UN Emergency Peace Service and the Responsibility to Protect

This volume examines the attitudes of political, military and non-state actors towards the United Nations Emergency Peace Service, and explores issues that might affect support for the establishment of UNEPS in both theory and practice.

This book explores the United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) proposal, which is a civil society-led idea to establish a permanent UN peacekeeping service to overcome some of the shortcomings facing UN peace operations as well as to operationalise the emerging norm of the “responsibility to protect” civilians from atrocity crimes. As with previous proposals for a standing UN army or peacekeeping capacity, the UNEPS proposal has received limited support from governments partly because of concerns about its feasibility and the perception that such a service would erode state sovereignty.

The book argues that interest in, and support for, the UNEPS proposal is determined by the extent to which the “norms” embedded in the UNEPS proposal are consistent with actors’ views on the world. Another factor influencing the support the proposal enjoys is the extent to which it is perceived as realistic, achievable and capable of contributing to the workings of the UN and regional peacekeeping systems in areas that are seen to be deficient. The book makes a case for localising the UNEPS proposal so that it honours and incorporates the normative and problem-solving preferences of respondents and other actors.

Because of the diversity of responses, this book does not commit to any concrete suggestions for reforming the UNEPS proposal; however, it does suggest that UNEPS’ architects might consider developing a less ambitious proposal as a first step to creating a rapidly deployable service with the mandate to prevent atrocity crimes. It examines various alternatives towards this end. The book concludes that because the UNEPS proposal is intricately linked to the UN, trust in the world organisation is an essential ingredient in generating support for the idea. It argues that a central way of achieving this is to ensure that the values and priorities of a wide range of stakeholders are seen to be represented in the Organisation’s structure and workings.

This book will be of much interest to students of peace operations, the Responsibility to Protect, the UN, International Relations and security studie in general.