic gap" between its resolutions, the means provided to fulfill them and the amount of opposition. According to Doyle, this disconnect led to such debacles as the slaughter of 7,000 civilians at the UN-declared "safe haven" of Srebenica during the Bosnian War, when a hopelessly outnumbered and underarmed battalion of Dutch peacekeepers was powerless to protect the refugees. Yet Doyle noted how the UN's performance was not uniformly dismal. High-profile failures in war-zones obscured the UN's promising successes in securing peace when parties to a conflict were finally ready to negotiate. The personal intervention of the secretary general, the peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities of the UN, and even occasional "discrete enforcement and quiet bribes" to keep parties in line, have led to encouraging outcomes in former battle zones like Cambodia, El Salvador and even the former Yugoslavia. Reacting to the talk, hosted by Penn's Christopher H. Brown Center for International Politics, College junior Maria Palomar noted how Doyle helped explain the "difficulties... [moving] from mandate-formulation to implementation."

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