Global Governance 11 (2005), 147–160

Mandates Matter:
An Exploration of Impartiality in
United Nations Operations


Jane Boulden

The idea of UN impartiality has long been assumed as a characteris-

tic of certain UN military operations but has never been explored. I
argue that the impartiality of a UN mandate needs to be considered
separately from the impartiality of the implementation of that man-
date. Such a separation reveals that maintaining an overall framework
of impartiality in UN operations is critically dependent on the nature
of the mandate. An analysis of UN operations on this basis reveals that
Security Council mandates for UN military operations whose tasks
extend beyond the observance of agreements made by the parties to
the conflict are not impartial. Often, however, these mandates are
crafted within an overall approach that is said to be impartial, thus
creating an inherent contradiction that has the potential to undermine
the operation as a whole. KEYWORDS: United Nations, Security Coun-
cil, impartiality, peace enforcement, peacekeeping.

he nature and scale of the United Nations Security Council for-

T ays into the conflicts of the early post–Cold War period took the
organization into uncharted territory, sometimes with devastating
results. These experiences prompted considerable discussion about the
merits of the UN approach. New subfields of study emerged on human-
itarian intervention, on the use of force, and on the multidimensionality
of UN operations. Much of the resulting debate was centered on the
implications of these changes for developing international norms and
practice and for determining the lessons learned for future action. Amid
this discussion little attention has been given to a characteristic that has
long been considered a foundation of most UN operations—impartial-
ity. The idea of impartiality is so much a given in the study of UN oper-
ations that it is listed consistently as a vital aspect of the UN’s charac-
ter, but it is rarely discussed and even more rarely defined.1

147
148 Mandates Matter

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of impartiality as

it applies to UN operations with Security Council mandates. The focus
here is specifically on the impartiality of UN operations as opposed to
the impartiality of the structure of the organization, its decisionmaking
bodies, or the impartiality of the organization as a whole. I propose that
in order to understand how impartiality works in UN operations, we
must disaggregate the concept and consider the impartiality of a Secu-
rity Council mandate separately from the impartiality of the implemen-
tation of that mandate. I then use this analytic framework to discuss the
inherent risks and advantages in UN impartiality and the implications
for how Security Council mandates are conceived.
The first section of the article outlines the origins of the idea that
the UN can and should be impartial in certain situations. The second
section then focuses on the disaggregation of the concept, explaining
how and why this disaggregation provides for a clearer understanding of
how impartiality works. In light of this analysis, the third section then
discusses the desirability and achievability of impartiality in UN oper-
ations, suggesting that the use of the impartiality framework in Security
Council mandates that go beyond traditional peacekeeping is rarely
achievable or desirable.

The Origins of UN Impartiality

An examination of UN impartiality must begin by asking whether

impartiality is even possible for the UN. After all, the UN is a political
organization with overtly political goals—the maintenance of inter-
national peace and security, for one—that suggest a need to take “par-
tial” positions in situations that threaten international peace and secu-
rity. Is it ever possible, then, for the UN to take impartial action in a
given situation?
The idea that the UN could act impartially is found in Article 40 of
Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The article provides that “in order to
prevent an aggravation of the situation, the Security Council may . . .
call upon the parties concerned to comply with such provisional meas-
ures as it deems necessary or desirable. Such provisional measures shall
be without prejudice to the rights, claims, or position of the parties con-
cerned.” The article is the product of a Chinese proposal at the San
Francisco negotiations.2 Prompted by its own experience in Manchuria
under the League of Nations, China believed that the Security Council
should have the ability to halt a situation before it deteriorated beyond
an ability to restore it to the status quo ante, without having to wait for
 Jane Boulden 149

