UN peacekeeper corruption's effects on international politics and economics

International Political Economics: The Impacts of UN Peacekeeper Corruption

International political economy tries to understand global and international problems through a diverse interdisciplinary arrangement of theoretical perspectives and analytical tools. International political economy focuses on the constant breakdown of disciplinary boundaries amid politics and economics. it's not easy to image a world devoid of international political economy since the mutual interaction of international economics and international relations is prevalent. The political activities of nations apparently influence international business and the flow of money, which consequently affects the environment in which nations make political preferences, and entrepreneurs make economic preferences.

It appears impracticable to put into consideration significant questions regarding international economics or international politics in devoid of taking into consideration their mutual effects and influences. The United Nations peacekeeping mission currently spends approximately 5 billion dollars on a yearly basis, and these missions frequently face criticism for a wide assortment of destruction they cause in war-torn economies. United Nations peacekeepers face criticism of inducing inflation, co-opting the host local talent, controlling real estate business and pushing most able individuals away from the local private sector and government (Leckie, 2004). This paper highlights the impacts of United States peacekeeper corruption on international politics and economics.

Introduction

Peace is a crucial precondition for economic growth. Peacekeeping missions form the greatest contribution to growth through facilitating restoration and maintaining peace. Without security and peace, there lacks any incentive for individuals to carry out productive investment in the lawful economy, as the possibility of return on investment becomes minimal (Kahler, 2014). Instead, individuals focus on subsistence practice while those with the ability to enforce their own law privately investing in profitable criminal practices such as human trafficking, narcotics and sale of illegal weapons.

Gross Domestic Product per capita in the course of civil wars declined at a 2.2% rate because war lowers production and the gradual loss of capital stock caused by destruction, lack of saving and the fact that people fear loss of their property and instead invest them abroad (Billion, 2011). For instance, Haiti recorded a major drop in GDP per capita in 1994 and 2004 due to civil unrest (Billion, 2008). Similarly, Ivory Coast's GDP per capita reduced between 1999 and 2003 because of civil war and political instability. DRC and Sierra Leone experienced falls in their GDP throughout 1990s and have turned around following the arrival of MONUC and UNAMSIL in 2000 and 1999 (Billion, 2008). Kosovo has also faced a great drop in its GDP per capita for the last 20 years while Yugoslav statistical books places Kosovo per capita Gross Domestic Product as 300 Euros in 1999, but the country is recovering following establishment of peacekeeping operations.

Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping entails the active preservation of peace among communities or nations principally through an international military force. Peacekeeping is the most productive tool accessible to the United Nations to help host nations steer the complex path of violence or war to peace. Peacekeeping hold distinctive strengths that include burden-sharing, legitimacy, and the potential to set up and uphold police and troops around the world. Peacekeeping also incorporates troops with resident peacekeepers in efforts of pressing on multidimensional directives (Kahler, 2013). United Nations peacekeepers offer security and peace building assistance to help nations make complex and early shifts from violence to peace. However, UN peacekeeping is directed through three major standard, which include impartiality, the consensus from involved parties, and no use of force, unless in self-defense.

Modern peacekeeping not only entails maintenance of security and peace, but also supporting political process in the host nation, civilian protection, reintegration and demobilization of former combatants, disarmament, foster elections organizations, promote and protect human privileges besides maintaining the rule of law (Kahler, 2013). However, the success of the United Nations peacekeeping is not always a guarantee given that UN peacekeepers are deployed in the most politically and physically complex settings. United Nations peacekeeping constantly acclimatize to novel political realities and challenges. Among the challenges, facing United Nations peacekeeping is corruption. According to Aoi & Thakur (2007), peacekeeping practices come with negative upshots. The deployment of huge numbers of military personnel affects a nation's economy and the entire society. Among the most negative impacts of peacekeeping operations is sexual exploitation and abuse, generation of false economy and corruption. These negative impacts hinder the realization of the mandates of UN peacekeeping missions.

