TRIAGE

for

FAILING STATES

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY

McNair Paper 26
January 1994

A popular Government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
JAMES MADISON to W. T. BARRY
August 4, 1822

Contents

Copyright Information
Foreword
Stuart Johnson

UN Peacekeeping in a Post-Cold War World
Edward Marks

Peacekeeping in the Name of Humanity
William Lewis

FOREWORD
The period since the end of the Cold War has witnessed dramatic growth in the number of local wars, anarchic situations resulting from the collapse of governing institutions, and natural disasters requiring humanitarian assistance. The majority of international efforts to deal with these crises have been linked with the United Nations operations tied generically to "peacekeeping." The reason is not difficult to perceive. Bipolarity has given way to multipolarity; today, intrastate conflicts threaten international order and stability much as interstate wars have done in this century.
While debate in the academic community and official precincts in Washington has tended to focus on the purely military aspects of international peacekeeping in the post-Cold War era, United Nations involvement in crisis resolution has developed through the humanitarian entry point. This has most obviously been the case in Bosnia and Somalia, with far-reaching implications and consequences for military forces so engaged.
Numerous issues have arisen in the peacekeeping-humanitarian assistance realm. Most notable have been: (a) whether humanitarian assistance represents a form of intervention in violation of Article 2(7) of the United Nations Charter relating to interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign member states; (b) the extent to which such intervention is justified when governments brutalize their populations or cannot provide minimal services to their citizens; © how to reorganize and draw together the diverse and divergent United Nations agencies concerned with peace support and humanitarian assistance operations; and (d) which elements should be responsible for overall coordination and direction of the two activities, each with its own bureaucratic culture and distinctive history.
To address these and related issues, we have elicited two essays. The first, by Ambassador Edward Marks, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, examines the United Nations aspect. Ambassador Marks recently came to the Institute after several years as a senior officer in the Permanent United States Missions to the United Nations (New York). The second essay is by Professor William Lewis of The George Washington University, who addresses the legal and political issues associated with the U.S. and UN involvement in Somalia and northern Iraq.
I believe that both presenters have explored a little understood subject field, one worthy of even more extensive analysis.

STUART E. JOHNSON
Acting Director