Defence Forces Review 2008

UNMIL – A UN Success Story
Stedman and George Downs suggest that a reasonable gauge of success is whether peace
prevails in the host countries at the moment when peace-building agencies depart.
Rowland Paris argues that the principle characteristic of peace building is to establish the
conditions for stable and lasting peace in countries that are just emerging from civil war. The
key words here are stable and lasting peace. Stedman and Downs’s assertion that peace at the
moment the peace-builder leaves is not a suitable gauge to assess the success of a deployment.
Paris’s view that peace must be lasting, and that success can only be judged when peace
remains long after the peacekeepers have left, is the most credible form of assessment in
the current situation. Sustained peace and stability assessed over time is perhaps the most
appropriate method of assessing a deployment as complex as UNMIL.
The necessity for peacekeeping missions to include a robust mandate coupled with a strong
and strategic peace-building ethos is essential if success is to be achieved. Peace building
is a necessary component of the peacekeepers exit strategy and in order for peace building
to succeed the internal actors must be willing to embrace the environment created by the
peacekeepers. 25 The peace-building element of peacekeeping operations must have goals, and
it is these goals that we can also use to assess and evaluate UNMIL. The Action Research
Initiative (ARIA) project was designed to develop, contextually appropriate means for the
evaluation of conflict resolution activities. Evaluation should be seen as an integral part of the
peacekeeping and peace building structure. The use of broad terms to define mission activities
such as ‘promoting peace’ provided an obstacle to effective mission evaluation. The impact
the UN deployment has had on state institutions, the ‘reverberation’ effect, the impact on
micro-level interventions that reverberate to the wider society and the methods of addressing
ethnic tensions must be studied as an integral element to the exit strategy. 26
An integral part of the UN’s new approach to peacekeeping is the evaluation of ongoing
deployments. The UNDPKO has since 2001 a Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit, which was
renamed Peacekeeping Best Practices Section in 2005 and was reformed again in 2007. 27
Its role in the peacekeeping framework is to function as a ‘learning manager’ and develop
best peacekeeping practice from lessons learned drawn from all deployments, on an ongoing
basis. The UN produces progress reports on its deployed missions and in these reports an
update is provided on the situation in that mission area. The reports address the mandate
areas and provide updates for member states on the progress of each strand of the mandate,
including problems and difficulties. These reports not alone cover peacekeeping activities but
other areas of UN involvement in theatre, such as humanitarian activities, human rights and
financial considerations. Each report also lists ‘observations’ that provide an assessment of
what has been done, what remains to be done and a reminder to the international community
of the continued necessity for support, both political and financial.
To date fifteen progress reports have been produced by the Secretary General for the General
Assembly on the UNMIL mission, from 15 December 2003 to 08 August 2007. 28
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