United Nations Peacekeeping and Corruption

According to Gold (2005), the United Nations is not a compassionate, but an inefficient world body. Gold asserts that the United Nations has instigated the rise and spread of global chaos. For instance, between 1999 and 2003 through corrupt UN officials and peacekeepers, Iraq could use unlawful income to develop its military capacity (Gold, 2005). Charles Duelfer, ahead of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, a group that worked to understand what transpired to Iraq's mass destruction weapon in 2004, gave a testimony confirming that through UN military impact, Iraq derived numerous billion dollars between 1999 and 2003 from kickbacks and oil smuggling. Iraq also imported illegal dual-use technology and illegal military weapons via the oil-for-food contracts controlled by UN peacekeepers. Moreover, UN corrupt officials affect a nation's political economy. For instance, in 1991, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq oil sales aimed at financing the buying of arms and development of mass destruction weapons (Gold, 2005). However, in 1996, the United Nations executed an oil-for-food program that allowed the Saddam era to sell oil to enable buying of food and other humanitarian products. Saddam also used the UN peacekeepers and officials to buy his own diplomatic protection.

According to Gold (2005), the UN peacekeepers and officials instigate and support terrorism. By the start of the 21 century, the world experienced divergent threats that the UN had addressed in the beginning of World War II. The single largest threat to international security is global terrorism. Prior to 9/11 terrorist attack, it was apparent that radical groups had resorted to a global campaign of terror. Among the numerous terrorist attack prior to the 9/11 attack includes the August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and the 1996 bombing of the al-Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The UN failed to live up to its goals and mission of upholding international security and peace. Allowing nations such as Iraq to purchase banned military weapons and create weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and other nations instigated international terrorism. This was evidenced through the cooperation between UN peacekeepers and Hizballah to kidnap soldiers in Lebanon (Gold, 2005).

Peacekeeping and Economic Development

Economic development and macroeconomic constancy are crucial to the consolidation of tranquility following civil war. In this regard, development help has become a persistent component of post -- conflict peacebuilding and intervention. According to Hughes (2009), if the entire evaluated United Nations peace operations mission budgets are used in means that fosters local economic growth while at the same time delivers efficient security and peace, then the general productivity of the spending would augment. Powerful economic growth increases the probability that UN peacekeeping missions can be withdrawn thereby lowering the cost of UN peacekeeping operations. According to an UNTAC study carried out in Cambodia, UN peace operations hold fewer effects on inflation because of the reduced level of UN mission local spending (Hughes, 2009). However, United Nations peacekeeping operations hold greater negative impacts (Kahler, 2013). This is because following UN peace operations in Cambodia, unsustainable blueprint of growth was realized because of most Cambodians businesses closed, land prices increased and so was rental charges. This situation was also recorded in DRC, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Timot-Leste and other nations where parallel economies were evident (Hughes, 2009).

The parallel economies emerged to achieve the requirements of international employees and it distorted rental and retail markets. Peacekeeping operations also instigated the creation of a temporary service industry that increased prostitution and illegal drug sale and use. While peacekeeping aims at providing security and peace that facilitates economic recovery, the manner in which security and peace occur can detract or promote economic development. Mission procurement decisions, structure, decision making, hiring decisions, and the manner in which to spend the peacekeeping mission allowances affects the local economy.

Intricate peacekeeping operations maintain and restore fundamental initial security in the deployed areas. This is their greatest single role in development because without security and peace, people do not have incentives to invest in the lawful economy. Reinstatement of security and peace makes lawful economy practicable (OECD, 2012). A powerful legal economy fosters security and peace objectives through creating employment prospects. The peacekeeping procedures' spending holds the ability to initiate the local economy during the period when it is most required. This economic action offers incomes and employment that promotes the refurbishing of stability and peace

Effects of Peacekeepers' Corruption

Peacekeeper's corruption leads to the emergence of the drug economy. The emergence of drug economy is evident in Afghanistan's political economy. Corruption and drug in some parts of Afghanistan have instigated the political order while in another it has fueled political disorder. According to a report filed by Transparency International and the World Bank, Iraq is among the most corrupt nations in the world (OECD, 2012). Although corruption flourished during the era of Saddam Hussein, corruption has further worsened during the post-Saddam era (Gold, 2005). Eradicating and controlling fraud in Iraq has proven to be difficult because corruption involves interlinked forces that include:

