Richard Al-Qaq

Since the end of the Cold War, United Nations peace operations have become an established and prominent feature of world politics. From the Sudan to the Ivory Coast, the UN now carries-out extensive governance related functions, under the generic rubric of peace operations, and is a significant political force in Southern states and societies. Despite these powerful new political roles, however, UN peace operations are frequently treated by the mainstream professional and academic literature as a normal and non-political set of activities for an international organisation to undertake. A primary task of this monograph is to problematise these apolitical notions, especially in relation to the rise of peace operations within the UN, and to uncover the political and socioeconomic import of peace activities for subject societies. To this end, the first part of the book outlines the political context in which to situate the prevalence of peace operations in the UN today. This context is the historically contested nature of the UN’s ‘programme of work’ among states and various groups of states from the 1940s to our current era. In essence, it is shown that what the UN is tasked with carrying out at any given moment is itself a highly contentious issue, reflecting various political and ideological agendas. Through new empirical research on the UN Secretariat, it is revealed that the rise of peace operations in the UN since the 1990s is no exception, reflecting a Northern agenda to strip the organisation of its political economy functions and replace them with specialised political and security related tasks at the borderlands of the interstate system. The second part of the monograph examines the application of these new peace and security functions in three seminal cases of the 1990s, in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia.  What these detailed empirical studies expose is the political logic of their design and implementation, such as how they fitted into wider projects of transforming subject societies into liberal market democracies and how they featured in the bigger picture of great power politics.

Since the end of the Cold War, United Nations peace operations have become an established and prominent feature of world politics. From Liberia to East Timor, the UN now carries out extensive governance-related functions and is a significant political force in Southern states and societies. Here Richard Al-Qaq leads us to a radical new understanding of the UN and its role in international politics. He uncovers the political and socio-economic import of such 'peace' activities for subject societies, and raises important questions about the functioning and dynamics of the global political order. A critical view of the internal process of programmatic reform within the UN is elaborated by detailed studies of the politics of UN peace operations in three seminal cases of the 1990s, in Somalia, Rwanda and Angola. This book is essential for understanding the new role of the UN, especially in Africa, and the politics of so-called humanitarian intervention and peace-building.