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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/04
The Future of UN State-Building: Strategic and Operational Challenges and the Legacy of Iraq
Kirsti Samuels and Sebastian von Einsiedel
May 2004
Executive Summary
Whether by accident or design, the United Nations increasingly finds itself in operations that seek to build or re-build the institutions of a state. This report discusses the challenges facing the UN in such statebuilding activities in the post-Iraq environment. Three sorts of challenges are reviewed: those arising from a lack of conceptual clarity on the aim of state-building, those resulting from the transformed strategic environment, and those operational and strategic challenges inherent to the complex task of state-building.
Conceptual Challenges:
Surprisingly, there is little clarity about precisely what sort of states are being built. Though rarely explicitly stated, it is assumed that such states ought to take the form of liberal democracies. Although concerns remain over what some perceive as a Western liberal agenda, what is striking is the extent to which certain values have become widely accepted. This is clearest in the importance now attached to democracy, but also to human rights more generally.
It is essential that the UN consider what realistically can be achieved. Creating a stable democracy is a complex, difficult, and lengthy task. Questions therefore arise whether less ambitious state-building aims, such as ensuring that some minimum standards are respected that fall short of a full-fledged liberal democracy, or simply making peace in a troubled territory, should be pursued instead.
The Post-Iraq War Environment and the “War on Terror”:
The environment in which future decisions about UN involvement in state-building will be made has been altered by the US-led war on terror and the divisive and controversial invasion of Iraq. This will have implications for the justification for future intervention, the strategies adopted, the political environment in which such decisions will be made, the relationshipbetween the US and the UN, and the operational challenges that are likely to arise.
The lesson from Iraq, at least in relation to statebuilding, may well be that such interventions are so exceptionally difficult and politically sensitive that only a body with broad international and local legitimacy stands a good chance of success. Although the UN’s own track record in state-building is mixed, the difficulties faced by the US in Iraq are seen by many to validate a role for the UN. Iraq demonstrates that state-building is easily jeopardized by bad politics, poor planning, and a failure to understand local context.
