Letter from the Dais
Dear Delegates,
Welcome to SCSY XL! My name is Brian Kitano, and I'm very excited to be your Director for the United Nations Security Council. I'm originally from Norwalk, CT, about an hour from Yale and New York City. I'm a Computer Science major, and in my free time I work on other Model UN conferences, as well as some programming projects focused on artificial intelligence. I also enjoy playing squash, hiking, and exploring New Haven with my friends.
Previously, I've been a Vice Chair on the World Health Organization committee, a chair on a crisis committee revolving around state collapse, and a USG of Specialized Committees for YMUN, Yale's home conference in New Haven.
This year, the UN Security Council faces unprecedented issues of mismanagement, of globalization, of diplomacy; these issues undermine the authority of the UNSC itself. With diplomatic relations deteriorating between the West and the East, to what extent can the UNSC reform its practices and maintain its status as an international peacekeeping organization? With advances in technology surpassing the capabilities of legislatures worldwide, to what extent can the UNSC to intervene on behalf of the global community and uphold national sovereignty? These are questions that we will only skim the surface of in our brief time, but it's my hope that together we will spark your interest in these important questions.
Please email me if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions, and I can't wait to meet you all soon!
Sincerely,
Brian Kitano
Topic History
Committee History
Incorporated as an integral part of the United Nations (UN) in 1946, the United Nations Security Council, or UNSC, is one of the six principal organs of the UN. It is responsible for administering peacekeeping missions, setting international sanctions, and authorizing military actions among member states. It is the only UN body whose resolutions are binding to all member states of the UN.
The origins of the UNSC lie just after the end of World War I, when the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations — an organization similar in structure and scope to the current UN, though less powerful and representative than today. When the League failed to act on events pivotal to the kindling of World War II, it was eventually engulfed by the ensuing conflict.
Following the end of WWII, the Allied Powers formed the United Nations, and organized the international organization around a central body, the United Nations Security Council. The United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China are the five permanent members, with 10 biannual rotating members.
While it has had many successes in the past, it is certainly not short of failures, especially in recent years. Critics of the UNSC have pointed out its various failures to address pressing conflicts such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, to assert jurisdiction over affairs instead of being bypassed in favor of direct negotiation in cases such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to inconsistently enforce punishments for resolution violations.
What is Sovereignty?
Sovereignty is defined as “the authority of a state to govern itself or another state.” In laymen’s terms, the sovereignty of a state is reliant on its ability to make decisions for itself, and to be independent of other influences that may coerce or subjugate the state.
Often, the notion of sovereignty is conflated with the notion of ‘territory’ and disputes with regard to territory, yet contemporary definitions of sovereignty surpass land entitlements. For example, how do governments exert sovereignty over trade deals or information traffic, an abstract aspect of identity? To address those complications, sovereignty is best broken into four specific types:
1. Domestic sovereignty refers to the state’s ability to exert authority over its polity. A state’s domestic sovereignty remains independent of international actors. Aspects of domestic sovereignty include policing, legislating, and other responsibilities delegated solely to the state. Not only does domestic sovereignty contain the listed responsibilities of the state, but also how effectively they execute said responsibilities. In simple terms, domestic sovereignty refers to state choice with regards to its citizens; if a government has the ability to do something, and does it well, then it is domestically sovereign. States with a lot of domestic sovereignty include Sweden or China, which have a greater ability to enact and enforce authority within their borders, as compared to Sudan, for example.
2. Interdependence sovereignty refers to the state’s ability to control the flow of traffic across its borders. The concept of traffic is intentionally vague; it may refer to the movement of ideas, goods, people, information, or anything else that crosses from state to state. In the context of globalization, interdependence sovereignty is what is usually being eroded; that is, most states are losing their ability to control movement across their borders. North Korea exerts high interdependence sovereignty, as it controls almost all of the traffic into its borders, whereas the US and Western Europe are both very globalized, and so the flow of people, goods, and information is more free.
3. Legal sovereignty refers to a state’s ability to interact on its own behalf in the international legal context, such as entering treaties or enacting embargoes. Examples of exerting international legal sovereignty include sitting on the UN, having embassies in other countries, or being recognized as a country by other countries. Palestine and Chechnya are both states which do not exert high international legal sovereignty, as compared to China or the US, since both emerging polities are controversial and are not completely independent of their neighbors (Israel and Russia, respectively).
4. Westphalian sovereignty refers to a state’s ability to limit external control of internal authority, or, more succinctly, a state’s ability to resist coercion. Treaties, trade deals, and supranational organizations all threaten a state’s Westphalian sovereignty because they induce a change within the state that was not inspired by the state. In effect, a constriction of Westphalian sovereignty usually impinges upon domestic sovereignty. The respect of the Westphalian sovereignty of other nations is nonintervention. Most of Western Europe exhibits no Westphalian sovereignty as a result of membership within the EU, which establishes supranational governance for each member state; Somalia exhibits a high degree of Westphalian democracy, because most countries are uninterested in engaging with it.
We divide the notion of sovereignty into these four subsets because states do not necessarily possess all four, nor is one necessarily indicative of another. A unique example of this idea is Ukraine. Recently, Ukraine was engaged in the throes of political unrest, which limited its ability to exert total domestic sovereignty. However, it still remained a country in the eyes of the international community, so it maintained its international legal sovereignty. Yet, as we have seen over the past few years, Ukrainian economics and politics have been heavily influenced by Russia, while they have also sought closer ties with the EU, so their Westphalian sovereignty was restricted by engaging or being coerced into making policy decisions without complete autonomy. Finally, as Ukraine tries to modernize its industries, its interdependence sovereignty consequently shrinks.
Since WWII, though the international legal and domestic sovereignty of most nations has rarely changed, we have seen a dramatic reduction of interdependence and Westphalian sovereignty worldwide as a result of globalization, rapidly accelerated by the worldwide adoption of the Internet.
The Rise of the Self Governed Internet
Early computers were almost unimaginably different from the machines that we use today. These machines were based on a mechanism which read a ‘tape’ containing logical instructions for the computer to carry out, much like a human does today. There were no electronic circuits, and its programs needed to be written manually by punching holes into cards, which the machine would read and interpret. It would then punch its results back onto a card, finishing a computation.
These machines were large, filling entire rooms with parts, and slow, often taking hours to perform simple tasks. For example, the ENIAC, developed in 1943, occupied 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, and weighed nearly 50 tons. Fortunately, like all technologies, the development of the computer led to more and more being built around the world with better design and greater efficiency, and later utilizing electric circuits and other modern refinements.