agreement on broader measures. Because action, and possibly judg-

ment, on the situation is pending, the interim measures taken by the
Security Council need to be “without prejudice” to the positions of the
parties. As with much of Chapter VII of the charter, the Security Coun-
cil stalemate produced by the Cold War meant that its use of Article 40
was limited. Although many Security Council actions can be catego-
rized as falling within the parameters of Article 40, its provisions have
rarely been formally invoked in Security Council resolutions.3
The idea of UN impartiality really took root with the creation of
peacekeeping in response to the Suez crisis in 1956. With the Security
Council unable to act because of the involvement of permanent mem-
bers, the secretary-general, along with key member states, developed the
idea of peacekeeping as a way of intervening to stabilize the situation.
The concept of peacekeeping was based on three interrelated tenets: the
consent of the parties in question; the use of force only in self-defense;
and the impartiality of the operation. The speed of the development and
implementation of the concept meant that the exact definition of impar-
tiality was not initially made explicit, although the requirement that no
states with interests in the conflict would be part of the operation, and
the limitation of the mandate to overseeing the agreed cease-fire, gave a
sense of the implied meaning of impartiality in that context.
Writing two years after the successful implementation of the result-
ing UN Emergency Force (UNEF), Secretary-General Dag Hammarsk-
jöld outlined the principles involved in greater detail. In a report to the
General Assembly, he indicated that the operation had “no intent . . . to
influence the military balance in the present conflict and thereby the
political balance affecting the efforts to settle the conflict.” Nor was the
force to be used “so as to prejudge the solution of the controversial
questions involved.”4 Hammarskjöld’s explication of these characteris-
tics falls neatly within the “without prejudice” concept contained in
Article 40. However, Article 40 was not cited, because the sense that
peacekeeping should not be considered an enforcement operation gen-
erated a desire to avoid an invocation of Chapter VII.
The largely successful implementation of peacekeeping during the
Cold War worked to consolidate a sense that impartiality was both pos-
sible and desirable. The nature of these “traditional” peacekeeping oper-
ations, however, obscured the need for a more nuanced understanding
of how impartiality works. Two factors contributed to a lack of ques-
tioning of the impartial aspect of the peacekeeping concept. First,
because peacekeeping generally worked as planned, the UN was not
forced by failure to question whether impartiality was a factor in that
failure. The second factor relates to the very nature of the operations.
150 Mandates Matter

Because these operations required the consent of the parties involved

and tended to be in response to cease-fire or peace agreements already
well in place, the question of separating the impartiality of the mandate
from its implementation rarely arose. Traditional peacekeeping opera-
tions tended to be the product of mandates that did not stray beyond the
observance and maintenance of those agreements. As a consequence,
they tended to be impartial mandates. This assumption is explored more
fully in the discussion that follows.

Disaggregating Impartiality

The question of whether or not the UN is acting impartially in a given

situation must derive from an understanding of how impartiality applies
to UN operations. To the extent that the question of UN impartiality is
discussed in the literature, the discussion generally talks of impartiality
as a blanket characteristic, without determining to which aspect of UN
activity this judgment applies.
When responding to conflict situations, UN action takes a variety of
forms, and as with decisionmaking at the national level, activity occurs
at a number of levels. The UN Charter establishes the decisionmaking
structure for the organization. The political decisionmakers (the Secu-
rity Council) determine that action is required, and they establish a set
of objectives for an operation (the mandate). Those objectives are then
pursued by military means (the operation).
A determination of impartiality depends on whether impartiality
exists both within the mandate and at the operational level (how the
mandate is implemented). A violation of impartiality at either level
affects impartiality overall.

The Impartiality of Mandates

How do we determine the impartiality of a mandate? The Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary defines impartial as “not partial; not favouring one party
or side more than another; unprejudiced, unbiased, fair, just, equi-
table.”5 This definition corresponds well with the provisions of Article
40 of the charter. Both generate the same sense of decisions that should
be “without prejudice” and not favoring one side or another. On this
basis, in the context of international peace and security situations to
which the Security Council chooses to respond, this means that any
Security Council action or decision that affects one of the parties to the
conflict, in either a positive or negative way, strays from impartiality.
 Jane Boulden 151

