South East Asian powers and contributions to peacekeeping operations: UN-ASEAN partnering for peace?

ABSTRACT

Regions are becoming increasingly central to both the implementation and claims to legitimacy of UN peacekeeping operations. In 2008, in the UN Secretary General published a report on the relationship between the UN and Regional Organisations (S/2008/186**), highlighting that UN-regional partnerships should develop to entail wider capacity building activities, define and refine the responsibilities of regions and the UN in both Chapter VIII and non-chapter VIII activities, and perform functions in support of disarmament and mediation. However, ten years after the UN Secretary General’s report and four years after the HIPPO report there is still an urgent need to understand how, and in response to what drivers, are UN peacekeeping operations changing? In this paper I argue that because of the UN’s approach to partnerships it excludes learning from the contributions of other global potential partners including ASEAN. As a result, although there are pathways that make it possible for such a transfer of knowledge and experience, but these are often blocked—or perhaps just obscured—by the practices within the UN; for example, the institutional stickiness around partnerships.

KEYWORDS:

• ASEAN
• UN peacekeeping
• partnerships
• regions
• UN
• humanitarian assistance and disaster relief

Acknowledgements

The paper was initially presented at ISA Hong Kong in 2016 and at ISA Singapore 2018. I am grateful to all the audience for their insightful comments and the comments of the anonymous reviewers from this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Catherine Jones is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews where she teaches on Northeast Asian international relations and the politics and development of Southeast Asia. Her research focuses on China's interaction and contribution to international norms and their implementation which was the topic of her recent book China's Challenge to Liberal Norms, published by Palgrave in 2018. Her work as also been published in The Pacific Review, Pacific Focus and International Politics.

ORCID

Catherine Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4049-1003

Notes

1 It should be noted that previous works exploring the contributions of Asia-pacific States has been undertaken, but not through the lens of exploring partnerships. See for example: Aoi and Heng (2014), Cunliffe (2013).

2 The ASEAN PSC Blueprint 2025 notably encourages the ‘dissemination of best practices’ by the ASEAN Regional Mine Action Centre in Cambodia across the region. However an emerging problem is that a number of experts are now retiring and the knowledge and expertise is not being passed on to the next generation – we thank Alistair Cook for this point.

3 One of Thailand’s pledges at the 2017 UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial conference on peacekeeping held in Vancouver: https://www.providingforpeacekeeping.org/capabilities-summits/united-nations-peacekeeping-pledge-counter/, last accessed 5 March 2019.

4 Vietnam dispatched in November 2018 its first ever Level-2 field hospital to a UN peacekeeping mission; see https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/historic-arrival-vietnam-and-united-nations, last accessed 5 March 2019.

5 I thank Lina Alexandra and Fitriani Bintang for this point.

6 Author interview, Jakarta, August 2016.

7 Participant Observation, UN Security Council, 18 March 2019.

8 Participant Observation, UN Fourth Committee, November 2017.

9 For example, in the 4th Committee meeting in November 2017, one state called for the Secretariat to listen to the comments and contributions of the C34 committee. In July-August in 2015, Malaysia, New Zealand and Nigeria all sought to focus on the importance of changing the working methods of the UN Security Councils so that elected members had sight of mandates further ahead of voting on them. Participant observation UNSC, August, 2015; Participant Observation, 4th Committee, October–November 2017; Jones 2015; Jones 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This research was support by the British Academy – Leverhulme SRG 170645. And through a fellowship at the HA and DR centre at RSIS, NTU Singapore.