Although the rise of the Internet could perhaps be traced to the development of the computer during WWII at Bletchley Park under the supervision of Alan Turing, the story of the Internet really begins after the end of the War, when the technology of computational machines had proliferated through the Western world. The Bombe, the original computer, developed to decrypt encoded German military messages, grew from four machines in June of 1943, to 180 machines by May of 1945, spread out across Europe and the Atlantic.
During the 1950s, these computers began to be built in clusters, such that information on one computer could be shared with information from another, by manually replacing the data tape. However, the manual transfer of data was particularly slow, compared to the processing speed of the information itself. During the 1960s, this manual transfer of data was replaced by the advent of telegraphic message switching systems. This development enabled computers to truly connect with each other, creating the first computer ‘networks’. Not only was the telegraphic messaging faster, it allowed computers at great distances to communicate, and led to the creation of commercial communication networks, such as the NASDAQ for stock quotes, and SITA for airlines.
Commercial communication networks were developed on the foundations of ‘time sharing’ services, which supplied consumers, mainly businesses, with access to otherwise prohibitively expensive computational power. These services, such as General Electric’s Informations Services, enabled a user to essentially borrow a computer for a limited amount of time at relatively low cost. As these time sharing services expanded to larger computer systems distributed over wider areas, companies also needed to optimize not only the way in which the data was transferred, then over telephone lines, but also how the information was formatted, which at the time was sporadic and inefficient. This led to the development of packet switching, in 1965.
Packet switching technology, or packetizing, the method of breaking up large pieces of information into smaller pieces, and sending them separately over different channels, would not have been successful without the military demand for connected computer networks. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, led the development for packet switching on behalf of the US Department of Defense to fully connect their groups of computers, creating the ARPANET in 1968. The ARPANET eventually enabled networks of computers at universities across the United States to connect with each other, creating a network of networks, which resembles the Internet as we know it today. In 1973, Norway became the first country outside the United States to connect to ARPANET, and was later followed by a node in London. These connections ushered in the era of an international computing network.
Access to ARPANET bloomed in 1981 when the National Science Foundation began aggressively funding the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to extend networking benefits to academic and research institutions that would otherwise be inaccessible. By 1984, after only three years, the CSNET grew to include Israel, Korea, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Japan.
One necessity of connecting networks was a standardized set of rules which governed how information over the network was to be formatted and shared. If, for example, two computers used different ways of packetizing and addressing their information, then they would simply be unable to communicate. This led to the development of the TCP/IP, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the set of protocols which specify how all computers should format their information over the ARPANET, in 1982.
All of this work, rather than being done secretly like the development of the computer itself, was done collaboratively under Defense contracts to universities and public companies. Research into computer networking technologies involved both private companies and governments throughout the world, thereby transcending the modern conceptions of ‘sovereignty.’ This global cooperation was done mainly out of economic necessity, since computers at the start of this era were prohibitively expensive, and needed to be accessed centrally.
The CSNET and ARPANET, though connected, were distinct networks. While the ARPANET was a mainly military development, the CSNET was an academic and research oriented system. It therefore became the dominant network for civilian institutions, especially after the military established their own network, MILNET, and abandoned ARPANET in 1983.
Concurrent with this explosive growth of connectivity was the demand for faster computers, and in 1984, the NSF began developing regional supercomputing centers. Once again, these otherwise prohibitively expensive computers grew the demand for increased connectivity, which led to the creation of yet another network, the NSFNET, to connect these supercomputing centers, in 1985. Built alongside CSNET, the NSFNET outsourced the expansion of its network to private companies in 1987, which further blurred the lines between public and private management of the now international network.
By 1988, multiple research networks had been established between different computing centers, and the need to further integrate them together was fulfilled by Merit, a company contracted by the NSF to build the backbone of inter-networking. The upgraded NSFNET expanded to connect 170 networks, all using the TCP/IP protocol first introduced by ARPANET, which by 1990 was totally discontinued.
At this time, however, commercial use of the vast NSFNET, which was doubling in academic traffic every seven months, was prohibited in order to prioritize research. As a result, commercial networks were established in parallel; however, in response to the demand for access, the NSFNET opened the network up to commercial firms in 1991.
It was around this time that the NSF began to consider transitioning the network from the public to the private sector; that is, instead of having the government enable access, private service companies could provide connectivity. Internet Exchange Points, IXPs, became the functional communicators of the network, which are physical locations that exchange regional traffic between any computers connected. Eventually, all of the NSFNET connections were migrated to the IXP backbone, the system still in place today. IXPs are located in essentially every country with Internet access, and more are built to accommodate increases in regional traffic.
Concurrent with the rise of access was the need to visually organize information over the heavily interconnected network. One such facility where this transparency was in extreme demand was the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN. It was here that Tim Berners-Lee developed the first hypertext system to link information about CERN’s projects in an organized, visual fashion. The first hypertext document, written in 1980, was the first website, and in 1990, ten years later, Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser to navigate the ‘web’ of hypertext documents, the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web provided the popularity and traffic necessary for the US Government, who managed the NSF, to give control of managing the CSNET, now the Internet, to independent, non-governmental organizations in 1995.
It was an intentional design choice to structure the Internet as a unified though disjointed network, not controlled by any one organization or government, but a collaboration of singularly weak groups with specialized authority, much like the separation of powers in modern democratic constitutions. The Internet’s growth was rapid, unpredictable, and global. Its initially liberal construction and focus on communal advancement rather than commercialization or authoritarianism has promoted a diverse and borderless growth of culture in the world. Essentially, the foundations of the Internet have made it transcendent beyond today’s conceptions of country, nation, group, creed, or society. It has, in fact, created its own society, that of the ‘global village,’ a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s to encompass the phenomenon of “electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion [which] has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.” The World Wide Web enabled almost anyone to easily browse and acquire information from any point in the network, democratizing the system even further.
The Cuckoo’s Egg, the First Documented Computer Break-In
In 1986, at about the same time of the rapid expansion of access to CSNET, an astronomer at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California reported what was to be one of the first unauthorized accesses to information via a computer, or ‘hack’.
The infrastructure required to detect the intrusion had, at the time, been slow and inefficient, so Clifford Stoll, the researcher who discovered the anomaly, needed to investigate it himself. Initially, he monitored the access points of the hacker by installing printers that would simply print out logs of activity. It was by this method that he discovered the interests of the hacker: using the laboratory as a gateway into the larger networks it was connected to, namely MILNET, DARPANET, and specialized research networks to search for terms such as ‘sdi’, ‘nuclear’, and ‘norad’ (all Cold War defense programs).
