scholarly journals Issues regarding the role of the united nations as a main institution in resolving international disputes

2021 ◽  
pp. 58-63
Author(s):  
Virginia Zaharia ◽  
◽  
Ion Frunze ◽  

UN peacekeeping missions and special political missions are an essential tool for efforts to promote stability. Currently, the emphasis is on coherence and synergies, making effective and efficient use of the set of crisis response options. An unprecedented number of key UN assessments/reports call in unison for more efforts to prevent crises and seek political solutions. Preventive diplomacy and mediation efforts are intensified. The UN plays a key role in combating terrorism, including preventing violent extremism. The UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy includes a comprehensive set of measures that must be fully implemented, highlighting the increased involvement of the UN in maintaining a climate of stability and global order, so fragile and unstable in the context of new challenges and threats.

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Witri Elvianti ◽  
Meilisa Rusli

The main purpose is to analyze the role of Indonesian female police deployed as Individual Police Officers in the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Darfur from 2016 to 2018. This research was designed as a qualitative case study that triangulated data from previously published researches, institutional documents, and semi-structured qualitative interviews. Previous scholarly publications were used to observe gender deficit – which is the lack of female personnel in UN peacekeeping missions. Institutional documents, particularly ex-Indonesian female police reports, were analyzed to contribute to data enrichment in this research. Lastly, the authors conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with some ex-female police who have completed their deployment in UNAMID (2016-2018). Concerning the gender equality and counterinsurgency concepts, this research figured out that Indonesian female police could demonstrate their strategic role to provide skill-building activities, trust-building with refugees, and human rights advocacy. The numbers of Indonesian female police in this mission remained higher than other Southeast Asian contributing countries, but the Indonesian female police were also functional in line with the UN gendering peace and security agenda.


Author(s):  
Hajira Arif

The United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions are increasingly deployed in highly complex environments, working towards realizing global peace and security. The missions face numerous challenges ranging from socio-economic dimensions to even political hurdles. Among these challenges, the role of peacekeepers during health crises calls for in-depth exploration. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for contextualizing peacekeeping amid health crises is receiving utmost attention. This essay looks at this challenge, notably during the outbreaks of HIV/AIDS, Cholera, Ebola, and the ongoing pandemic (i.e., Covid-19). It briefly analyzes the impacts experienced and the role played by peacekeepers during the times of these outbreaks. The essay also explores the need for „transformation‟ of peacekeeping missions to counter the challenges posed by health crises. It highlights how globalization has caused the „globalized‟ nature of diseases, and therefore thereis an urgent need for exploration and adoption of policies concerning this issue. The essay also suggests some of these potential measures that may equip the peacekeeping missions to fulfil their mandated tasks effectively. It also points towards the gaps in the literature, whose exploration may contribute towards realizing health crises within the broader roles of the peacekeeping mandates.


Author(s):  
Bakare Najimdeen

Few years following its creation, the United Nations (UN) with the blessing of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) decided to establish the UN Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKO), as a multilateral mechanism geared at fulfilling the Chapter VII of the UN Charter which empowered the Security Council to enforce measurement to maintain or restore international peace and security. Since its creation, the multilateral mechanism has recorded several successes and failures to its credit. While it is essentially not like traditional diplomacy, peacekeeping operations have evolved over the years and have emerged as a new form of diplomacy. Besides, theoretically underscoring the differences between diplomacy and foreign policy, which often appear as conflated, the paper demonstrates how diplomacy is an expression of foreign policy. Meanwhile, putting in context the change and transformation in global politics, particularly global conflict, the paper argues that traditional diplomacy has ceased to be the preoccupation and exclusive business of the foreign ministry and career diplomats, it now involves foot soldiers who are not necessarily diplomats but act as diplomats in terms of peacekeeping, negotiating between warring parties, carrying their countries’ emblems and representing the latter in resolving global conflict, and increasingly becoming the representation of their countries’ foreign policy objective, hence peacekeeping military diplomacy. The paper uses decades of Pakistan’s peacekeeping missions as a reference point to establish how a nation’s peacekeeping efforts represent and qualifies as military diplomacy. It also presented the lessons and good practices Pakistan can sell to the rest of the world vis-à-vis peacekeeping and lastly how well Pakistan can consolidate its peacekeeping diplomacy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA HULTMAN ◽  
JACOB KATHMAN ◽  
MEGAN SHANNON

