In 1948, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) was deployed as the first United Nations peacekeeping mission, mandated to monitor the Arab-Israeli ceasefire. In the aftermath of World War II, the international system had evolved into a bipolar order in which international actors were focused mostly on interstate disturbances and proxy wars. During this time, organized crime was mostly concentrated in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Naples, Palermo, and Tokyo, and of little significance to the international community. Peace operations and organized crime were separate and unrelated issues.
Sixty years later, however, as the international system changed and fragile states came into the spotlight, the trajectories converged. Both UN peacekeeping and organized crime have evolved over four distinct generations, adapting to their environment during similar time periods, despite the fact that organized crime was essentially driven by market forces, while peace operations came about as the result of primarily political developments and decisions.
A new report from the International Peace Institute, "The Elephant in the Room," lays out this issue in depth. (The International Peace Institute also publishes the Global Observatory). It suggests that organized crime–in its various forms–is a serious threat to peace in virtually every theater where the UN has a peace operation or mission: from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from Mali to Somalia. Yet, out of 28 currently deployed UN missions, less than half have a mandate with an explicit reference to organized crime, and even most of these lack the resources to implement their crime-fighting mandates effectively.
- As indicated in the report, the main reason for the disconnect between peace operations and addressing organized crime can be found in the structural development of peacekeeping as a politically-driven process highly dependent on political will of sovereign states, while organized crime has flourished as an economically-fuelled phenomenon nourished by increasing globalization and state erosion.
- The report lists other causes of disconnect, including peacekeeping missions’ lack of appropriate mandates and response capabilities, the political expediency of senior UN and host government officials, and the lack of sufficient functional adjustment of “peacekeeping” as outlined below.
- The analysis in the report clearly reveals that the problem has been largely ignored, due to a lack of awareness or political will, a fear of its size and extent, and the difficulty of dealing with the challenge. “But ignoring the problem does not make it go away,” the report states—in fact, “it makes it worse.”
- It can be concluded from the report that UN peace operations have yet to fully adjust from a purely responsive mechanism to violent conflicts to a comprehensive strategy for stabilizing societies, including measures to address and eradicate organized crime. As trajectories of organized crime and peace operations converge, so too should operational responses—particularly in fragile states.
Until the late 1980s, UN peace operations were conceived as a tool to monitor ceasefires in established buffer zones between warring parties. At that time, organized crime was seen by the international community as a relatively isolated problem mostly concentrated in cities that had not yet entrenched itself in fragile and conflict settings. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, a new and much larger generation of peace operations deployed across conflict zones in the developing world, mandated to cope with challenges of change in countries where superpower rivalry left a legacy of instability. At the same time, these conflicts and the end of the Cold War opened new opportunities for criminal groups—including “the exploitation of natural resources (drugs, diamonds, and timber) in fragile states,” as the report notes. A third generation of peace operations emerged in the mid-1990s, when protracted intrastate conflicts, civil wars, and spoiler groups necessitated more robust multidimensional deployments.
Several of the armed groups involved in these conflicts had established “close links with criminal groups, or were themselves engaged in illicit activities”—as economic globalization deepened, these groups successfully seized control of new trafficking routes and areas of operation. Responding to complex (almost exclusively intrastate) conflict scenarios in the late 1990s, peace operations evolved to include new complex tasks ranging from robust enforcement, peacebuilding, and stabilization to state or institution building and even the implementation of executive mandates—thus marking the fourth generation.