Has there ever been a time that two adversarial countries at the brink of or engaged in actual war came to an amicable agreement as the result of UN efforts? Has there even ever been a time that ALL parties involved accepted a UN resolution as being the guiding line of how they should act regarding a conflict and acted accordingly ?
This question is not asking about situations where the UN has kept the peace between warring parties by placing troops as peacekeepers between them.
UNIIMOG was set up in 1988 to de-militarize Iran-Iraq relations after the 1990-88 Iran-Iraq war.
It was disbanded 3 years later, after everyone withdrew to where they belonged.
The United Nations Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) was a United Nations commission created during the Iran–Iraq War by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 619 of August 9, 1988. The withdrawal of UNIIMOG forces in 1991 marked the official end to the Iran–Iraq War.[1][2]
The goal of UNIIMOG was to monitor, since August 1988, the armistice held between both parties, which was drawn following Security Council Resolution 598 of July 20, 1987. A personal representative of the UN Secretary-General secured the implementation of the UN resolution, and Brigadier General Anam Khan, from Bangladesh, stood as the highest military observer on both sides.
According to the UN, "UNIIMOG was established in August 1988 to verify, confirm and supervise the ceasefire and the withdrawal of all forces to the internationally recognized boundaries, pending a comprehensive settlement. UNIMOG was terminated in February 1991 after Iran and Iraq had fully withdrawn their forces to the internationally recognized boundaries."
The Cyprus mission has also worked well, except that it's a bit ridiculous the world is still footing the bill for it 50 years later.
In the traditional view, the UN isn't in the job of "making peace". It is in the job of facilitating de-escalation.
It's not that bad at this traditional, classical, approach, given favorable circumstances: stable states that both want a ceasefire and are ready to respect it.
Arguably, not many of these ingredients are present in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
It should be added that in most state-on-state cases the UN is seen as good faith, neutral broker by the different state parties. That really doesn't seem to be case here either. Israel distrusts the UN, the Palestinians will try to use their leverage in it to gain advantage and the UN isn't willing or ready to enforce peace.
That doesn't mean the UN is useless in other state-on-state missions, elsewhere.
Turns out that's not the entire story however. Found a paper from the American Foreign Service Association - Why Peacekeeping Fails - that points out, correctly, that many of the historical assumptions and statements about UN mission types don't hold true anymore.
They divide UN missions into 3 groups:
i.e. what was just covered above.
In classical peacekeeping operations, the peacekeepers had the uncomplicated assignment of monitoring a demilitarized zone between the two armies following a war between countries over territory. The goal was to allow both sides to have the confidence that neither was taking advantage of a cease-fire to improve its military position. The combatants had a wide variety of weapons at their disposal, but they were generally disciplined military forces that attacked each other rather than civilians. So while the work had its risks, the peacekeepers were not targeted.
and yes, they address the never-ending bit:
If the United States wants to save money on peacekeeping, it should push to close all six classical operations (and the non- U.N. mission in the Sinai). If the countries involved and their main supporters want to retain the peacekeepers, they should be required to pick up the tab.
The term is jargon-y, but they seem to mean keeping the peace in ethnically divided and/or civil war contexts, as they give Kosovo and Haiti as examples, as well as Angola wrt a rebellion. It's not state-to-state but it's still relatively old-school stuff and no combat is required from the UN:
Once a cease-fire was established in these wars, peacekeepers could be sent. They brought a long list of goals to accomplish to help the peace become permanent. The list could include demobilization of most of the former combatants, helping them reintegrate into civilian life, forming a new national army that was not loyal to only one faction, aiding refugees and displaced persons with returning to their homes, providing humanitarian aid and development assistance to restart the economy, and holding elections in a country with little-to-no democratic experience.
While the United Nations has had mixed results in its multidimensional peacekeeping missions, they are, at least for the moment, largely a thing of the past.
Traditionally, three principles have guided the conduct of peacekeepers: (1) They became involved only at the invitation of the parties to the conflict; (2) They were to be strictly neutral; and, (3) They were to use force only in self-defense. If these principles were not adhered to, a situation could prove disastrous. For instance, when peacekeepers took sides in the Congo in 1960 and Somalia in the early 1990s, hundreds of them died as they were drawn into the fighting.
At the risk of being tautological, peacekeepers are bound to fail if there is no peace to keep. When a cease-fire is negotiated, peacekeepers can do their work. Without one, they are either ineffective or the international community is faced with ordering them to try to impose an end to the fighting. That requires the international community to be willing to have the peacekeepers inflict and take casualties.
The rise of terrorism is the reason the final stage in the evolution of peacekeeping has become so dangerous. Perhaps reflecting the lack of an agreed definition of terrorism, many in the United Nations and elsewhere prefer to use the term “violent extremism.” Terrorists are indistinguishable from noncombatants; they will use any type of weapon, and their objective is to kill innocent people to call attention to their cause. Whatever it is called, when extremist violence comes into play there is no role for peacekeeping. Yet peacekeepers are being asked not only to protect civilians but, often, to help the government stabilize the situation and extend its control over its own territory in countries threatened by extremists.
To make matters much worse, the five countries where these protection and stabilization missions are taking place—Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—have governments that are among the most corrupt, repressive and incompetent in the world. One need only to look at their corruption rankings by Transparency International, their political liberty rankings by Freedom House or their governance scores on the Ibrahim Index to confirm that.
The fundamental problem is that there is no peace to keep, and U.N. forces are incapable of imposing one because they are peacekeepers and not warfighters. If the international community wants to try to impose a peace, it should send troops that are capable and willing to do that.
p.s. I suspect that if there is ever a real, comprehensive, deal between Israel and Palestine, the enforcement of it will have to be "outsourced" in some form to a more trusted, as well as more powerful, set of outsiders.
But even getting that far probably requires the "violent extremism" components of that conflict to be massaged into a more normal state-on-state configuration, with states that are actually states, actually want peace and have sidelined their more extreme elements from their governments.
There's a 2013 paper that tried to assess the level of compliance with UN[SC] resolutions, in civil wars, which have become the main focus of the UN after the [1st] cold war ended.
Its conclusions were that
Demands made in the presence of a peacekeeping operation with a multidimensional mandate or a mandated monitoring mechanism are associated with higher odds of compliance.
Demands made during periods of low-intensity or no fighting are associated with higher odds of compliance.
Demands made in the presence of a traditional peacekeeping operation, alongside a current or previously imposed sanctions regime, or following a Security Council field mission tend to be associated with lower odds of compliance.
Situations in which there is a proximate ongoing war, there are significant sources of lootable resources, or there has been a negative political shock [defined as a large shift toward autocracy] all have a negative correlation with compliance.
Surprisingly, a lack of continuous consensus between the permanent members of the Security Council regarding a resolution is positively associated with compliance.
Finally, the use of threats by the council presents mixed results, and the fact that a demand reiterates activity already agreed to by parties through an existing peace process has no effect.
The author actually has a theory for the penultimate point, namely that if the P5 moved from no consensus to consensus, one of the parties had P5 backing for continued fighting, support which then ended for some reason (be it that the goal of that party/supporter was achieved or they gave up).
The author doesn't seem to have much of an idea why (UNSC-agreed) sanctions appear not to work in the indend direction, in this context (of stopping a conflict). Says that more research is needed on that.