After Stoll had solidified his monitoring system, he then reached out to numerous federal agencies and telecom companies to trace the signal from his computer to its source. With cooperation from the FBI and the German Bundespost, the intruder’s computer was identified at a German university.
Once Stoll and the FBI had realized that the hack was an act of international espionage, they then planted a ‘honeypot’, or trap: they intentionally uploaded onto their network a document full of military jargon, and left a mailing address for the hacker to discover and mail to. Their suspicions of espionage were confirmed when a letter arrived from someone in the United States, meaning that an agent in Germany shared this information with an agent in the US.
Ultimately, in 1990, Markus Hess admitted to selling the information he hacked to the KGB upon his arrest. He was charged with espionage and given a suspended sentence of 20 months, rather than the full sentence of 5 years because “No serious damage...had arisen.” While this, the first documented instance of cyber-espionage, occurred without much damage to its victims or strategic advantage to its perpetrators, the potential ramifications of cyberattacks have dramatically increased from 1986 to today.
The First Peacekeeping Operations
The first Peacekeeping Operation by the United Nations was to monitor the truce agreements between Israel and its neighboring Arab countries during the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948. During this time, the UN ordered the UN Truce Supervision Organization, or UNTSO, to maintain a ceasefire between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces throughout the region. Later, the UNTSO expanded its arbitrating functions into the surrounding countries, namely Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The UNTSO has remained in the region since, and has mediated most major conflicts arising on the issues of territory.
The UNTSO, the first Peacekeeping operation, was unarmed and engaged in civil arbitration between parties. Concurrently, in 1949, the UN supervised and facilitated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, deliberating in the Security Council over the possession of disputed territories in the region of Kashmir.
The first armed Peacekeeping operation began during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the United Nations General Assembly commissioned the first UN Emergency Force (UNEF I) to uphold the cease fire between British, French, Israeli, and Egyptian forces over control of the Suez Canal. The Peacekeeping operation lasted from November 10, 1956 until June, 1957, when all invading forces left and the Canal was reopened. A maximum of six thousand soldiers from non-Security Council states were stationed throughout Egyptian territory, and prevented the escalation of minor violations of the ceasefire, as well as protected civilians from conflict.
The decision to introduce an armed, neutral force in the area, led by a coalition of member states to uphold peace during negotiations was spearheaded by Lester B. Pearson, the future Prime Minister of Canada. Pearson later received the Nobel Peace Prize for the strategy, which became the foundation of modern Peacekeeping operations throughout the world. However, its foundations were hotly contested by the General Assembly at the time.
There were three main possibilities for the structure of the first UN Force. The first proposed structure was a group of soldiers from non-Security Council states, which would be led by a non-state aligned, appointed officer to command the force, independent of any national interests. The second structure was a state or group of states to independently provide a force to serve the United Nations; this would lack the same autonomy of the first option, but would likely be easier to organize. The third option would be to create a force of a coalition of states to be organized by the UN.
After intense debate, the General Assembly voted on the first option, and the presence of the UN Emergency Force lasted for 10 years in the region, until March 1967.
In those ten years, a tense state of stability between Egypt and Israel was maintained by the UN Peacekeeping Mission. However, it was evident that, following the wake of the 6 Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors only three months later, the Peacekeepers only solved the proximate issues of hostility in the region, and failed to address the ultimate causes of their tension.
The Cold War era
The first large scale mission by the UN Peacekeepers was the Mission to the Congo, in 1960. The UN Operation in the Congo (UNOC) was staffed by nearly 20,000 international officers, as compared to the UNEF-I, which at its peak was only 6,000. The mission was focused on preventing the outbreak of civil war in the Congo, following its independence from Belgium, which was subsequently violated by a Belgian invasion.
The UNOC faced unprecedented challenges, including negotiating the structure of the new Congolese government, restoring law and order, facilitating the withdrawal of Belgian forces, and preventing international interference from non-UN actors such as state sponsored mercenaries. However, non-UN support for factions opposed to the UN’s implementation were strong, and supported a revolt against the forces supported by the UN, in the province of Katanga. On multiple occasions, the armed Peacekeepers and secessionist gendarmes clashed, and 250 personnel died, including the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. The UNOC withdrew in in June of 1964, after Katanga had been successfully integrated with the remainder of Congo.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the UN Peacekeepers led smaller, short term missions throughout the world. In 1962, when territorial disputes between newly liberated Indonesia and its ex-colonizer the Netherlands nearly escalated into conflict, the United Nations intervened to negotiate a ceasefire and resolve the issue. In 1965, the UN intervened to end a civil war in the Dominican Republic, following the collapse of the government. This mission represented the first time the UN overstepped the responsibilities of a regional organization, in this case the Organization of American States. Some missions, such as the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) beginning in 1964, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) beginning in 1978, and the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) beginning in 1974 continue to operate today in similar capacities of establishing ceasefires, monitoring the withdrawal of forces, and stabilizing governments in the region. In 1988, the UN Peacekeepers were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1991 onwards
In 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the UN Peacekeepers needed to reformulate their missions to address the instability of Eastern Europe, as well as other regions in turmoil. These were even more complex and involved missions, and shifted in focus from interstate conflicts, like India and Pakistan, to both interstate and intrastate conflicts, such as the mission in the former Yugoslavia. Whereas the Peacekeepers had been a mainly military presence in the past, these missions also expanded to encompass more administrative activities such as elections monitors, economists, and legal experts. To accommodate these expansions, the Security Council expanded Peacekeeping forces from 11,000 to 75,000 between 1989 and 1994.
Alongside the ambitious expansion of goals and personnel were raised expectations by the global community to see the Peacekeepers stabilize regions and succeed in missions that were unprecedented. On missions in Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR), Rwanda (UNAMIR), and Somalia (UNOSOM II), the Peacekeepers were sent in to create peace, rather than maintain it. These missions were embroiled in peace agreement violations, inadequate resources for Peacekeepers, and insufficient political support.
Upon the fracturing of Yugoslavia in 1991 into multiple, ethnically brokered states, the UN expressed concern over the ethnic minorities that would be trapped by the new divisions, specifically Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. When the Serbian Army invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina, they slaughtered thousands of Bosniacs, also known as Bosnian Muslims. 20,000 people were killed in massacres at Srebrenica, a UN designated “safe area,” and other sites throughout the region. The official UN report states that the United Nations “failed to deter the Serb attack on Srebrenica and the appalling events that followed.”
