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Abstract
Scholars have largely overlooked a critical influence on the effectiveness of organizations in their conduct of peace operations: response duration. The consequences of prolonging the time between the demand and supply of a peace operation often include a rise in the death toll on the ground and a fall in the operation's legitimacy in the eyes of the local population. This paper aims to present and explain surprising variation among regional organizations' response rates – a critical influence on operations' prospects for success. The evidence that I have collected shows that despite its relative superior capacity, the European Union responds more slowly than the African Union and other less affluent regional organizations conducting similar peace operations. Applying theories of international organization pathologies, the paper argues that institutional design problems of bureaucratic dysfunction hinder organizations' abilities to rapidly respond.
Notes
1. It is not my intention in this paper to measure effectiveness since the paper focuses on explaining response rates. Effectiveness can be understood here as Doyle and Sambanis’ (2000, p. 779) ‘sovereign peace’ measure of peacebuilding success. That is a short-term measure of outcomes after the end of the conflict.
2. Fortna's conservative estimate of 55–60 per cent only accounts for peacekeepers’ ability to prevent conflict while deployed. This figure increases to 75–85 per cent when accounting for the sustainability of peace after peacekeepers have left.
3. This study showed that in civil wars since 1945, a peacekeeping presence made negotiations and third-party mediation less likely.
4. UN Security Council Resolution 797 established ONUMAZ on 16 December 1992, but it did not become fully operational until the end of March 1993.
5. Sidhu (2004, p. 1) observes that this post-cold war ‘regionalization of peace operations was not decreed or even necessarily desired’ but ‘rather it came about in an improvised way and in response to specific regional situations’.
6. Examples include the Sudanese Government's insistence in 2006 for a peace operation to be led by the AU and not the UN, and ‘Russia's preference for the OSCE rather than the UN in Chechnya or the US’ preference for NATO in Afghanistan’ (Bures Citation2006, p. 94).
7. Dorn (Citation1998) warns of problems of the practicalities of regionally led peace operations.
8. Martin and Simmons (Citation1998, 729) call for researchers to ‘increasingly turn to the question of how institutions matter in shaping the behavior of important actors in world politics’.
9. My decision to exclude the UN does not discount the importance of the UN in international peacekeeping but rather aims to shed light on the regional level of peacekeeping as it has been so minimally studied.
10. If there have been more than one.
11. The new figures for the EU without the three operations for Tables 2 and 3 are, respectively, 6.53 and 2.43.
12. Since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on 1 December 2009, the ESDP has been renamed the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) but will be referred to as ESDP in this paper since at the time of writing, it was still widely referred to by its previous name.
13. The EU's Common Foreign Security Policy explicitly allows for common funding to be used toward civilian missions, not military missions.
14. In December 1999, France's and Britain's heads of state signed the St. Malo Declaration, which gave rise to the ESDP Policy established at the European Council Cologne Summit in 2000.
15. This is according to interviews in Brussels with several EU PSC ambassadors who were recounting the role of France in the committee (H. Hardt, personal communication, June 2009).
16. For a detailed account on EU capabilities, see Biscop (Citation2004).
17. For the most up-to-date reforms, see the overview on the EU Council website: ‘Military capabilities – February 2010’. http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=1349&lang=EN
18. Personal interviews with 60 ambassadors and diplomats at the headquarters of the AU, EU, OAS and OSCE, March and May–June 2010.
19. Barnett and Finnemore derive this particular pathology from Vaughan's (Citation1996) study of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.
20. In some instances, the EU has sought an ex-post facto UN resolution to legitimize an operation that has already commenced.
21. For more on the division of labor among the Council, Commissioner and High Representative, see Anderson (Citation2007, pp. 39–40).
22. The Lisbon Treaty's establishment of the ‘High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy’ post resulted as a merger of the posts of High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy.
23. ECOMOG was the Military Observer Group of the ECOWAS.
24. See Herz (2008, pp. 20–21) for a detailed overview of these missions.
25. See my use of the SIPRI definition of ‘peace operation’ in Section ‘Exploring response rates at the regional level’.
26. CARICOM is the acronym for ‘Caribbean Community’, a sub-regional organization of Caribbean states.
27. Following Kosovo's declaration of independence on 17 February 2008, Serb rioters clashed sporadically with UN and NATO forces.
28. Author's research conducting interviews at the headquarters of the AU, EU, OAS and OSCE.
29. See Wendt (Citation1994, p. 384) on the role of collective identity.