At first glance, therefore, it appears relatively straightforward to

divide UN mandates into two categories: impartial and partial. However,
it is the inevitable gray zone between these two categories that raises dif-
ficulties. If we use the criteria just outlined for determining the impartial-
ity of Security Council mandates, the clearly impartial category consists
of those mandates whose purpose is to authorize the monitoring of peace
agreements or agreed cease-fires. Such mandates are impartial, because
all that they do is commit the UN to overseeing terms or arrangements
already agreed by the parties. The Security Council makes no determina-
tion of the nature of those terms, nor does it take any action that will alter
them. By not engaging in any political decisionmaking about the conflict
itself, or the terms of the agreement, the Security Council has created an
impartial mandate in the sense of acting without prejudice or favor to one
side or the other. In addition to traditional Cold War peacekeeping man-
dates, this category includes a number of post–Cold War operations, such
as those undertaken in Namibia and Cambodia, as well as those in which
the Security Council contracts out the overseeing of the operation, as is
the case in the UN-approved NATO-run operation in Bosnia to oversee
the Dayton Peace Agreement (SFOR).
There is also room for impartial Security Council mandates not
based on agreements, although this is quite limited. For example, a
strictly humanitarian mandate might qualify as impartial in certain sit-
uations. The closest example of this situation is the Security Council
authorization of the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) operation in Soma-
lia. The objectives of the mandate were the creation of a secure envi-
ronment to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. The mandate did
not extend any further than those humanitarian goals.6 As a conse-
quence, the mandate can be said to have been without prejudice to the
parties to the conflict and was therefore impartial.
At the other end of the spectrum are the clearly partial mandates.
These mandates establish political objectives that take a clear position
on the situation in question. For example, the UN operation in Korea in
the early 1950s and the one in the Persian Gulf in 1991 were both
directed to redress a violation of the charter by altering the situation on
the ground and were directed against specific states. They established
political objectives and were clearly partial in their approach.
Between these two ends of the spectrum there lies a middle area of
“gray zone” mandates in which the Security Council has combined
impartial and partial elements. It is this gray zone that has been the
source of the most problematic UN operations. These mandates either
begin as impartial mandates and are then altered, bringing their impar-
tiality into question, or the Security Council intervenes in situations
152 Mandates Matter

where there is no cease-fire or peace agreement on which to base the

mandate and/or where the consent of the parties is partial or tenuous.
Any decisions for action it makes in that context have the potential to
influence the position of one or more of the parties and are therefore not
impartial.
For example, in Bosnia, the initial Security Council mandate was
for a peacekeeping operation, even though the Council recognized that
the conditions for peacekeeping were not in place.7 The UN operation in
Bosnia (UNPROFOR) was originally intended to act as a stabilizing
presence and to oversee a cease-fire (which rarely existed), but the
Security Council quickly turned its focus to dealing with the humani-
tarian aspects of the conflict. Throughout the conflict, during which the
Security Council passed more than seventy resolutions, the Council
deliberately steered clear of taking a position on the conflict (aside from
calling for its end) and avoided an authorization of the use of force that
might take it into a full-scale Chapter VII situation, thereby ending its
“impartiality.”8 Instead, the Security Council focused on the humanitar-
ian consequences of the conflict, prompting it to authorize the creation
of a no-fly zone to avoid humanitarian aid flights being used as cover
for air attacks and of six “safe areas” to protect populations under siege.
To the extent the use of force beyond self-defense was authorized, it
was toward those ends. Although the focus on the humanitarian effects
of the conflict and the limitation of the use of force to compelling com-
pliance with the mandate gave the appearance of impartiality (or at least
some grounds on which to claim impartiality), in practice the effect of
the mandate was far from impartial. Indeed, because there was never
any kind of agreement among the warring parties on which the Council
could find purchase for its mandate, each decision the Council took
risked creating a differential impact that violated the “without preju-
dice,” not favoring one side or the other, impartiality rule. In seeking to
deal with the humanitarian aspects of the conflict, for example, the
Council was effectively supporting the Bosnian Muslim population
against Bosnian Serb aggression.9 And the establishment of a no-fly
zone was a measure taken primarily to curb the abilities of Bosnian
Serbs—the only group with a military aerial capability—to operate by
air within Bosnia, even though the Security Council resolution itself did
not single out any party.10
When intervening in the crisis in the Congo in the early 1960s, the
Security Council faced similar dilemmas. Two days after the achieve-
ment of independence, clashes among different groups prompted a
descent into widespread disorder, accompanied by attacks on Belgian
and other European citizens. The initial mandate for the UN operation
 Jane Boulden 153

was to oversee the withdrawal of Belgian troops and to restore law and
order.11 When the Congolese government collapsed later that year, the
UN found itself in an extremely awkward situation. Deployed in a coun-
try in the midst of a civil war, now without a government, every move
the UN made inevitably, if inadvertently, favored one group or the
other. The secretary-general and the Security Council worked hard to
maintain an impartial approach to the conflict, emphasizing that they
would make no decisions that would influence the eventual outcome.12
Nevertheless, each decision the UN took (especially the determination
not to accept the secession of Katanga), albeit in pursuit of the need to
restore law and order and to prevent civil war as the mandate directed,
had an impact on one or more of the parties struggling for control. This
point was not lost on troop-contributing member states, some of which
pulled their troops out of the operation in protest. The Congo operation
remains one of the most contentious and damaging UN operations to
date, and its side and after effects (including the death of Secretary-
General Hammarskjöld in a plane crash) haunted the organization for
years afterwards.