In Rwanda, ethnic tensions between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis during the Rwandan Civil War escalated into genocide following the downing of the President’s plane on April 6, 1994. The Belgian Peacekeeping battalion, stationed near the Prime Minister’s house, was targeted and brutally murdered by the Rwandan military in the hours after the crash. Following the collapse of the Arusha Peace agreement negotiations to end the civil war, and the slaughter of 20,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus despite the UN presence, the UNAMIR significantly reduced its forces. This withdrawal was advocated for by the Belgians, who lost their delegation to the violence. By the time the mandate was amended to reflect the tragic change in circumstances, 200,000 Tutsis had died. The Secretary-General, addressing the failure of the mission, stated a new mission would require “a commitment of material and human resources on a scale which member States have so far proved reluctant to complete.” By July 18, the rebel faction that engineered the genocide, led by Paul Kagame and the Interahamwe extremists, had taken power and announced a unilateral ceasefire. Between 500,000-1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, and nearly 2,000,000 were displaced in the 100 days of the genocide.
Since the 1980s, Somalia has been ravaged by a civil war which led to the collapse of the government, and its ability to enforce law and order. In this chaos, more than 12 different political factions attempted to gain influence in the power vacuum, and the UN Peacekeepers attempted to broker a peace between all of them, in 1993. While the government was dissolved, the UN also tried distributing humanitarian relief throughout the country (UNOSOM). When the conference finished, Ali Mahdi Mohamed was named President, though Mohamed Farah Aidid, a powerful general who boycotted the conference, still maintained control over a significant portion of the country. Aidid saw UNOSOM as a threat to his power and attacked a Pakistani battalion in June of 1993. After incurring significant casualties, the UN was forced to withdraw their forces in 1995. In that time, they were able to establish a functional police force, a basic judicial system, basic education to parts of the country, and rehabilitated parts of Somalia’s infrastructure that were damaged during the civil war.
Current Situation - Cyberhacking
Russia-US Elections Hacking
State elections are a pivotal aspect of domestic sovereignty, and are perhaps the only manifestations of domestic sovereignty which threaten a state’s international legal sovereignty. For example, in Egypt following the Arab Spring in 2011, the coup d’etat by al-Sisi against Mohammed Morsi, the democratically elected president, led to an international denouncement of the new military government. With regards to state transitions of power, the most dramatic loss of international sovereignty as a consequence of shifting domestic sovereignty was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which the shah of Iran was deposed by the religious council of Iran. Led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Revolution directly resulted in a diplomatic disconnect between the US and Iran, which has persisted since.
A currently unfolding encroachment of domestic sovereignty by international actors over the Internet is the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States by Russia. In an attempt to undermine national support for Hillary Clinton, the Democrat candidate for president, the Russian government illegally accessed the emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, and senior aides in the DNC.
In response, the chairman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned.
- The Russian hack of the [Democratic National Committee] was small beans compared to the destruction of the integrity of a national election result. … Election fraud is typically the responsibility of election officials working with law-enforcement officials. But when election fraud with national consequences is potentially threatened by foreign adversaries, it should become the responsibility of (at a minimum) national intelligence officials. But are they on this problem? Does the United States government have a well-worked out plan to ensure that our highly computerized and highly decentralized system for electing the President is protected from foreign disruption via cyber-exploitation or cyber-attack?
It is one of the most foundational principles of the UN to respect, maintain, and uphold national sovereignty; in fact, Resolution 50/172 Operant Clause 3 dictates:
- Reaffirms also that any activities that attempt, directly or indirectly, to interfere in the free development of national electoral processes, in particular in the developing countries, or that are intended to sway the results of such processes, violate the spirit and letter of the principles established in the Charter and in the
Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations;
Putin has been opposed to Hillary Clinton since her term as Secretary of State, when she alluded to fraud in Russia’s elections in 2011, and he had vested interests in seeing Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election. In addition, both Russia and the US have colored histories of interfering with foreign governments, such as the US led coup of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.
The attack by Russia, through direct hacking of the DNC’s emails and sponsoring the spread of ‘fake news’, represents one of the first overt efforts by one country to interfere with another over the internet. Both Germany and France have expressed serious concern over the integrity of their elections, to be held in 2017.
It should be noted that domestic elections hacking is well documented in Latin America. Though electronically rigging an election is a way of undermining a state’s domestic sovereignty, these hacks were led by the political campaigns within the country, not a foreign power intent on swaying a vote.
The Shift in the Global Economy
Flows, or the movement of goods, services, information, or people across borders, are how globalization manifests itself in the world economy. In the past, flows were more tangible, such as physical trade routes between countries, and limited by who could participate, namely governments and multinational corporations; however, since the rise of the Internet, flows have dramatically expanded into the virtual world of online shopping, data, and automation, and now almost anyone can participate in the international marketplace.
During a 20 year period from 1987 to 2007, the traditional economy of goods, services and finance experienced a massive growth, increasing from 21% of World GDP to a staggering 53% of World GDP before the Great Recession. But since the crisis the relevance of traditional economic flows has not recovered, flatlining at about 39% since 2008.
While the traditional global economy has undergone a period of stagnation, the flow of data around the world has grown 45 times larger from 2005 to 2014. As of 2014, 12% of the global goods trade is driven by online commerce, and nearly 50% of globally traded services have been digitized. New forms of goods have been created as a result of this digital explosion, such as instant video streaming, online gaming, and online news and publications. Global data flows have also made popular new ways of facilitating trade, for example the prevalence of vendor ratings on most online shopping platforms, or the ability to track packages and shipments en route to their destinations
Not only has the growth of the Internet changed what the global economy trades and how it trades things, it has dramatically expanded who can participate in international exchanges. In the past, only governments and large corporations could afford to reach beyond the domestic economy; today, as a result of the Internet and the zero marginal cost of connecting to it, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) now engage in trade through online platforms like Amazon and eBay, with international payment processing being expanded by Paypal. Even Facebook, a strictly social networking site, hosts the profiles of an estimated 50 million SMEs out of an estimated 100 million total, a proportion which will continue to grow as becoming a business with an online presence becomes increasingly critical. This new global participatory economy is easily demonstrated by the shift in US exports: in 1977, large multinational corporations accounted for 84%, while in 2013, they accounted for only 50%. This indicates that the shares of US exports by SMEs, traditionally domestic businesses, has increased to 34%. This growth would not have been possible without the rapid expansion of the Internet.
However, while global flows as a whole have benefited from the modern rise of data, state participation in these flows has not been equal. Data flows alone have generated $2.8 trillion of the $7.8 trillion of total flows in the global market in 2014; however, the US and Western Europe have been the main benefactors of this prosperity due to their established position in the network of data flows (recall that these two regions were the first to be connected over ARPANET and other early networks). The countries on the periphery, countries that are not fully connected to the Internet, be it due to limited access or underdevelopment, stand to gain the most from being connected.
