PEACEKEEPING, PEACEMAKING, & WORLD ORDER: A STUDY OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

By Alexander Mirza

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the UN's role in peacekeeping and peacemaking in the post-Cold War era. The author evaluates the strength and shortcomings of multilateralism, its evolution, challenges, and failures. The author sees a role in peacemaking operations through U.N. multilateralism to address self-determination movements and solve the debate between humanitarian intervention and national sovereignty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jan 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665754446

Alexander Mirza

Alexander Mirza has 25 years experience in Fortune 500 corporations and start-ups. After Deloitte Consulting, he led strategy at Starwood and held senior management roles at Hilton, Ticketmaster, and Caesars. He subsequently served as CEO of Asia-based Cachet Hotels. Mirza holds degrees from Harvard Business School and Queen’s University at Kingston, where he was an Aga Khan Scholar.

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Copyright © 2024 Alexander Mirza.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5445-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5444-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023923891

Archway Publishing rev. date: 01/03/2024

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1Outlining the Post Cold War Dilemma

Chapter 2The New U.N. Multilateralism

Chapter 3The Evolution of Peacekeeping

Chapter 4Transforming U.N. Multilateralism: Drawing Lessons from the New World

Chapter 5An Agenda for Rule Supervision: From Peacekeeping to Peacemaking

Chapter 6Peacemaking Through the New Multilateralism

Epilogue: Establishing Responsible AI in a Turbulent World

Endnotes

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I cannot express enough gratitude to Professor David G. Haglund, Director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen’s University in Canada, Professor Michael Hawes, CEO of Fullbright Canada, and Queen’s law Professor Venkata Raman, and former Member of the United Nations Secretariat, for their contributions as thesis supervisors and for designing an exceptional place for me as a master’s student in their respective PhD and graduate law programs.

The subject matter of this research was inspired by my late grandfather Raisat Jalali, whose understated career as a civil servant spanned colonial India to Canada where he was awarded for 26 years of service by Canadian Prime Minister Chretien. His idealism is carried forward by my brother, Justice Faizal Mirza, a former member of Justin Trudeau’s National Security Intelligence Review Agency, a Professor at Osgoode Hall and the University of Toronto and an author of a leading textbook in criminal law practice.

This work would also not have been conceivable without the intellectual contributions of my wife Barbara Roblin Mirza. At the time I authored this thesis she was studying international law under leading scholars in human rights and self-determination movements at the University of Toronto Law School where she was Co-Editor and Chief of the Law Review.

I’m also grateful to the Aga Khan Foundation who granted me their Canadian Scholarship in international economic development, for my entire five years at Queen’s University at Kingston. Finally, I am fortunate to have benefited from the diverse intellectual contributions of my executive team during my tenure as President of the Queen’s International Affairs Association (QIAA). Our deliberations and debates amongst ourselves and with ambassadors and diplomats from around the world including Israel, Egypt, the U.K., France, the U.S., and NATO provided an ideal incubator for experimentation and accelerated the discoveries shared in this research. My heartfelt thanks.

INTRODUCTION

Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and World Order: A Study of the International System is my master’s thesis completed at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 1992-1993. In the early 1990s, the Cold War ended, and U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s vision of a New World Order based on multilateral cooperation through international organizations reintroduced collective security as a paradigm governing dispute resolution. For idealists, the wave of democratization sweeping the globe signaled that human civilization was progressing towards what scholar Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.

The euphoria was short-lived.

In the decade that followed, international peacekeeping failures in Central Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere deflated the prospects of collective security. Instead, the end of the East-West conflict resulted in an unprecedented number of self-determination movements, giving rise to a new generation of ethnic, religious, and communal conflicts. The U.N. recognized over 30 newly created nation-states amidst a rising number of failed states unable to enforce laws and provide public goods and services to their citizens.

Three decades later, there is still no stand-by international peacekeeping force capable of pre-empting or responding to interstate or internal threats to peace and security. Nor is there a global organization capable of facilitating a post-war transition to democratic governance.

In the 21st century, climate change and an artificial intelligence arms race have accelerated instability, exacerbating the largest-ever refugee movements around the globe. The 2020s have witnessed the West’s dismal failure to deliver democratic transitions in the Middle East, irredentist wars in Europe, and large-scale violations of minority rights in Asia and Africa, resulting in millions of deaths.

Many scholars predict that we are heading into an extended period of instability and that World War III may result in a new international system ushered in by a non-Western civilization with alternative perspectives on human development and democratization.

This raises the following question: are we deemed to repeat history, or can World War III be averted?

As a new generation of government leaders comes to power, they confront another rising stakeholder. Many big technology firms that control data and information networks have a greater influence on international peace and security than many heads of state and international organizations. Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and unprecedented access to global capital sources create opportunities for paradigmatic change led by these non-state actors whose allegiance is to their shareholders rather than national governments or citizens of any country.