Impartiality in Mandate Implementation

There is an inextricable connection between the impartiality of the man-
date and its implementation. The implementation process is a direct
product of the nature of the mandate. If a mandate is partial in its con-
ception, its implementation on the ground will reflect that. When prob-
lems arise on the ground, it is often the case that they become the focus
of attention—the use of force, for example, is often seized on as under-
mining impartiality—when in fact the source of the problem is in the
nature of the mandate. However, the implementation process must be
considered separately from the mandate itself, for two reasons—first,
because it is a separate process (those undertaking the implementation
of the mandate do not participate in the decisionmaking process deter-
mining the nature of the mandate); and second, because it is possible
that the implementation process may itself undermine impartiality.
Military actions undertaken in the course of the implementation of
the mandate might in and of themselves violate the impartiality of the
mandate. The impartiality of the implementation process may be under-
mined, for example, by the actions of the military on the ground in con-
travention of the mandate or with the intent to favor one of the parties
to the conflict. The desire to minimize this possibility was behind the
Cold War practice of limiting participation in peacekeeping operations
to member states without any connection to the parties to the conflict.13
154 Mandates Matter

Similarly, a traditional concern about the involvement of regional organ-

izations in undertaking Security Council mandates relates to their abil-
ity to act impartially. Because they are of the region in which the con-
flict is occurring, the involvement of regional organizations raises the
possibility that they, or one or more of their members, may consciously
or unconsciously work to favor a specific outcome or one of the parties
to the conflict in question.
The UN intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s created prob-
lems at both the mandate and implementation levels. After the U.S.-led
operation to establish a secure environment for the delivery of humani-
tarian aid (UNITAF), the Security Council authorized the creation of the
UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) to take over when UNITAF
left. The mandate for the operation included peacebuilding tasks, such
as political reconciliation, economic rehabilitation, the establishment of
a police force, and the repatriation of refugees. Along with these tasks,
the Security Council authorized a series of military tasks, such as pre-
venting the resumption of violence, controlling heavy weapons, seizing
small arms, and maintaining security.14 The ongoing conflict prompted
the Security Council to give the mandate enforcement authorization
under Chapter VII of the charter. The UNOSOM II mandate was un-
usual in that it was not based on a peace agreement or another preexist-
ing agreement among the parties as to the way forward. Just as it had
done in the Congo thirty years earlier, the Security Council placed itself
in a situation where there was no formal government and no agreement
to end the fighting. The mandate for UNOSOM II was arguably impar-
tial in that the terms applied to all of the parties in Somalia. But with
ongoing fighting and a political vacuum, any move the UN made had a
potential impact on the position of one or the other of the parties.
Within the first few weeks of the transition from UNITAF to UNOSOM
II, two attacks on Pakistani UN soldiers undertaking disarmament tasks
resulted in the death of twenty-four soldiers. The day after the attack, the
Security Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning the
attacks, reaffirming the secretary-general’s authorization to use “all
necessary measures” against “those responsible,” and asked the secretary-
general to report on which faction leaders were responsible.15 Although
no party was named in the resolution, it was understood that those
responsible were the rebel group run by Mohammad Farah Aidid. The
addition of the arrest mandate to the UN’s existing mandate in Somalia
compromised the overall mandate’s impartiality by directing action
against a particular party in the conflict. The situation was further
complicated by the fact that the pursuit of Aidid was undertaken by U.S.
troops working outside the UN operation, not UN troops. For those on the
 Jane Boulden 155