Because a vast proportion of the world is still unconnected, it is safe to say that digital globalization is far from complete. In addition, connectedness as a whole is a boon to all those who are connected. However, as we have seen in the case of the US-Russia elections hacking, perhaps unpoliced globalization represents a potential threat or disincentive to countries that would otherwise come online faster. What can the United Nations do to ensure that all countries sow the economic benefits of globalization, while still maintaining sovereignty?
Closed Networks
The internet has a long history of open access, starting with its early foundations as a tool to promote research between institutions. Today, however, the same openness which led to the rapid growth of the internet is curbed by governments in an attempt to install physical borders to the intangible Web. This is essentially a problem of modernization: how can states apply existing structures of law and sovereignty to a technology that does not easily fall within the current definitions? Should we limit the ability of the technology, or should we redefine the laws to govern them more effectively?
Certainly, the internet and its powers of connectivity have enabled sedition and revolt within countries all over the world. The Arab Spring of 2011, specifically in Egypt and Tunisia, was significantly abetted by Twitter and Facebook, enabling demonstrators to organize protests and mobilize crowds. 90% of activists polled said they used social media in some form of activism. During the revolutions, the number of Facebook users in nearly all of the countries engaged in the Arab Spring doubled. The regimes which were being protested were keenly aware of this new social capability, and consequently shut down internet wherever possible. In Egypt, the internet blackout lasted 5 days, though it was unable to curb the riots, and may have counteracted efforts to suppress the public demonstrations.
The Arab Spring cut offs of internet access were the first such expansive restrictions by a government in an effort to control its citizens. Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and other North African countries with more authoritarian governments have limited connections from their national network, or intranet, to the global network. These connections are tightly controlled by the government itself, which has enabled these countries to effectively shut off access.
In China, much like Egypt and Tunisia, the government has strengthened its grip over what information can flow through its network. The “Great Firewall”, China’s internet censorship program, was enacted almost immediately after China connected to the internet in 1997, in order to limit information that is deemed “subversive” to the people of China. China maintains a uniquely intimate relationship with internet companies, as well as providing the internet itself, and so Chinese search engines like Baidu also limit their indexing of banned websites.
In recent times, China has asserted its right to a “cyberspace sovereignty” in the international community. According to leading Chinese internet experts, “As in the high seas or other countries’ territorial waters, airspace within the vessels, aircraft and so belong to the national territory, then the physical network in the formation of national network space, naturally belongs to national territory. As a result, national sovereignty over cyberspace can naturally be exercised.” They reaffirm a stance held by the UN as of 2013, which states that “State sovereignty and the international norms and principles that flow from it apply to States’ conduct of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies)-related activities and to their jurisdiction over ICT infrastructure with their territory.”
While many international companies have stated that the Great Firewall stifles legitimate business practices, the Chinese internet economy has remained lucrative. Indeed, China maintains one in four internet users in the world; AliBaba, the Chinese e-commerce website, launched Wall Street’s largest Initial Public Offering; and four of the top 10 internet companies are hosted behind the censors of the Chinese government. Therefore, while the Chinese policy of regulating the internet stands in stark contrast with the West, it continues to grow and develop, albeit disconnected, both literally and figuratively.
In the United States, the National Security Agency (NSA) led covert surveillance programs which monitored certain keywords and accounts for terrorist activity. This program, commonly called “PRISM”, exceeded the bounds of the United States Constitution, the supreme legal authority which governs laws and government activity. This means that the actions by the US government in surveilling internet activity were not in accordance with prior civil protections that it had in place. The United States places a particular significance on the freedom of speech and right to privacy, and so citizens were considerably angered by the revelation that they were being “tapped,” which was disclosed after a leak of secret documents was published by the British newspaper The Guardian, and the American newspaper The Washington Post.
In addition to the monitoring of US citizens, the PRISM program surveilled most forms of foreign data entering the United States. These actions were enabled by the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA). Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand all share in monitoring global communications under a secret pact known as the Five Eyes Agreement, dating back to World War II. Under this agreement, these five English speaking countries share signal intelligence, which amounts to each member nation spying on the other four. Clearly, the bounds that sovereignty had been defined by were surpassed by internet surveillance programs across the world.
The questions, suspicions, and gut reactions that these programs rouse within the average citizen are critical to establishing how the internet should be governed. Should access to an unrestricted, unmonitored internet be a human right? How can individual governments act to maintain their borders on the borderless internet? Can the internet stay as free as it was intended to be in an increasingly hostile political environment? How can we ensure the future of an internet which promotes international collaboration and enables individuals?
Encryption and Secrecy
The fundamental tenet of encryption is to make data that is otherwise readable render it -- through various algorithmic procedures -- into something completely illegible by both humans and machines alike. There are two basic types of encryption used widely in the world today: symmetric and antisymmetric encryption. Symmetric encryption allows for one key sequence to be able to jumble, and correspondingly, unjumble information at will. Some businesses and organisations use symmetric encryption as the one and only line of defence against cyber-security threats. Asymmetric encryption systems, on the other hand, are built from multiple keys sequences. There is typically one key that encrypts the information, and another one that decrypts the information.
Encryption is ubiquitous in our daily lives -- all forms of our digitized, day to day communications are encrypted at some level. This includes everything from texts sent through messaging services like WhatsApp, to communications conducted by military channels. Though the level of sophistication of these algorithms is continually varying, a mechanism that allows these encryption algorithms to be cracked has, not only profound implications for the nature of cybersecurity, but the very foundations of political world order. Third party hacker groups, rogue nations, antagonized political blocs all would have the capability to arbitrarily shut down military and economic institutions around the world leading to socio-economic and political calamity. The very notion of online privacy would become farcical -- sensitive information held on our private disks and servers would now be an open book, available for anyone with enough technical nous to read at their own leisure. Compromising our ability to encrypt information would in tandem compromise our right to privacy and anonymity as we know it.
Current Situation: Peacekeeping
Sex Abuses
In recent times, peacekeeping missions have been associated with a rise in sexual abuse. Though the sexual abuse of civilians by military presences in the area is not a new phenomenon, it is significant that the United Nations Peacekeepers, an organization that relies on international cooperation and trust, lacks the ability to discipline its officers from such grave offenses. In fact, it is a systemic issue inherent in international cooperation that allows for crimes by Peacekeepers to go unpunished. In missions throughout the world, ostensibly beginning in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, though first reported in the Central African Republic in 2013, peacekeepers have been widely accused of sexually assaulting, trafficking, and abusing civilians.
