South East Asian powers and contributions to peacekeeping operations : UN-ASEAN partnering for peace?

Abstract

Regions are becoming increasingly central to both the implementation and claims to legitimacy of UN peacekeeping operations. In 2008, in the UN Secretary General published a report on the relationship between the UN and Regional Organisations (S/2008/186**), highlighting that UN-regional partnerships should develop to entail wider capacity building activities, define and refine the responsibilities of regions and the UN in both Chapter VIII and non-chapter VIII activities, and perform functions in support of disarmament and mediation. However, ten years after the UN Secretary General’s report and four years after the HIPPO report there is still an urgent need to understand how, and in response to what drivers, are UN peacekeeping operations changing? In this paper I argue that because of the UN’s approach to partnerships it excludes learning from the contributions of other global potential partners including ASEAN. As a result, although there are pathways that make it possible for such a transfer of knowledge and experience, but these are often blocked—or perhaps just obscured—by the practices within the UN; for example, the institutional stickiness around partnerships.