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Abstract
United Nations peacekeeping is implemented by a complex bureaucratic organization, which itself can be a source of dysfunction and failure. This article empirically explores the strategies officials within the United Nations Mission in Liberia and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations apply in order to continue to do their job as effectively as possible despite the limitations of the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy. The findings demonstrate that internal acknowledgement and relevance of work are core strategic goals of UN officials. However, as the actual practices of achieving these objectives vary at different levels and locations of the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy, these strategies contribute to a significant diversity of local and decentralized decision-making frameworks rather than a rationalized effective bureaucracy.
Notes
1. On the development of UN peacekeeping since the end of the cold war see, e.g., James Dobbins, Seth G. Jones, Keith Crane, Andrew Rathmell, Brett Steele, Richard Teltschik, and Anga Timilsina, The UN's Role in Nation-Building: From Congo to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005; Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006; William J. Durch (ed.), The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping: Case Studies and Comparative Analysis, New York: St Martin's Press, 1993; William J. Durch, Victoria K. Holt, Caroline R. Earle, and Moira K. Shanahan, The Brahimi Report and the Future of UN Peace Operations, Washington, DC, 2003; Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Ramesh Thakur and Carlyle A. Thayer (eds), A Crisis of Expectations: UN Peacekeeping in the 1990s, Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995; Jean E. Krasno, ‘To End the Scourge of War: The Story of UN Peacekeeping’, in Jean E. Krasno (ed.), The United Nations: Confronting the Challenges of a Global Society, Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 2004, pp.225–68.
2. Joel Gwyn Winckler, ‘Managing the Complexities of Intervention: United Nations Peace Operations as Organisational Action’, Peace, Conflict and Development, No.18, 2011, pp.83–103.
3. Number of UN peacekeeping missions as of April 2014; see United Nations, ‘United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Fact Sheet, 10 April 2014’, 2014 (at: www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/bnote314.pdf).
4. See, e.g., Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004; Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002; Susanna P. Campbell, ‘(Dis)integration, Incoherence and Complexity in UN Post-Conflict Interventions’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.15, No.4, 2008, pp.556–69; Séverine Autesserre, ‘Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International Intervention’, International Organization, Vol.63, No.2, 2009, pp.249–80.
5. The Human Security Report Project, for example, argues that despite its flaws, international interventions such as UN peacekeeping have ‘been remarkably effective in driving down the number and deadliness of armed conflicts’, see Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence, Evidence, Explanation, and Contestation, Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013, p.3. On the continued contribution of UN peacekeeping see also Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents’ Choices after Civil War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
6. Barnett and Finnemore (see n.4 above), p.18.
7. See, e.g., Touko Piiparinen, ‘The Rise and Fall of Bureaucratic Rationalization: Exploring the Possibilities and Limitations of the UN Secretariat in Conflict Prevention’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.14, No.4, 2008, pp.697–724.
8. Of course this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy. Ambiguity is a common phenomenon in complex organizations and bureaucracies, see, e.g., James G. March and Johan P. Olsen (eds), Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, Bergen et al.: Universitetsforlaget, 1976.
9. Michael Lipson, ‘Performance under Ambiguity: International Organization Performance in UN Peacekeeping’, Review of International Organizations, Vol.5, No.3, 2010, pp.249–84.
10. Julian Junk, ‘Function Follows Form: The Organizational Design of Peace Operations’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol.6, No.3, 2012, pp.299–324.
11. John Karlsrud, ‘Special Representatives of the Secretary-General as Norm Arbitrators? Understanding Bottom–Up Authority in UN Peacekeeping’, Global Governance, Vol.19, No.4, 2013, pp.525–44.
12. Michael Lipson, ‘Peacekeeping: Organized Hypocrisy?’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.13, No.1, 2007, pp.5–34; Wolfgang Seibel, ‘Moderne Protektorate als Ersatzstaat: UN-Friedensoperationen und Dilemmata internationaler Übergangsverwaltungen’, in Gunnar Folke Schuppert and Michael Zürn (eds), Governance in einer sich wandelnden Welt, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008, pp.499–530.
13. Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Autesserre (see n.4 above).
14. Barnett (see n.4 above); see also Barnett and Finnemore (n.4 above), pp.121–55.
15. The analysis in this article concentrates exclusively on the substantive side of the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy, which includes a multiple range of military and political issues, but excludes administrative and support matters handled by the administrative side of UNMIL and the Department of Field Support.
16. On value and selection of ‘typical cases’ see, e.g., John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.91.
17. Research trips to Liberia and New York were supported by the State of Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service.
18. Most of the interview partners are members of the middle management (formal UN P3–P5 level), whereas some interviews also were conducted with section heads and directors. Next to UN officials at DPKO and UNMIL, around 15 interviews were undertaken with middle management staff of close partners of the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy such as UN agencies in Liberia and other UN headquarters departments. The data accessed through interviews are supplemented with several background discussions with former UN officials in Germany and participant observation especially at UNMIL field offices. All interviews were made under the condition of anonymity and are referenced with ‘UN official’. In order to prevent retracing of sources, I also refer to interview partners as gender-neutral.
19. The term ‘senior manager’ or ‘senior management’ is used in this article to refer to formal high-level management positions, including directors, Assistant Secretary-Generals, Under-Secretary-Generals, Deputy Special Representatives and Special Representatives of the Secretary-General as well as the Secretary-General himself.
20. See, e.g., United Nations, Handbook on United Nations Multidimensional Peacekeeping Operations, New York: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit, 2003; United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines, New York: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations/Department of Field Support, 2008; Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, Understanding Peacekeeping, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010.