Peacekeeping presence in a country promotes sex trade and sex trafficking. “The sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would have been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia,” said David Lamb, a regional human rights officer covering the violence in Bosnia in 2000. The sex slave trade grows rapidly and extensively in nearly every country where peacekeepers work. Consider the UN mission to Cambodia (UNTAC) from 1992 to 1993, in which the French and Bulgarian battalions were accused of establishing their own brothels or prostitution rings. Estimates suggest that the number of prostitutes in Cambodia tripled or quadrupled while the Peacekeepers were present.
Rape is also rampant near peacekeeping camps. While in most cases the prostitution, while exploitative, is still consensual, there are some heinous instances reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where “rape was disguised as prostitution.” In these cases, young women were raped, and subsequently given food or money after the fact to veil the rape behind the murkier instances of prostitution. There were 72 allegations of rape against the Peacekeepers: 68 military, and 4 civilian officers in 2004. This is dwarfed by the unfortunate rise in allegations since; in 2015, there were 99 allegations made against UN staff, a 25% increase in reports, compared to 2014. More concerning still, in countries such as Mozambique, the majority of allegations involved victims under the age of 18 being raped or sold into prostitution.
The side effects of peacekeeping sexual exploitation are severe. Most immediately, these crimes are violations of local and international law, as well as a violation of human rights. Sex trafficking accelerates the spread of sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS in already perilous regions of the world. In addition, prostitution establishes an unhealthy economic dependence between sex workers and peacekeepers. The abhorrent behavior undermines the ability of the UN to establish trust and cooperative relationships with the communities they are trying to rehabilitate. Finally, impregnated women who cannot afford contraceptives are forced to carry unwanted children, a practice so common their children are called “peacekeeper babies.”
The UN’s responses to these allegations have thus far been ineffective at stopping sexual assault, considering that the most recent accusations against peacekeepers were made in April of 2016, and have continued for more than 20 years. Though progressively more incriminating reports continue to be released, such as the Brahimi Report (2000), followed by A Comprehensive Strategy (2006), sexual exploitation continues to plague Peacekeeping operations.
The main reason for its perpetuation is the lack of a disciplinary structure within the United Nations. If a Peacekeeper breaks a law while on a mission, the only consequence for the officer is repatriation; it is then the responsibility of the supporting country to reprimand the officer, or have them extradited to the country where the crime was committed. However, the difficulty of arranging international extradition essentially allows these soldiers to go unpunished. Others also attribute blame to the UN itself, for using bureaucratic deadlock to prevent said allegations from ever coming to light. In any case, sexual abuse by peacekeepers threatens to destroy the image and trust the UN has spent decades building up to today, and will continue to inhibit the UN’s ability to work as an international organization until it reforms itself.
Haiti
The UN Peacekeeping mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH) to stabilize the government began in 2004 after President Bertrand Aristide fled Haiti in exile following a violent coup d’etat. Though the mission was slated to end in October of 2010, the 7.0 M earthquake in January of 2010 severely damaged the nation, crippling the economy and government. The mandate was then extended to address the recovery operations and increase the Peacekeeping presence in Haiti by 3500.
Three months earlier and halfway across the world, Jajarkot, Nepal was in the midst of its worst cholera outbreak on record. Nepal, which currently maintains a presence of 507 officers in Haiti and is the 7th largest provider of peacekeepers to the UN, reported over 30,000 people affected by the outbreak. Cholera, which is endemic to Nepal, typically spreads during the monsoon season from June to October, and contracts during the off season. However, based on its climate, which averages above freezing for the entire year, and its close proximity to Bangladesh, the ‘homeland of cholera,’ cholera scourges Nepal on a regular basis.
By October 22, 2010, the cholera outbreak in Nepal had receded, but the first cases of cholera in Haiti in a century were being reported along the northern Artibonite River, Haiti’s main waterway. Less than a month later, every department in Haiti was enflamed in one of the worst cholera outbreaks ever recorded. By the end of the first wave of the outbreak in mid-April of 2011, 280,000 cases of cholera were reported to the national cholera surveillance system, including more than 150,000 hospitalizations and almost 5,000 deaths. However, mortality rates were severely underreported, according to a retrospective report by the CDC. In total, roughly 800,000 have been diagnosed with cholera and 10,000 people in Haiti have died, though some believe it could be orders of magnitude higher.
Though recent medical studies confirmed the provenance of the outbreak to be the Nepalese Peacekeeping camp, which leached its contaminated sewage into the water supply of the Haitian countryside, and though the international community has come to the consensus that the cholera epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations,” the UN had remained dismissive of the overwhelming evidence that it was at fault for nearly six years. Only in August of 2016 did the UN acknowledge the role that it played in introducing cholera to the island. In a press statement, a UN spokesperson stated, “ the UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.” Later, in December of 2016, Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General, apologized to the people of Haiti, saying to the General Assembly, “we simply did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread in Haiti. We are profoundly sorry for our role.”
Though the UN has accepted blame for the epidemic, Haitians and the international community have sought justice for the negligence that led to the introduction of cholera to the country from Nepal. 158 members of Congress in the United States, the UN’s largest economic supporter, have sought reparations to cholera victims in Haiti. In New York, the host city of the United Nations, three different lawsuits against the UN were argued, then squashed as a result of the diplomatic immunity the UN enjoys. Initial estimates at financial compensation for cholera victims predicted nearly $40 billion in reparations to Haiti, five times the annual global budgets of the Peacekeepers. In response to the insurmountable cost of redressing Haiti by legal injunctions, the UN has instead put forth a plan to strengthen Haiti’s medical and water infrastructure, while also aggressively vaccinating citizens and paying victims and families for their loss over the next two years. However, a question always on the mind of the UN given its recent budget shortages, is whether adequate funding will be secured to complete the project.
The cholera outbreak in Haiti has revealed a series of critical issues and policies that need to be addressed and reformed. First, Peacekeepers need to enforce health and safety procedures more strictly. Second, the United Nations needs a forum, within the international legal framework, to be able to be held accountable for failures without reducing its utility as a force of good. Finally, the UN must establish a way to redress victims for its mistakes.
South Sudan
In 2011, South Sudan became the newest country in the world, seceding from Sudan after a national referendum voted with extremely wide support for South Sudan’s independence. North and South Sudan, while united, had been engaged in a bloody civil war that killed nearly 1.5 million Sudanese people in its twenty year long struggle. Like most political shifts in Africa, the independence of South Sudan was accompanied by a UN Peacekeeping mission (UNMISS) to “consolidate peace and security and to help establish conditions for development.”
Only two years later, in December of 2013, the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, accused his deputy and vice president, Riek Machar, of an attempted coup d’etat, which initiated violence in the capital. The fighting quickly spread throughout the nascent country.
