Peacekeeping and Conflict Prevention

1. Peacekeeping and Conflict Prevention By Rafael dos Santos Carlos Orosco

2. What is Peacekeeping and Conflict Prevention? • Peacekeeping and conflict prevention is the way of reducing any type violence or harassment among different cultures, races, social classes, and political disagreements. • It is defined by thefreedicionary.com as the maintenance of peace, especially the prevention of further fighting between hostile forces in an area.

3. What are the causes of Peacekeeping? • The causes for the need of peacekeeping throughout the world are: • Racial and social differences; • Cultural and political disagreements; • Control over the population; • Power and self-benefit.

4. What are the effects of Peacekeeping? • The United Nations allege that peacekeeping is one of the most effective tools to assist countries through the path from conflict to peace. • As a result of peacekeeping, peace can thrive in countries with certain difficulties, such as poverty and low education. • The effects of non-peacekeeping are: • War; • Conflicts; • People killing others for any irrational reason.

5. UN solving the issue on an international scale • The main association related to peacekeeping in an international scale is the United Nations. • The UN has been trying to solve the issue ever since 1948, and had 68 operations since then. • “Over the years, hundreds of thousands of military personnel, as well as tens of thousands of UN police and other civilians from more than 120 countries have participated in UN peacekeeping operations.” • Currently, the United Nations has 15 peacekeeping operations throughout the world.

7. Methods for Peacekeeping • “Peacekeepers monitor and observe peace processes in post-conflict areas and assist ex-combatants in implementing the peace agreements they may have signed. Such assistance comes in many forms, including confidence-building measures, power-sharing arrangements, electoral support, strengthening the rule of law, and economic and social development.”

8. Methods for Peacekeeping • The UN has 3 principles for peacekeeping. • Consent of the parties - Their acceptance of a peacekeeping operation provides the UN with the necessary freedom of action to carry out its mandated tasks. • Impartiality - United Nations peacekeepers should be impartial in their dealings with the parties to the conflict, but not neutral in the execution of their mandate. • Non-use of force except in self-defense and defense of the mandate - They may use force at the tactical level, with the authorization of the Security Council, if acting in self-defense and defense of the mandate.

9. Where is this issue more of a problem? • Around the world, most of the countries have problems with peacekeeping. However there are some countries in which the situation is more intense than others, for instance Afghanistan, countries in the middle east, North Korea, countries in Africa, Haiti among others. • Most of the countries that have peacekeeping issues are in a developing state, and the United States often interferes (or tries to) with most of them.

10. Peacekeeping in 20 Years • In a 20 years future, peacekeeping will pretty much be more of an issue, since humans will have more scarce resources than today, thus including water, power, and food. • Therefore, more countries will decide to fight over them, and will cause mire social differences, more cultural and political disagreements, and countries will want more power/control over such scarce resources.

11. Physical and Cultural Changes • Physically, the issue will create more conflicts, possibly destroying some cities and maybe even countries due to highly intensive wars. • Culturally, it will change the way humans behave as war will be seen as a normal, daily-life situation.

12. What makes peacekeepinga global issue? • Among all countries in the world, many struggle for power and resources, often for the sick of self-benefit. • Also, when talking about peacekeeping, we’re often talking about it in countries relationships, as there are more conflicts between countries than inside countries. • Due to this, almost all countries are involved in the issue for peacekeeping, making it a global issue that has to be solved in a global scale in order to become inexistent.

13. Does this issue exist in Bolivia? • Yes, this issue exists in Bolivia. However, it doesn’t involve other countries, it’s more like an internal rebellions that happen here. • The reason for such rebellions/conflicts is the political instability that Bolivia has been having ever since its independence.

14. Who is trying to solve peacekeeping in Bolivia? • In Bolivia peacekeeping is very irrelevant, in the sense that there are few actions taken for it. • For example, each time there’s a blockade the only ones that step up are the municipal police, who are effective only in certain times, as they are often corrupt and do nothing about the blockades. • Therefore, there is no direct intervention for peacekeeping in Bolivia.

16. Would this be something for ACS GIN to take on? • Yes, it could actually be something that ACS GIN could take on, but it seems quite impossible to solve between ACS GIN, because the government involved has to be changed and that’s not something that ACS GIN can reach after. • However, hypothetically talking, if we could reach government officials we’d do the following: stop corruption in the police, by increasing the police officials’ salaries, by collecting more taxes, which in our opinion would lead to more issues in the country since the society wouldn’t accept to pay more taxes that well. • Furthermore we think that the government should train the police to become more strict and tough in order to enforce the law, rule of law.