21. Joel Gwyn Winckler, ‘Protectionism within the Organization of United Nations Peacekeeping: Assessing the Disconnection between Headquarter and Mission Perspectives’, Journal of International Organization Studies, Vol.5, No.1, 2014, pp.71–84.
22. United Nations, ‘Resolution 1509 (2003) Adopted by the Security Council at its 4830th Meeting, on 19 September 2003’, UN doc., S/RES/1509 (2003), 19 Sep. 2003.
23. The HOFO reports to the SRSG through the Recovery and Governance Pillar.
24. Compare David Beetham, Bureaucracy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp.11–13.
25. Winckler (see n.2 above).
26. Compare Georg Elwert, ‘Selbstveränderung als Programm und Tradition als Resource’, in Beate Hentschel, Michael Müller and Hermann Sottong (eds), Verborgene Potentiale: Was Unternehmen wirklich wert sind, München and Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2000, pp.67–94.
27. On visibility in complex organizations see also James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory, New York et al.: McGraw-Hill, 1967, p.107.
28. C.J. Friedrich, ‘Authority, Reason and Discretion’, in C.J. Friedrich (ed.), Authority, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958; see also Niklas Luhmann, Organisation und Entscheidung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006, p.203.
29. For a summary of the different sources of authority see, e.g., Karlsrud (n.11 above), pp.534–7; Barnett and Finnemore (n.4 above), pp.20–9.
30. On the importance of knowledge and the development of knowledge management systems within the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy see Thorsten Benner, Stephan Mergenthaler and Philipp Rotmann, The New World of UN Peace Operations: Learning to Build Peace?, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
31. Compare Michael Barnett and Christoph Zuercher, ‘The Peacebuilder's Contract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood’, in Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (eds), The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations, Abington and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp.23–52; Christoph Zürcher, Carrie Manning, Kristie Evenson, Rachel Hayman, Sarah Riese, and Nora Roehner, Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization after War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
32. Interview with UNMIL official, Liberia, 2011.
33. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
34. The assessments of the UNMIL field structure are based on interviews with UNMIL officials in Monrovia and interviews and observations in five field offices around the country. See also Frederik Trettin and Joel Gwyn Winckler, ‘Die Friedenmissionen der Vereinten Nationen: Komplexe Organisationen mit schwierigen internen Herausforderungen’, Vereinte Nationen, Vol.60, No.3, 2012, pp.115–200.
35. See, e.g., interview with UNMIL official, Monrovia, 2010 (interview A); interview with two UNMIL officials, Monrovia, 2010; interview with UNMIL official, 2011 (interview B).
36. See, e.g., interview A (n.35 above) and interview with UNMIL official, Monrovia, 2011.
37. The problems resulting from ‘stove-piping’ also led to a reform of the UNMIL field structure in 2008 (see below).
38. Interview B (see n.35 above).
39. Ibid.
40. Interviews with UNMIL officials, Monrovia, 2011 and UN officials in DPKO, New York, 2010.
41. Interview B (see n.35 above), and interview with UNMIL official, Monrovia, 2011. At the time of research, there was considerable pressure from DPKO towards UNMIL to follow policies and implement JOC and JMAC both as equal functional structures. However, with practices working well the mission seemed precautious in imposing any fundamental changes to JMAC's scope of action.
42. See interview (n.33 above) and interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
43. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
44. Interviews with several UN officials in DPKO, New York, 2010.
45. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
46. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
47. Winckler (see n.21 above).
48. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
49. Ibid., two interviews with UN officials in DPKO, New York, 2010.
50. The following paragraph is based on an interview with a UNMIL official, Monrovia, 2011.
51. In other interviews, Løj has been applauded for her efforts to streamline communication and close coordination gaps in the mission, see interview A (n.35 above).
52. United Nations in Liberia, ‘Working Group on UN Field Structure and Support. Addendum: Final Recommendations’, United Nations in Liberia, Monrovia, 2008.
53. The HOFO is also obliged to compile a weekly joint report, which is regarded as the most viable report from the field office.
54. Interview A (see n.35 above); interview (see n.36 above); and interview with UNMIL official in Liberia, 2011.
55. Interview with UNMIL official, Liberia, 2011.
56. Interview (see n.36 above).
57. See also interviews with three other HOFOs: interview (n.54 above), and two interviews with UNMIL officials, Liberia, 2011.
58. See also background discussion with former DPKO official, Germany, 2010: s/he recalled that without connections, one would just be working isolated from everything important.
59. Interview with UNMIL official, Monrovia, 2011: this group of people can also incorporate officials from UN agencies and other international organizations.
60. Interview (see n.45 above) and interview with UN official at DPKO, New York, 2010.
61. Interview (see n.33 above).
62. Interview with UN official, New York, 2010.
63. There are of course exceptions. A DPKO official for example referred to a weekly director's-level meeting as a way for the Chief of Staff to make sure that directors ‘roll up their sleeves and do their work, make decisions and coordinate their efforts’. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
64. For more details see Winckler (n.21 above).
65. Interview with UN official in DPKO, New York, 2010.
66. See also Benner et al. (n.30 above).
67. Interview (see n.41 above).
68. Interview (see n.60 above).
69. Interview (see n.62 above).
70. See, e.g., Autesserre (n.13 above); Campbell (n.4 above).
Additional information
Joel Gwyn Winckler is a researcher based at the Research Unit Peace and Conflict Studies of the Free University of Berlin. He is a member of the research network Cultures of Intervention and leads the research project United Nations Peace Operations as Organizational Action. Joel Winckler has carried out extensive field research in Liberia and New York, in 2010/11. He also worked for the United Nations Mission in South Sudan in 2012, establishing a State Operations Centre at the field office in Bentiu, Unity State.