1. 1
Overallthe United Nations Record on Peacekeeping has been a successfulone.
When United Nations (UN) troops are deployed their goal is not to fight enemy troops or to
conquer territories, but to protect the peace between parties previously at war (Deutsche Welle,
2012). The UN regards its history of peacekeeping as one with an impressive record of
achievements. It cites the operations carried out in Tajikistan, Namibia, Mozambique, Guatemala,
El Salvador and Cambodia as examples of peacekeeping operations where UN troops successfully
conducted missions which ended conflicts and promoted reconciliation (UN, n.d.) However, there
have been a number of failures which shed a bad light on the peacekeepers with the UN missions
to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, Rwanda in 1994 and Somalia in 1993 standing out as the ones
which arguably failed most notably (Deutsche Welle, 2012).
Mathias Dembinski of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt argues that due to the increasingly
comprehensive nature of peacekeeping missions it has become very difficult to evaluate whether
a peacekeeping mission has been successful (Deutsche Welle, 2012). Other analysts are less
diplomatic with Boot arguing that the UN’s record of peacekeeping was one of “almost unrelieved
failure”. Boot based his argument on the failure to of UN troops to prevent the killings of over
800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and the “worse than useless” intervention of UN troops in
Bosnia (Boot, 2000). Boot’s argument however does not reflect the complexity of the situation in
Bosnia. While the UN intervention and the delivery of humanitarian aid were certainly prolonging
this conflict it also saved many peoples’ lives (Shawcross, 2000).
The above examples show that there is a certain difference in opinion among analysts as to
whether the UN’s record of peacekeeping is a successful one. Empirical evidence shows that the
establishment of durable, long-term peace conditions are fostered by peacekeeping missions.
However the short-term effects of peacekeeping operations can be different. Hultman argues that
peacekeeping missions can have unintended negative effects of creating violence against civilians
by rebel groups. However, if these missions had a clear-cut mandate to protect civilians, evidence
also shows that violence against civilians by rebel groups had been reduced. Therefore it is
important that the success of peacekeeping missions is evaluated against the specific mandate of
every mission (Hultman, 2010).

2. 2
When we look at the political process of drafting a specific mandate for a UN peacekeeping
operation we notice that these processes are often shaped by the reluctance of one or more
members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to become too involved in a conflict (Findlay, 2002).
Therefore the variations in the scope of mandates not only reflect the needs essential to resolve
the conflict but also the political interests of certain states. This, in extension, means that the
success of a mission is also influenced by politics (Allen & Yuen, 2014) The political influences on a
successful peacekeeping mission could arguably been observed most clearly in the recent Syrian
crisis, where no mission could be established due to contrasting political interests by members of
the UNSC.
Whether the UN peacekeeping record can be deemed a successful one also depends on the
definition of success in the context of peacekeeping. Hultman, among others, has in her work
already differentiated between short and long-term success and argued that the mandate
fulfilment should be used as criteria. Further to that Heldt and Wallensteen raise the question
whether resource limitations and/or recalcitrance of the warring parties must be taken into
account. Likewise we must consider if limitations of casualties, conflict containment, the
facilitation of conflict resolution or the establishment of democracy are the defining criteria (Heldt
& Wallensteen, 2006). If we therefore accept that the definition of successful peacekeeping is not
an exact science, than we must also accept that the same is true for the definition of failure in
peacekeeping. Likewise it is hard to establish exactly how much credit (or blame) the UN should
take for changes in any given peacekeeping operation, especially as the different criteria are
dependent on each other (Doyle et al, 1997).
In an attempt to quantify the success rate of UN peacekeeping missions Heldt and Wallensteen
have established that the success rate of interstate peacekeeping missions has been much higher
than those of intrastate missions, with virtually no ongoing conflicts once interstate missions had
been deployed and ongoing conflicts in one fifth of the intrastate missions deployed between
1948 and 2004 (Heldt & Wallensteen, 2006). Whether this is a remarkable success rate is arguably
open to further discussion.
Conclusion
The failures of UN peacekeeping have indeed been prominent. The massacres of innocent civilians
in Bosnia and Rwanda casted a very bad light on the UN peacekeeping operations. Have these

3. 3
failures been offset by other, more successful missions? I think yes. Every life saved is valuable and
while the UN peacekeeping record is far from perfect it can most certainly be credited with saving
the lives of many innocent people. That is why every peacekeeping mission should be evaluated
independently and judged carefully as to whether its mandate has been fulfilled and if it has been
adjusted quickly enough in case the realities on the ground changed. Trying to measure the
success of peacekeeping on an overall scale is perhaps not the best way to judge it as missions
vary too much in their basis of deployment, evolvement over time and (political) stakeholder
interests. The modus operandi of peacekeeping must therefore continuously be challenged and
lessons must be learned from failures in order to prevent failures in the future. Avoiding to repeat
mistakes of the past ensures success in the future.
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