While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-384
Author(s):  
Ayodele Akenroye

The end of the Cold War witnessed the resurgence of ethnic conflicts in Africa, which necessitated the deployment of peacekeeping missions in many crisis contexts. The risk of HIV transmission increases in post-conflict environments where peacekeepers are at risk of contracting and spreading HIV/AIDS. In response, UN Security Council Resolution 1308 (2000) stressed the need for the UN to incorporate HIV/AIDS prevention awareness skills and advice in its training for peacekeepers. However, troops in peacekeeping missions remain under national command, thus limiting the UN prerogatives. This article discusses the risk of peacekeepers contracting or transmitting HIV/AIDS, as well as the role of peacekeeping missions in controlling the spread of the disease, and offers an account of the steps taken within UN peacekeeping missions and African regional peacekeeping initiatives to tackle the challenges of HIV/AIDS. While HIV/AIDS remains a scourge that could weaken peacekeeping in Africa, it seems that inertia has set in, making it even more difficult to tackle the complexity of this phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Kristine St-Pierre

The prevalence of hybrid peacekeeping missions on the international stage underscores the increasing flexibility with which the UN can meet the peacekeeping demand. This flexibility results from the growing number of actors that the UN can rely on, allowing in turn for more diverse responses to conflict. However, current confusion surrounding hybrid missions points to the need to further clarify the role of regional actors in hybrid missions and elaborate on the implication of these missions for UN peacekeeping. This paper thus discusses the importance of hybrid missions in peace operations by examining the current nature of European Union (EU) and Canadian contributions to peace operations, and by analysing the implications of these contributions for hybrid missions and UN peacekeeping in general.


Author(s):  
Maura Conway

This chapter explores the changes that have taken place in the role and functioning of the Internet in terrorism and counter-terrorism in the past decade. It traces the shift in focus from a preoccupation with the threat of so-called “cyberterrorism” in the period pre- and immediately post-9/11 to the contemporary emphasis on the role of the Internet in processes of violent radicalization. The cyberterrorism threat is explained as over-hyped herein, and the contemporary focus, by researchers and policymakers, on the potential of the Internet as a vehicle for violent radicalization viewed as more appropriate albeit not without its difficulties. This change in emphasis is at least partially predicated, it is argued, on the significant changes that occurred in the nature and functioning of the Internet in the last decade: the advent of Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social networking, user generated content, and digital video is treated as particularly salient in this regard. Description and analysis of both “negative” and “positive” Internet-based Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) and online counterterrorism measures and their evolutions are also supplied.


2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Boutton ◽  
Vito D’Orazio

While the evolving nature and proliferation of UN peacekeeping operations in the post-Cold War period is well documented, we know less about how personnel are recruited for these missions. Furthermore, recent developments have rendered existing supply-side explanations for troop contributions less convincing. The increasing demand for personnel, along with stagnant UN reimbursement rates and the rising costs of participation that began during the 1990s, mean that it is less attractive than ever for developing countries to offer their own troops to what have become increasingly ambitious operations. Yet, we see a large pool of developing countries continuing to do so. To address this puzzle, we argue that UN member states with strong preferences for establishing peacekeeping missions have begun using foreign aid as an inducement to help potential contributors overcome the collective action problem inherent in multilateral peacekeeping operations. We uncover strong empirical evidence that these ‘pivotal states’ strategically allocate foreign aid to persuade contributing states to boost their contributions, and also to ensure that these missions continue to be staffed and maintained as costs rise, particularly during the post-1999 period. We also find that states are responsive to these financial inducements: foreign aid increases both the likelihood of contributing personnel and the size of a state’s contribution. Theoretically, this article advances the scholarly understanding of international organizations and cooperation by illuminating an informal, extra-organizational strategy by which IOs can facilitate cooperation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-330
Author(s):  
Doris Asante ◽  
Laura J. Shepherd

Using discourse analysis, this research explores the representation of gender roles and identities in relation to counter-terrorism/countering violent extremism in 38 national action plans for the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and associated United Nations Security Council resolutions. Representations of gender in relation to counter-terrorism/countering violent extremism in the national action plans that we analyse fix women in subordinate and passive subject positions while presuming that men are inherently violent and extremist. These findings have implications not only for scholarship on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, but also for policy practice in this area.


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