ground, the distinction between U.S. troops and UN troops, the former
using force to pursue Aidid and the latter now increasingly using force in
an effort to implement the disarmament mandate, was difficult to
maintain. In the absence of a political agreement to which all of this could
be related, it appeared to many inside and outside Somalia that U.S. and
UN troops together were using military means to establish and achieve
their own political objectives. At the time, considerable attention was
focused on the upsurge in the use of force and the argument that the
increasing use of force undermined the UN’s impartiality. In fact, it was
the mandate itself that undermined impartiality. The implementation of
the mandate brought the problem to the forefront.
The Somalia example raises the question of the relationship between
impartiality and the use of force. If this analytical framework is valid, it
means that the use of force by the UN is, in theory, able to occur impar-
tially in pursuit of impartial mandates because it is related to the imple-
mentation side of the equation and thus is simply occurring in fulfilment
of an impartial mandate. On this basis, we can say that there is no inher-
ent incompatibility between impartiality and the use of force. By its
nature, however, the use of force is problematic, regardless of whether
it is occurring in pursuit of an impartial mandate. Any use of force be-
yond self-defense becomes effectively offensive in nature. In the end,
force is used against someone—some group or party involved in the
conflict—thereby violating, or at an absolute minimum, threatening
impartiality in the sense of being without prejudice to the parties.
In sum, a violation of impartiality can happen at a variety of points
in a UN operation, but the starting point must always be the mandate. If
the mandate is effectively partial with respect to its impact on the par-
ties, the game is up before it has even begun, although, as discussed
below, it is feasible that in very specific situations this may not prove to
be a fatal flaw. In situations where a mandate is impartial, a violation of
impartiality may occur in the implementation process.

The Achievability and Desirability of Impartiality

This analysis raises significant questions about the viability of mandates

that fall within the gray zone. Is impartiality achievable in gray zone sit-
uations? And, if so, is impartiality even desirable in those situations?
At first glance, the answer as to whether impartiality is achievable
in these situations appears to be that it is not. It is difficult to imagine
how any intervention by the UN in situations in which conflict is ongo-
ing16 does not affect one or another of the parties. However, experience
156 Mandates Matter

suggests that there is some room for maneuver in this assessment relat-
ing to the scale of the prejudice caused to the positions of the parties in
question. For example, a UN mandate that seeks to provide humanitar-
ian assistance in certain conflict zones may not definitively alter the
position of one or all of the parties to the conflict. As such, it may not
fundamentally undermine the UN’s attempt to maintain an impartial
position in the conflict. And, if the intervention is part of a process in
which the conflict ultimately does come to an end, the issue of whether
the UN was truly impartial becomes moot. Such examples are the
exception rather than the rule, and even in these very limited cases, the
argument is not that the UN mandate is impartial but that the limited
impact on the situation means that the lack of impartiality is not criti-
cal to overall success and is easily overlooked.
Any measures beyond these limited circumstances generate prob-
lems. The creation of safe areas in Bosnia, for example, and the refusal
to accept the secession of Katanga in the Congo, definitely affected the
position of major parties to the conflicts. Yet both were carried out
under the auspices of UN impartiality. This is the inherent problem that
disaggregating the concept of impartiality reveals. Saying the UN is
behaving impartially does not make it so. Security Council claims to
impartiality are just that—claims. Here we run into the difficult distinc-
tion between motive and consequence. The Security Council’s motives
with respect to a given conflict may be impartial, but the consequences
of the mandates it authorizes may not be. This contradiction goes to the
heart of the situations that have created such difficult problems for the
UN. Maintaining impartiality, or maintaining a claim to impartiality, in
the face of effects on the ground that belie that stance puts the organi-
zation in a particularly self-destructive situation and may contribute to
the prolongation of the conflict and greater suffering. We need look no
further than UN experiences in the Congo in the 1960s and in Bosnia
and Somalia in the 1990s for evidence of this. For those on the receiv-
ing end, it is the actual situation on the ground that matters. Whatever
the intent of the implementation, if the outcome is “partial,” the fact that
it may have been impartially generated is beside the point.
This raises the second question: even if we can argue that in certain
highly circumscribed circumstances some form of impartiality is
achievable, is it desirable? Impartiality clearly has a significant role in
the work of the UN. The long list of peacekeeping successes is testa-
ment to the importance and value of peacekeeping and, by extension,
impartiality. A good deal of the credibility and moral weight the UN
brings to conflict situations can be attributed to this history. However, the
case for impartiality is not so clearly made in the gray zone situations.
 Jane Boulden 157

The main argument in favor of impartiality in these instances is that the

operation in question may provide a way to stabilize a situation and pro-
vide some breathing space in which the parties to the conflict can negoti-
ate an end to the conflict. It also provides a way in which the UN can
intervene to provide emergency humanitarian assistance to victims of the
conflict. Both are valuable goals. A belief in the UN’s impartiality is crit-
ical to achieving them. That belief in UN impartiality is completely
dependent on a level of credibility derived from UN behavior in the past
and the integrity and commitment with which the goals associated with
impartiality are carried out. Impartiality does not just happen. It must be
achieved through hard work on the part of the UN and the willingness
and wherewithal on the part of the warring parties to engage in the
process in good faith. The problem revealed here is that overreaching
impartiality by establishing partial mandates within an overarching
approach that claims to be impartial creates a fundamental contradiction
whose consequences may undermine the Security Council’s credibility
and moral weight in all situations, not just the conflict at hand.
Although the UN has the ability to slide over the existence of par-
tiality in mandates in certain circumstances, those circumstances are
quite limited and are highly dependent on a context that quickly gener-
ates a positive outcome. When that does not happen, the UN has put
itself in a very difficult situation that carries with it the potential for
negative outcomes. The desirability of impartiality in gray zone situa-
tions is therefore very limited.

Conclusion

A disaggregation of the concept of impartiality suggests the following

conclusions. First, the UN can be assured of mandate impartiality only
in situations in which the mandate authorizes oversight of a firm agree-
ment by the parties to the conflict and where consent for UN involve-
ment is unimpeachable. Even these situations are open to change—the
agreement may fail or consent may disappear—but if the UN mandate
is limited to overseeing terms agreed to by the parties to a conflict and
the UN itself does not take a political stand on the nature and outcome
of the conflict, the resultant mandate is correspondingly impartial. If
and when the situation changes, the Security Council not only needs to
consider taking alternative approaches but also ending its impartial
approach. This does not necessarily imply a shift to more dramatic
measures, such as full-scale enforcement, but it does mean that the
Security Council should be clear within itself and with the parties to the
158 Mandates Matter

conflict that its response to the conflict can no longer be considered as

being “without prejudice” to all of the parties.
Second, this analysis is ultimately an argument for being definitive
about impartiality in Security Council mandates. It is also a call for
greater care and nuance in crafting Security Council mandates. UN
mandates authorizing measures that extend beyond anything agreed by
the parties are not impartial mandates and should not be treated as such.
In certain limited circumstances, the UN may be able to get away with
claiming otherwise, but the risks of failure are high. The experience of
the UN operations in the Congo in the 1960s, and in Bosnia and in
Somalia in the early 1990s, provides strong evidence that the conse-
quences of failure are significant for both the UN as well as for those it
is seeking to assist.
As stated at the outset, the UN is a political actor with political goals,
namely the protection and maintenance of international peace and secu-
rity. In conflict situations in which there is no peace agreement or full
consent for UN involvement, these goals put the organization at odds
with at least one of the parties to the conflict. In these cases, any action
the UN takes may effectively prejudice the position of one or more of the
parties to the conflict. A freezing of the situation through a cease-fire, for
example, will negatively affect a party that might gain more militarily
than it would through political negotiations carried out at that point. This
is the dilemma Richard Betts raised in his article “The Delusion of Impar-
tial Intervention.” Betts argues that remaining impartial creates a situation
that “usually blocks peace by doing enough to keep either belligerent
from defeating the other, but not enough to make them stop trying.”17
This last argument raises an unhappy point relating to the motiva-
tion behind an impartial approach. In some situations, impartiality may
be used by the Security Council as a shield to cover inaction or to avoid
greater action. The UN Security Council wants the conflict to end but
does not want to involve itself in determining how it should end, so it
chooses to take the impartial option to avoid making a judgment. The
most egregious examples of this occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda, where
the UN Security Council maintained its impartial stance regarding the
conflicts even in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Secretary-
General Kofi Annan recognized the terrible betrayal inherent in these
actions in his report on Srebrenica when he stated that errors of judg-
ment “rooted in a philosophy of impartiality” were made.18
There are several good reasons for the Security Council to avoid
imposing its views on situations in which a peace process is nascent or
is moving to completion. Nonetheless, the Security Council is ulti-
mately responsible for maintaining international peace and security.
 Jane Boulden 159

There are situations in which impartial mandates either represent an

avoidance of that responsibility or may ultimately undermine that goal.
None of this is necessarily to argue that the Security Council should
take less action, that we should return to traditional peacekeeping only,
or that we should place less importance on impartiality. Impartiality
clearly plays a vital role for the UN. And that is ultimately the critical
point. Impartiality is a valuable asset, but as with any asset it is subject
to deterioration if improperly used. Employed properly it carries
tremendous power and has the potential to contribute a great deal to the
UN’s objectives. A greater understanding of its role, when and where it
can be most useful, should strengthen the Council’s ability to design
acheivable mandates. Employing impartiality as a way to avoid taking
more effective action rather than because it is the correct approach will
ultimately diminish its power and that of the UN. 

Notes

Jane Boulden holds a Canada Research Chair in international relations and

security studies at the Royal Military College of Canada. Previously she was a
MacArthur Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, University
of Oxford, where the research for this article was carried out. Her recent publi-
cations include Jane Boulden, ed., Dealing with Conflict in Africa: The United
Nations and Regional Organizations (2003); Jane Boulden and Thomas G.
Weiss, eds., Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11th (2004),
and Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement (2001).
1. There are a few exceptions: Adam Roberts, “The Crisis in UN Peace-
keeping,” Survival 36, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 93–120; Marrack Goulding, “The
Evolution of United Nations Peace-keeping,” International Affairs 69, no. 3
(1993): 451–464: and Richard K. Betts, “The Delusion of Impartial Interven-
tion,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 6 (November–December 1994): 20–33.
2. Ruth B. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1958), pp. 675–676.
3. A good summary can be found in Leland Goodrich, Edvard Hambro, and
Anne Patricia Simons, Charter of the United Nations: Commentary and Docu-
ment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 302–310.
4. Study of the UNEF Experience, Report of the Secretary-General,
A/3943 (9 October 1958), par. 12.
5. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 1989, available online at www.
OED.com. By contrast, the definition of neutral is “not taking sides in a
controversy, dispute, disagreement, etc.; . . . in relation to war or armed conflict,
. . . remaining inactive in relations to belligerent powers.” There is, therefore, an
assumption of response or activity inherent in impartiality that is not necessarily
present in neutrality.
6. This was in spite of efforts by the secretary-general to convince the
leaders of the mission, the United States, that the creation of a “secure envi-
ronment” required a full disarming of the armed groups in Mogadishu.
160 Mandates Matter

7. The Security Council agreed with the secretary-general’s initial recom-

mendation to authorize a peacekeeping force in the absence of the conditions
for peacekeeping on the basis that the dangers associated with a failure of the
mission were “less grievous” than the dangers of continued fighting in its
absence. UN Doc. S/23592 (15 February 1992).
8. See Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001).
9. This was not always the case. In other situations, the support and
requirement for humanitarian assistance acted in favor of other population
groups. The overall point is that, by and large, humanitarian aid in a conflict
situation will influence the position of one of the parties to the conflict.
10. Security Council Res. 781 (9 October 1992).
11. Security Council Res. 143 (14 July 1960), Security Council Res. 145
(22 July 1960).
12. Security Council Res. 146 (9 August 1960), par. 4. In debating the res-
olution in the Security Council, the British representative noted: “There can be
no question of empowering the United Nations to use its forces to impose a
political settlement,” S/PV.942 (20 February 1961), par. 29.
13. This practice eased with the end of the Cold War, in part because of the
need to generate sufficient numbers of troops to take on the numbers of opera-
tions authorized by the Security Council.
14. Security Council Res. 814 (26 March 1993).
15. Security Council Res. 837 (6 June 1993). The resolution also con-
demned radio broadcasts used to incite violence against UN troops.
16. “Ongoing” conflict in this sense does not necessarily mean active fight-
ing. It includes situations in which there is no agreement to stop the conflict
even though fighting may be sporadic or temporarily suspended.
17. Betts, “The Delusion of Impartial Intervention,” p. 21.
18. Srebrenica Report, A/54/549 (15 November 1999), par. 499.