Within four days, 20,000 people had fled to UN Peacekeeping camps in the capital, and another base in Akobo was attacked by 2,000 armed ethnic Nuers, fueling concerns that an ethnically hostile civil war was afoot. Secretary General Ban attributed the casualties in attacks like Akobo throughout the country to “a lack of leadership on the part of key senior Mission personnel culminated in a chaotic and ineffective response to the violence.”
These patterns of undisciplined behavior in Peacekeeping battalions have widely plagued peacekeeping operations in South Sudan since the start of the civil war, and have escalated as the force’s size has increased to deal with the increasing violence. Most recently, on November 1, 2016, South Sudanese troops attacked a hotel filled with Western aid workers, less than a mile from a peacekeepers’ station, which did not answer the calls for help. After three years of the hostilities, UNMISS has developed a reputation in the region for neglecting to protect civilians, operating under disorganized or deserting commanders, failing to police areas of protection, and retreating from conflict. In addition, the Small Arms Survey has accused the mission of being partial in the conflict by giving arms to rebel factions in 2013. All of these allegations violate the UNMISS mandate, which has proven difficult to achieve and has been repeatedly rewritten over the course of the UN’s presence in South Sudan.
The Limits of Peacekeeping
In response to the attacks in South Sudan in November 2016, Ban Ki Moon offered “little hope” to the Security Council, stating “While the Secretariat will continue to make every effort to implement the mandated task of protecting civilians through the use of all necessary means, it must be clearly understood that United Nations peacekeeping operations do not have the appropriate reach, manpower or capabilities to stop mass atrocities.”
Secretary General Ban brings up an important point: it is beyond the scope of the UN Peacekeepers to bring peace to countries; they are only capable of maintaining it. Furthermore, extending the responsibilities of Peacekeepers has proven troublesome in places like Haiti and the Central African Republic. Humanitarian relief work by Peacekeepers, such as rebuilding water infrastructures or administering internally displaced person (IDP) camps, exceed the original scope of Peacekeeping, like the operations of the UNTSO only 70 years ago. Perhaps Peacekeeping, a predominantly military force, must refocus its responsibilities and goals for the future.
On the other hand, the effectiveness and proven success of Peacekeeping in the past is undoubtable, and suggests great promise for the future. In fact, in a United States Government Accountability Office report on the cost effectiveness of Peacekeeping, it is estimated that ”it would cost the United States about twice as much as the United Nations (UN) to conduct a peacekeeping operation similar to the current UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (designated “MINUSTAH”). Undersecretary-general of peacekeeping Herve Ladsous says, "Some operations are working very well. For instance, we are a few months away from an end to the operations in Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. Their success enables us to withdraw. However, some operations are working less well, frequently because of factors linked to the local political situation and local players, rather than to the shortcomings of our operations themselves."
There are about 100,000 peacekeepers deployed in 16 missions throughout the world, as of January 2016. In what capacity should they work, and how can the UN promote its goals for Peacekeeping for the near and distant future?
Bloc Positions
Bolivia: (47 active Peacekeepers): Bolivia led more than 3000 Peacekeepers in Haiti until the mission was retracted in 2015.
Ethiopia (8295 active peacekeepers): Ethiopia is the 4th largest contributor to Peacekeeping forces; however, it only provides Peacekeepers to African missions. It believes in participation as a way of promoting peace in its region, and is also a major policy consideration, because Ethiopia borders many other African countries. They are regularly accoladed for their Peacekeeping work. Its strong participation is driven by a combination of securing regional influence, receiving monetary support, and establishing military ties with more powerful countries abroad. Ethiopia’s ability to provide Peacekeepers is limited by regional and internal conflicts, a preference for other types of international resolution, military resistance, and poor organization. It is further challenged by a shortage of domestic legislation promoting Peacekeeping. Their support is heavily militaristic, such as helicopters.
Egypt (2869): Egypt has been a strong supporter of UN Peacekeeping missions since Peacekeeping itself began there during the UNEF I in 1956. Egyptian troops are currently deployed in nine missions globally, and continues to advocate for the expansive missions of modern Peacekeeping missions
Italy (1077): Not only is Italy one of the Peacekeeping’s largest personnel and financial supporters, it also hosts the United Nations Logistics Base, where the UN trains Peacekeepers for most international missions. Italy also has wide public support for Peacekeeping, in alignment with the Western bloc.
Japan (274): Japan’s limited military resources have shifted focus in the 21st century from Peacekeeping, beginning in 1992, to aiding the War on Terror. Japan has enjoyed the favor of the UN since the country adopted its constitution which prohibits a Japanese army. Japan financially supports 12.5% of the total Peacekeeping budget, perhaps in pursuit of a permanent seat on the Security Council. Japan remains dependent on the UN to arbitrate international disputes, specifically in the South China Sea, because it is dependent on marine trade routes for resources. Like China, the Self Defense Force of Japan (SDF) uses Peacekeeping missions as practice for military operations other than war. In addition, Peacekeeping receives wide public support in Japan. Japan limits its participation based on prioritizing US-Japan ties over UN-Japan ties, legal obstacles revolving around what constitutes a military force, and alternative security priorities within the region. Japan’s congress bipartisanly supports Peacekeeping, but its constitutional contentions stand as legal challenges that have not been and will not be easily resolved. Currently, Japan is developing an additional humanitarian force, the Central Readiness Force, to aid in recovery efforts domestic and abroad.
Kazakhstan (3): Kazakhstan began peacekeeping in 2013 in Haiti, Western Sahara, Liberia, and Cote d’Ivoire.
Senegal (3600): Senegal is the 7th largest contributor Peacekeepers internationally. They have led or held senior positions in many missions around the world. Senegal chaired the Security Council’s Working Group on Peacekeeping Operations. Senegal’s provision of Peacekeepers is driven by an interventional regional security policy, a higher salary for UN Peacekeepers as compared to Senegalese soldiers, military funding from other nations, and wide public support for the program. Its participation is limited by its belief in alternative strategies of international conflict resolution, shifting foreign policy, high short term costs, and political and military resistance. Senegal is a strong proponent for strengthening ties between domestic, national, and international forces within the Security Council. One of their major issues is the lack of female Peacekeepers; women have only been allowed to serve as Peacekeepers since 2008.
Sweden (278): Sweden has long been a proponent of Peacekeeping, seeing its support as a crucial aspect of its foreign policy. However, public support has waned in recent years, reaching nearly 20% of Swedes as ‘undecided’ regarding increased participation in Peacekeeping. Sweden’s main limitations are actually of logistics rather than participation, since it has always been in strong support of international peace frameworks.
Uruguay (1430): Uruguay is one of the strongest supporters of Peacekeeping; since 1992, nearly 25% of Uruguay’s military is devoted the UN Peacekeeping. Uruguayan foreign and military policy agree that peacekeeping is “a relatively inexpensive exercise that could divert the armed forces away from domestic politics and budgets to external roles,” a position that resonates with Senegal and other bellicose nations. Uruguay is one of the only Latin American states that provides air and sea support to missions as well. Finally, UN salaries for Peacekeepers is higher than their military peers. Despite this exceptional support, Uruguayan support has largely stopped increasing, based on high operating expenses and the recent Peacekeeping scandals.
Ukraine (482): In an effort to distance itself from Russia, Ukraine has established itself as a firm supporter of Peacekeeping. Ukraine specializes in helicopter support. It also sees Peacekeeping as a way to modernize its military, in the midst of conflict with Russia. However, any increase in quantitative support is unlikely, due to the crisis in Eastern Ukraine with Russia.
France (872): France has maintained a policy of distant participation in Peacekeeping since the 1990s, except for short lived missions in former French colonies. France and the UN maintain dissonant views of military crisis management, especially regarding the increasingly expansive objectives of UN mandates in recent times. France maintains support of Peacekeeping because, like Japan, it wants a permanent seat on the Security Council. In addition, public perception of support for Peacekeeping has become the norm in the Western bloc. In general, French military and French politics disagree with the principle of overexaggerated bureaucratic projects, especially with regards to international military aid. In addition, the conception of the French soldier as a “warrior” undermines their fiercely nationalistic identity. France instead pursues more regionally united efforts, such as by the EU, NATO or in smaller alliances with neighboring nations like Germany in aiding countries like Mali, where a UN presence has done little to improve stability. Simply, although it is a permanent member of the Security Council, and although recent developments within specific missions are becoming more harmonious with French ideals, France does not trust Peacekeeping.
UK (345): The UK remains in strong support of Peacekeeping monetarily, while rather conservative with regards to troop contribution. Their rationales for support are low, aside from perhaps the Western norm to support the UN. Unlike Sweden, the UK’s security interests usually do not overlap with the UN’s, and so the UK’s support is proportionally low. More recently, nativist and other conservative policies have become popular, and so political support for Peacekeeping has declined. Finally, the UK’s own domestic forces are strong enough to avoid the need for Peacekeeping participation in general. Peacekeeping in the UK is a low profile and low priority aspect of a large and already highly influential foreign policy.
US (72): The US remains the largest financial supporter of the Peacekeepers and one of the smallest personnel contributors in the Security Council, starting the 1990s. The US does not have a political system for responding to calls for personnel to missions, unlike most other member states. Like the UK, their security priorities do not align with the UN’s, and as a result focus their efforts elsewhere. In addition, the US is currently pivoting its diplomatic and humanitarian efforts towards Asia, to establish influence in the region, whereas the Peacekeepers focus wherever they are needed. Overall, the US remains financially supportive, even though political opinion in the US surrounding Peacekeeping is contentious and diverse.
China (2630): China’s participation in Peacekeeping missions has steadily grown in scope since 2006. China is one of the largest contributors of resources as well. China’s rising participation in Peacekeeping is rooted in its desire to uphold rising public popularity in the international community, to practice military operations other than war, and perhaps to increase its economically strategic presence in Africa. China’s foreign policy of respecting state sovereignty and nonintervention have a strong influence over which missions it supports, preferring more expansive and socially oriented missions over missions focusing on solutions such as disarmament. Chinese representation in senior Peacekeeping positions remains disproportionately low compared to Western members states. China also retains clandestine diplomatic relations with African countries where its Peacekeeping efforts are focused, leading some to question China’s intentions in the region. China’s efforts in civil engineering and reconstruction, however, are some of the best among the UNSC. In general, China remains wary of international intervention on the scale of most military Peacekeeping missions, but is very supportive of humanitarian aid and support.
Russia (105): Since the Peacekeeping failure in the Balkans, Russian Peacekeeping activity has declined significantly; Russia sees Peacekeeping as a Western front for illegal influence. However, Russia’s participation in Peacekeeping is perceived as crucial to establishing a global presence of unified peace, and Russia’s efforts in Peacekeeping are focused on securing senior leadership positions on missions and in the Peacekeeping bureaucracy. Russia has consistently opposed a “reserve force” of Peacekeepers that would bypass the need for an official mission request to constituent states, as that would limit its influence in the Security Council. Russia’s infrequent assistance is almost never impartial, offering to provide troops in Ukraine, Syria, and Israel, places where Russia maintains heavily vested interests. Like China, Russia also wishes to establish a favorable presence in Africa, likely with economic motivations. Russia is the second largest contractor services supplier of Peacekeepers, and the largest air transportation supplier, so Peacekeeping missions, though antithetical, are lucrative for Russia. Russia also uses the veto power as a form of retaliating against Western-led actions in Syria and Ukraine. In addition, Russia resists Peacekeeping on the grounds of having alternative priorities or strategies for peace, dissent for interventionism with respect to host states, regional exceptionalism, domestic political disputes, and the remnants of Soviet military prestige. Russia consistently falls short of its support requirements, and although Russia is intent on increasing its presence as a contributing state to Peacekeeping missions, it is likely doing so to increase its global influence rather than to serve a common good. Russia is aware of its ability to augment Peacekeeping ability worldwide, and looks to interact more with missions in the future.
Questions to Consider
1. What should be the focus of Peacekeeping moving onwards?
2. How should states be held accountable for their pledged contributions to Peacekeeping?
3. How should states be held accountable for the actions of their Peacekeepers?
4. How should the UN be held accountable for failures in Peacekeeping?
Further Research
For info on the most advanced cyberattack ever, see https://www.wired.com/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/
For critics of the UN and its respect of sovereignty, see http://www.familywatchinternational.org/fwi/documents/fwipolicybrief_National_Sovereignty.pdf
For more info on the history of the internet, see http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
For more info on Italy’s national cybersecurity framework: https://www.sicurezzanazionale.gov.it/sisr.nsf/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/italian-national-strategic-framework-for-cyberspace-security.pdf
For more info on Peacekeeping missions in the past and present, visit the official Peacekeeping website: http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/
For more info on Peacekeeping reform within the UN, visit http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/reform.shtml
For internal UN reports on Peacekeeping, visit http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/resources/reports.shtml
For critics of Peacekeeping in Somalia, see Wilson https://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/21/2wilson.pdf and Allard http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Allard_Somalia.pdf
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