Dynamics and growth of informal and shadow economy

Social capital deterioration that leads to lack of confidence among divergent regions, tribes and religious groups

The emerging link amid gangs, the insurgency and tribes

These factors should be considered in controlling corruption. Practitioners and scholars identify corruption as a great obstacle to the efforts of peacebuilding. Corruption weakens the effectiveness and legitimacy of a nation through destroying public goods distribution. Corruption makes motions to be unable to resolve and manage social conflicts, reignites disagreements and leads to violence through fueling economic, social and political grievances and through undermining the institutions of security (Pete, Harvey, Savage & Jacobs, 2006). In spite of the extensive assortment of social ills linked to fraud in peacekeeping perspective, the manner in which fraud influences peacebuilding attempts are less direct and not well comprehended.

Facts of corruption are hard to collect and the reality of operating in post-conflict settings makes corruption data collection even harder. In addition, corruption shifts across divergent cultural and social contexts, and some actions viewed as corrupt in some settings are legitimate and appropriate in other contexts. Analysts and donors via links between citizens and state usually comprehend fraud and its effects. Less attention is offered in the manner through which fraud affects the links between divergent societal groups. There is developing recognition that fraud in peacebuilding perspective can offer short-term stabilization of post-war political order.

Prospects for rent-seeking and fraud can offer motivations for armed groups to sign a peace agreement and become agents of upholding patronage stabilizing network intrinsic in bargaining the peace process (Leckie, 2004). Peacebuilders can as a result accept corruption pragmatically and tacitly as a way of buying peace while they attempt to develop institutions to maintain corruption in the long-run (Pete, Harvey, Savage & Jacobs, 2006). However, there are significant costs linked to such a move. A nation's stability depends on appointing local leaders to execute extensive peacekeeping objectives, but when the interests of the local leaders extend beyond those global peacebuilders, incompatibility occurs. Different interest and inclusive comprehension of local status the leaders hold are potentially going to hinder constructive anti-corruption reforms. Moreover, involving wartime networks in the process of peacebuilding also undermines a nation's institutions, impart impunity and entrench inequality.

According to Smith & Cuest (2011), huge foreign forces in a given conflict-zone, country generates criminal activities such as drug and human trafficking. Using Haiti, Sierra Leone and Kosovo as case studies, Smith & Cuest (2011) demonstrated how the injection of relatively wealthy UN soldiers motivates generation of criminal networks through illegal actors. The UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) highlights the hugest peacekeeping operations carried out by the United Nations. After adoption of the Council Resolution 1244, UN deployed a force of about twenty thousand peacekeepers to protect the civilian from the conflict between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Kosovo Liberation Army. Although the Kosovo Protection Force achieved its mission, the huge number of foreign force instigated demands for prostitutes.

Several months after the deployment of KFOR, the international human rights agencies noted dramatic and large rise in human trafficking to the conflict-zone (Zimelis, 2009). From small-scale prostitution, the UN peacekeepers turned the region into professionalized practice operated through criminal networks. The United Nations Development Fund for Women noted four different areas with huge numbers of peacekeeping troops that practice the illegal business with UN peacekeepers forming the largest portion of sex workers' customers (Williams, 2007).

Smith & Cuest (2011) confirms that the presence of UN peacekeepers created false peace and economy. The size of UN peacekeeper troops is linked to corruption and criminal activities. The creation of human trafficking trade is extensively viewed as being compelled through financial gain. The economic essentials that instigate human trafficking is similar to those that instigate other illegal networks including the sale of narcotics (Brysk, 2012). The establishment of large UN troops serves to disrupt local criminal networks temporarily. The containment of available networks lowers the obstacles to entry of regional and transnational actors who seeks to exploit the lapse in practice. UN peacekeepers enter into partnership with fusing networks to enrich themselves. These actions destabilize a nation's peace and the economy, and prompt increased criminal actions (Mendelson, 2005).

