What Color Helmet? Reforming Security Council Peacekeeping Mandates

Dr. Nordquist's study and Newport Papers 13, What Color Helmet?, reviews past peacekeeping operations and the aspects of the Charter of the United Nations that govern the use of force. He proposes that, given the end of the Cold War, distinctions in the UN Charter framework between traditional peacekeeping and enforcement actions can and ought to be reflected in future Security Council peacekeeping mandates. He also offers realistic peace-enforcement scenarios illustrating how updated mandates might operate. This overview of the Charter and the challenges of modern peace operations provides a better understanding of the legal and institutional nature of the Security Council, of why existing peacekeeping mandates now lack consistency, and of the importance of dealing with these issues. This study is divided into five chapters. The first focuses on the legal framework for peacekeeping and enforcement operations under the United Nations Charter and the North Atlantic Treaty. The general approach here is an article-by-article review of the pertinent texts, without delving into nuances of meaning or legislative history. Chapter II is a brief summary of the forty peacekeeping operations in which the United Nations engaged from June 1948 through the end of 1995. Again, to foster a reform-minded policy outlook, only a skeletal description of the mandate for each UN peacekeeping operation is given. Marshaling such an outline of peacekeeping operations is instructive in that even the bare recitation of this fifty years of practice reveals a remarkable range of experiences. It is easy to discern why Security Council mandates on peacekeeping lack consistency. Chapter III of this study contains an analysis of UN peacekeeping practice and of key points that ought to be dealt with in reformulating traditional peacekeeping and enforcement actions under Security Council mandates. In Chapter IV, several scenarios are presented to illustrate how properly mandated peacekeeping and enforcement operations might work in the post-Cold War era. To emphasize the critical distinctions between different use of force mandates and the corresponding legal status of the individuals involved, the illustrations refer to white, blue, and green helmet participants. Chapter V of this study proposes a few suggestions to improve Security Council mandates for "mixed" traditional peacekeeping and enforcement actions. A threshold comment is needed for clarification about the use of the term "peacekeeping" in this study. When the term appears alone, it refers to the great variety of activities that have been mandated and therefore formally designated as "peacekeeping" operations. As will be explained, peacekeeping is a generic label that, inter alia, obscures an important legal distinction between traditional peacekeeping and enforcement actions. From a legal perspective, it is important to know what is meant by the term "peacekeeping." However, efforts to use more precise words with better defined meanings may also pose problems. For instance, the term "peace enforcement" is now heard and often seen in the literature. While this is an understandable effort to distinguish operations based on consent from those that are not, the term is not taken from the Charter, is ill-defined in actual practice, and is logically inconsistent as a phrase. The approach preferred in this study is to use words taken from the text of the Charter or with an agreed meaning in State practice. However, bowing to overwhelming usage, an exception to this preference for precise language is made in the case of the term "peacekeeping." Accordingly, the term is used in this study generically to cover the entire spectrum of activities ranging from traditional peacekeeping to enforcement actions.