Comment: UN’s peacekeeping role in domestic conflicts. (1994, 20 Marks)
Peacekeeping, which Dag Hammarskjöld called “Chapter Six and a Half”, was invented for wars between states: lightly armed contingents watching a ceasefire line, as UNEF I did at Suez in 1956. Today it is deployed almost entirely inside states. Every element of the classical model (consent, impartiality, minimum force) assumes conditions that civil wars rarely supply. The record shows that peacekeeping can implement a domestic peace but cannot impose one.
How the role expanded
- An early precedent in the Congo. ONUC (1960–64) was drawn into a secessionist war, and an Indian brigade fought in the operations that ended Katanga’s secession.
- Post-Cold War multidimensional missions ran whole transitions: disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration, elections, police reform, refugee return and human-rights monitoring.
- Transitional administration. UNTAET governed Timor-Leste outright (1999–2002), and UNMIK still operates in Kosovo.
- Protection of civilians, first mandated in Sierra Leone by resolution 1270 (1999), is now the task by which local people judge missions.
- Stabilisation. The Congo’s Force Intervention Brigade (resolution 2098, 2013) conducted offensive operations against armed groups.
Where it has worked
Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Timor-Leste saw wars ended, combatants demobilised and elections accepted, with no relapse. Virginia Page Fortna‘s study Does Peacekeeping Work? (2008) found that peacekeepers substantially reduce the risk of renewed civil war. They work by monitoring, reassuring parties caught in a security dilemma and raising the cost of defection.
Why domestic conflict strains the model
- Consent from whom? The government is often a party, sometimes the main abuser, and in a collapsed state no authority can consent at all.
- Impartiality against atrocity. Rwanda (800,000 killed in 1994 while UNAMIR was cut back) and Srebrenica (1995) showed that neutrality between perpetrator and victim is complicity. The Brahimi Report (2000) redefined impartiality as adherence to the Charter, not equal treatment of the parties.
- No peace to keep. Missions now deploy before any settlement, against militias and jihadist networks that sign nothing. MINUSMA in Mali lost over 300 personnel, the deadliest mission in UN history.
- Consent withdrawn as a weapon. Mali expelled MINUSMA in 2023 (resolution 2690), and the Congo forced an accelerated MONUSCO drawdown after protests.
- The sovereignty objection. Article 2(7) and Global South suspicion, sharpened after Libya, cast robust mandates as intervention by other means. India, which has sent nearly 300,000 personnel to more than 50 missions and gave UNPROFOR its first force commander, Satish Nambiar (1992–93), insists on consent, impartiality and consultation of troop contributors under Article 44.
- Conduct. Sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, and the cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2010 linked to a peacekeeping base, damage legitimacy among the people missions exist to protect.
The position in 2026
Eleven operations remain on a 2026–27 budget of about US$5.1 billion, after a cash crisis sent a quarter of uniformed personnel home in 2025. UNIFIL, where India keeps a battalion, received its final mandate (resolution 2790) and leaves Lebanon through 2027. Haiti’s new force is a non-UN Gang Suppression Force, and resolution 2719 (2023) opens UN assessed funding to African Union operations. The 2026 review of peace operations (A/80/798) calls for focused mandates matched to resources. India, third-largest contributor in February 2026 with 4,278 personnel, has lost 184 peacekeepers in all.
Conclusion
What separates the successes from the failures is not a mission’s size or robustness but whether a political settlement existed that the parties wanted implemented, which is the 2015 HIPPO panel’s primacy of politics. Peacekeeping in domestic conflicts is indispensable where a war is already ending and dangerous where it is asked to end a war by its mere presence. The Council’s habit of writing mandates without matching means remains the root of its failures.