These discontinuities represent an existential threat to the future of humanity. But they may also give rise to a new generation of global citizens who see the benefits of spearheading a multilateral system for peacekeeping and peacemaking while there is still time.

Alexander Mirza

Malibu, California

CHAPTER 1

Outlining the Post Cold War Dilemma

The legitimacy of future U.N. Security Council operations is contingent on the political willingness of member states to develop a more structured system for conducting peace imposing military activities.

M any have long believed that the provisions contained in the United Nations Charter are all-flexible, representing our best hope for the development of collective approaches to the maintenance of world order. ¹ Actually, the Charter has proved to be less than fully inclusive: the collective security system enacted by the U.N. Charter framers has been forced to evolve through the creation of an informal peacekeeping measures and third-party half-way house between enforcement mediation. ²

Subsequently, some have observed that this newly-invented inter- positional arbitration along with the sanctions instruments contained in the Charter together provide the most effective tools for collective internationalism. ³ However, it will be seen that because of the emergence of new security dilemmas in the post-Cold War era this assumed effectiveness must be questioned.

Over the past several decades, it has also been observed that one consequence of the divisive East-West conflict, characterized by a common recourse to collective defense arrangements, as well as unilateral efforts at strategic containment, has been a constraining of the UN’s operational framework. ⁴ During the Cold War, the permanent members limited their investments in the UN system, thus reneging on their larger Charter obligations for maintaining peace, and discouraging opportunities for the growth of UN military proficiency.

The end of the veto paralysis in the immediate post-Cold War era has facilitated the prospects for conflict management through the United Nations. ⁵ However, despite the order-seeking experience during the 1991 Gulf War campaign, it has become increasingly obvious that the conventional norms of U. N. peacekeeping are becoming politically, operationally, and financially problematic to the various actors in the new world. ⁶ It is the central argument of this thesis that the legitimacy of future U.N. Security Council operations is contingent on the political willingness of member states to develop a more structured system for conducting peace imposing military activities.

Some observers have suggested that the post-cold war generation is faced with two foreseeable problems, the first of which is nationalism and ethnic strife. ⁷ Specifically, the aggressive intensification of aggregate, post-Cold War nationalisms and the proliferation of inter- ethnic and inter-communal conflicts has called into question George Bush’s so-called new world order, which was based on consultation and cooperation in international organizations. ⁸ In this setting, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the relative economic decline of the United States, and the political illegitimacy of rising challenger states (such as Germany and Japan) has worsened the international community’s capacity to deal with already aggravated regional conflicts. ⁹ For instance, the emergence of war-torn new entities out of states such as the former Soviet Union offers a telling illustration of what historian Augustus Norton calls irredentist campaigns, and political scientist James Rosenau terms sub-groupism. ¹⁰ In response to these developments, the UN Security council of the late 20th century is being forced to cope with the tragic resurgence of ethnic, religious and other nationalist conflicts across the globe.

The external management of these rising nationalisms is often made more difficult by the presence of militant, religious radicalism. As military expenditures continue to generate a disproportionately large allotment of income in the Third World, Egyptian political scientist Saad E. Ibrahim perhaps most succinctly outlines the new security problem after the Cold War: each society is going back to the delayed items of the agenda: how to divide or distribute power, to distribute wealth, to distribute prestige. ¹¹ Civil conflicts based on religious affiliations, such as those between Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Azerbaijanis and Armenians in the post- soviet republics, are often cases where political compromise and third-party mediation becomes especially difficult. ¹² As well, the pre- eminence of Islamic fundamentalism as a political religion has provided yet another nationalist mobilization platform, for anti- Western movements.

All of this is to say that the resurgence of religiopolitics, the explosion of ethnic enmities and new attitudes towards authority suggest that instability has become the central problem of the 1990s.

A second group of factors shaping the 1990s security dilemma are associated with the frailty of new democracies and the emergence of collapsing states. Already, Somalia and Cambodia are amongst those heading the extending list of states, where Lebanonization, or extreme internal fragmentation in the forms of civil strife, government collapse and overwhelming economic deprivation has demanded a peace-imposing response from the international community. Additionally, problems of governability also characterize fledging democracies in Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Overall, it seems evident that the effectiveness of governments has become increasingly based on the ability of national political agents to meet the cultural and material needs of their sometimes troubled peoples. ¹³

In this setting, the doomsday predictions offered by both economists and environmentalists are very troubling. They argue that

Reviews for PEACEKEEPING, PEACEMAKING, & WORLD ORDER

[James Devin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Indeed, the author has performed a great job by extensively researching and analyzing how the United Nations has responded to world affairs in the post-COVID era. His evaluations concerning multilateralism are truly commendable. A must-read if you’re the one looking to solve the debate between humanitarian intervention and national sovereignty!