Concerns regarding the impacts of corruption on the shift to peace contribute to the developing literature on armed conflict and corruption (Pete, Harvey, Savage & Jacobs, 2006). Studies on the political economy collective violence and corruptions had instigated significant understanding of the link between regime types, transition process and corruption. From 1989 to 2002, international donors spent in excess of 90 billion dollars to rebuild thirty-two conflict-affected nations. Unprecedented from the rebuilding attempts after the World War II, this amount of money is huge (Billon, 2008). The amount is averaged out per conflict-affected individual on yearly basis shows major discrepancies amid recipient nations. The Iraq reformation budget amounted to approximately 60 billion dollars from 2003 to 2006. The corruption, lack of transparency and wastage in the Iraq situation has been condemned as confounding. Trough OECD members, growth support to Afghanistan rose up from 87 million dollars in 2002 to 2.2 billion dollars in 2005 (Billion, 2008). International donors promised 7.6 billion dollars in Lebanon following the damage created in 2006 by the Israeli military.

Reconstruction and peacebuilding funds are distributed to nations with the most poorest fraud indicators that usually fall well lower than the standard level of corruption in the nations' income group. Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Sudan ranks among the ten percent most fraudulent countries in the world (Billon, 2008). This is according to the Transparency International surveys compilation of 2007. Anecdotal proof implies that fraud considerably arises in the course of post-conflict transition. The key interpretation of increased fraud in a post - conflict milieu derives from the historical domestic perspective. Wartime views a diffusion and entrenchment of fraudulent practices as governmental organizations fall and the survival politics capture any impression of public ethics (Leckie, 2004).

Armed factions justify fraud via reference to war through using fraudulent practices that are similar to the protection racket by government militias and security agencies to reinforce their grip on authority (Cooksey, 2003). Because of lack of optional strategies, people resort to illegal and corrupt economic practices to address the hardships instigated through economic sanctions and war. Corruption through regional and local powers and participation of local people in the informal economy instigates and uphold chronic conflicts.

Since 1990s, the number of armed violence has declined because of the increased liberal peacekeeping interventions. However, Billion (2008) claims that economic and political liberalization describing these interventions holds weakening effects via augmented societal struggle and destabilized domestic organizations. According to Billion (2008), liberal peacekeeping has instigated very weak institutions and states that depend on foreign support and are often tested for corruption and power sharing. Besides tests through fraud, liberal peacebuilding hold incongruous links with corruption. While peacebuilding practices may offer the institutions and resources to cut back corruption, these interventions may prompt and generate prospects for novel types of fraud.

The change to attain peace from war following Cold war is modeled around negotiated democratization and settlements. The negotiated democratization holds potential effects on corruption. National reconciliation in the milieu of peace process results in a politically compelled states position and asset distribution. The following power-sharing and electoral politics weakens institutions' growth and lower reliability given that every faction claims "sovereignty" over its institutional or territorial turf. With respect to economic liberalization, this procedure provides key corruption prospects that post-conflicts organizations may not be able to handle (OECD. 2012). The process of economic liberalization leads to unregulated or spontaneous state assets' privatization besides landholding and market liberalization.

Fraudulent practices that were evident in socialist nations such as Mozambique and Algeria spread because of economic liberalization (Cooksey, 2003). Similar to transition nations, prioritization of private over communal ownership through international institutions may by mistake play into the local corrupt privileged hands. The post-conflict perspective is often overlooked through informal and criminal practices. Considerable market contract to land and other properties besides a booming private segment favors local people with contact to seed capital created through corruption and wartime criminal practices proceeds. According Billion (2008), international Western donors and financial organizations are aware of corruption in post-conflict peacekeeping, and they accept this trend through describing it as a normal process.

Liberal peacekeeping turn to become a market access where corruption is promoted and tolerated by investors and donors. This form of donor conduct was evident towards Ugandan and Mozambique governments that were effectively conducting neo-liberal donor-promoted reforms. