In the early 1990s, the United Nations achieved in Cambodia an outcome that has been promoted as an important and rare peacekeeping success. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia ... Show moreIn the early 1990s, the United Nations achieved in Cambodia an outcome that has been promoted as an important and rare peacekeeping success. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was a key experiment in the laboratory of post-Cold War peacekeeping. Although UNTAC was confronted with one major spoiler party, the Khmer Rouge, the mission’s leadership supposedly resisted venturing into peace enforcement and succeeded in achieving the mission’s end goal of holding democratic elections in May 1993. However, UNTAC’s outcome has been all too readily interpreted in the light of the peacekeeping failures in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Using newly declassified documents, this study breaks with the traditional narrative that ascribes the causes for “success” in Cambodia to a strict adherence to the traditional peacekeeping principles. It reveals that under the imperative of turning the mission into a success, and paradoxically, saving the credibility of UN peacekeeping itself, UNTAC eventually violated the core principle of impartiality by forging an alliance with the government faction against the Khmer Rouge. The historical analysis thereby demonstrates that the theoretical and legalistic distinction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement has long distorted a thorough understanding of the true challenges in UN peacekeeping operations. Show less
“Transitional justice” is a field of practice, policy and study that focuses on the ways that societies respond to legacies of large-scale atrocities though tribunals, truth commissions,... Show more“Transitional justice” is a field of practice, policy and study that focuses on the ways that societies respond to legacies of large-scale atrocities though tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, and other mechanisms. Over the last thirty years, transitional justice has become the globally dominant lens through which we grapple with such legacies. Yet transitional justice practice has rarely reflected the diversity of peace and justice traditions around the world, bound up as it has been with largely liberal and Western conceptions of justice. This thesis examines the frictions and blindspots these dynamics have created, arguing that the liberal transitional justice lens has significantly biased our conceptions of what it means to “do justice” as well as the modalities for bringing justice about. If we are to make transitional justice into a true global project, I argue, we need to revisit and deconstruct the field’s core normative metanarratives and assumptions as a prelude to seeking a more emancipatory ground for transitional justice policy and practice that is true to human rights ideals while becoming more open-textured and attuned to local needs and context. Show less
