A difficult decade ahead for the UN
https://arab.news/z35zy
For nearly eight decades, the UN has continued to play a pivotal role in nurturing global cooperation, institutionalizing international norms and propping up a fairly rule-based order. However, the next decade — rife with crises and their confluences — promises to be the organization’s greatest test yet. At stake are decades of progress in maintaining relative global peace, and the UN’s pervasive role in solving most of the world’s intractable economic, humanitarian, social and cultural woes should member states eschew shared priorities in favor of a continuing and escalating pursuit of corrosive self-interest.
Unfortunately, despite clearly defined mandates and scopes for intervening in some of the world’s worst hotspots, the jury is still out on whether the current iteration of the UN is capable of fulfilling its role as a force for global good, especially in the poorer, politically and culturally marginalized parts of the Third World. After all, a number of well-intentioned interventions over the past few decades have consistently failed to deliver favorable outcomes, resulting in the prolonged presence of relatively ineffectual peacekeeping missions, crippled by complex dynamics on the ground and a perennially divided Security Council.
From the sprawling deserts of Libya and the Sahel to the ever-green jungle in the Democratic Republic of Congo stretching east to the Horn of Africa, a number of UN missions are actively engaged in a variety of stabilization activities such as conflict resolution and chaperoning post-war transitions. However, unlike in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, El Salvador and Cambodia, the jarring political and cultural realities on the ground in South Sudan and Mali, for instance, have left UN peacekeepers mired in open-ended missions barely able to sustain fragile status quos.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, in particular, has been a major headache since the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC — founded some 23 years ago — not only failed to neutralize armed nonstate actors but whose proximity and cordial ties with the Congolese army accused of committing human rights atrocities has marred its reputation as a neutral arbiter.
In Libya, a familiar phenomenon has also overtaken the UN’s Special Mission that has changed leaders seven times in its 10-year history. To date, the UN is still unable to rectify the lofty demands of a divided and often disinterested Security Council with the shifting priorities and constantly evolving realities in a Libya ravaged by conflict and a divided government more interested in waging war with itself than catering to the needs of a beleaguered, war-weary population.
Within the Security Council itself, the path to Libya’s stabilization remains obscure, veiled by the struggles in weighing the vested interests of the Permanent Five in the country’s malaise against the will of ordinary Libyans to get out of it. Russia appears comfortable with the status quo, especially since Libya’s porous borders make it easier for the Wagner Group to sustain its operations in the Sahel and in Central Africa.
France, on the other hand, dithers between perfunctory support for the internationally recognized Government of National Unity based in Tripoli and covert acquiescence to the eastern-based armed groups under the warlord Khalifa Haftar. After all, their activities — malign or otherwise — help to stem the flow of arms, combatants and contraband in and out of the Sahel that benefit militant extremists there.
Washington and London remain committed to the UN-led intervention but have yet to demonstrate unequivocal support for its activities. The UN mission would be very effective if the two countries helped to police the arms embargo, sanctioned violators and malign actors, corralled international support for national elections, and even incentivized the constitution-drafting process.
What the organization urgently needs is a deep consideration about how the UN (and its various offshoots) fit into today's geopolitics.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
Unfortunately, the UN presence in Libya is now reduced to a headless, limbless entity tasked with supervising the democratization of a country that has not had a legitimate government for half a century. What remains is a strange body that is limited to only granting legitimacy to competing aims among the ruling elites since it lacks the initiative, direction and ability to fully cater to its mandates.
Similar to other peacekeeping, conflict-resolution and humanitarian quagmires around the world, the UN cannot do less or abandon missions since its presence, effective or not, serves a purpose for some of its member-states and the Security Council. Alternatively, it cannot do more either because in most cases that would mean going beyond the mission scope, i.e., in Libya, Mali or the DRC, from stabilization to regime change which would be a can of worms that the organization would be wise to avoid at all costs.
Unsurprisingly, a less-than-flattering record of woeful errors and failures continue to fuel doubts about the organization’s efficacy, sparking legitimate concerns that without serious reform, the UN is quickly becoming an antiquated relic, ill-suited to its supposed role in a vastly changed and changing world. Today, an irrepressible pandemic, the worsening effects of climate change, intensifying great power competition, economic depression and a rapid breakdown in international cooperation are already creating new challenges or complicating the resolution of old ones.
It is becoming increasingly evident that today’s iteration of the UN no longer possesses levels of coherence and sufficient bureaucratic independence to set the agenda, corral international agreement, and pursue clearly defined objectives to ensure the long-term peace and stability of its member-states. The organization remains crippled by a growing list of failures ranging from a botched clean-up of a NATO-led intervention in Libya, among other failed stabilization efforts, a global refugee crisis likely to intensify as the planet heats up, and the still palpable ramifications of a disastrous invasion of Iraq nearly two decades ago.
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the UN is faced with a tide of challenges threatening to irreparably widen fissures in international relations, dooming the beleaguered organization to the same fate as its predecessor, the League of Nations. Some of its interventions have met with great success, which provides credible blueprints for what the global community can do to confront shared threats, and what pitfalls to avoid.
Extensive multi-decade studies of UN interventions have outlined at least nine key factors that exponentially improve the probability of success for almost any intervention. A few of these include a sincerity and willingness to cooperate by all parties, a sense of security, and a demonstrable awareness of the root causes of any crises in sufficient breadth and depth. Furthermore, no intervention can survive without significant international backing and coordination as well as competent leadership that prioritizes local ownership.
These are already well-known factors, which make it appalling that the UN is still lumbering along, consistently failing to heed very important lessons. Clearly, what the organization urgently needs is a deep consideration about how the UN (and its various offshoots) fit into today’s geopolitics, what role it should play and how it can effectively navigate a vastly different world from the post-1945 one that gave birth to it.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell
