GARNET Working Paper No. 13/07

In other cases, the external intervention might be intended at one particular state, but it will
ultimately bring about positive change in the whole region. UN peacekeeping operations are
paradigmatic in this regard. The deployment of traditional or robust peacekeeping operations,
which might envisage the monitoring of cease-fires, social and political reconstruction,
disarmament, promotion of human rights or enforcement of a cease-fire in one specific
country will likely transform in a positive way the dynamics in a region. For instance the
recent deployment of a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon following the Israel-Lebanon war
(2006) certainly had broader security goals than the mere pacification of the southern part of
the country.
Regional Provision of Peace and Security
The third example in which the regional level stands out presupposes the emergence of a
regional actor with the capacity to produce peace and security (internally or externally).
Peace (negative and positive) is occasionally treated as a global issue (see Mendez, 1999).
This study does not challenge the idea that peace (and security) is a state (or a value), which,
if produced globally, would benefit virtually everyone. This idea marginalizes, however, the
crucial question of production of peace. As Olson cautioned “the desire for peace (…) for
orderly financial arrangements for multilateral trade, for the advance of basic knowledge, and
for an ecological viable planet are now virtually universal, yet these collective goods are only
episodically or scantily supplied” (cited in Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern, 1999:14). Who is able
to produce and sustain global peace The only global organization, which could legally
provide such arrangement, is the United Nations. But, since its foundation in 1945, the UN
has proven incapable of working as a collective security organization insomuch as the
national security agenda of great powers leads them, regularly, to engage in military disputes,
which are incongruent with the collective security principles. Not surprisingly, thereby,
the UN is consigning the responsibility to handle ‘regional conflicts’ to regional
organizations (Diehl and Lepgold, 2003; Pugh and Sidhu, 2003; Graham and Felício, 2006).
In his September 2006 report, ‘A Regional-Global Security Partnership: Opportunities and
Challenges’, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan briefly sketched this growing trend:
“a representative list of regional and other partners that have collaborated politically or codeployed
with the United Nations peacekeeping operations includes the AU in Burundi,
Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan; ECOWAS in Ivory
Coast, Sierra Leone and Liberia; the EU in Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo
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