United Nations (UN) peacekeeping was not primarily designed to intervene in conflicts and significant battle violence. Instead, it was developed as a tool to bolster ongoing conflict resolution efforts, primarily between countries.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) located in Central Asia, has one of the most significant records in its internal conflicts and UN resolutions. The DRC’s two wars (1996–97 and 1998–2003) were a concoction of intertwined conflicts. At the regional level, the DRC was the battleground for conflicts spilling out from Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Angola (Tull, 2009), which killed more than five million people, the deadliest war since World War II (Ishizuka, 2016). Due to these events, peacekeeping missions in DRC…show more content… The shift from traditional peacekeeping to so-called robust operations has implications for all peacekeeping operations. The concept of ‘robustness’ in UN peacekeeping is a political and operational strategy to signal the intention of a UN mission to implement its mandate and to deter threats from spoilers. A robust approach is guided by the mission objectives established by the Security Council and should be driven by a clear political strategy (Murphy, 2016). It could be argued that the description perfectly captures the kind of operation undertaken in the DRC, but the exact limits of the use of force and where the line crosses from robust to enforcement is difficult to outline in practice as well as theory and it shares many of the characteristics of NATO peace support operations…show more content… Moreover, peace enforcement violates one of the main principles of UN peacekeeping which is non-use of force except in self-defense and defense of the mandate. A peace enforcement operation has three features: it is neither neutral nor consensual, and it is authorized to wage war to accomplish its political goals. It is more likely for humanitarian abuse of civilians to increase because of the aggressiveness of the nature of their power. It is a coercive invasions of countries by an UN-authorized force, intent on destroying or changing a threat to international peace and security (Hurd,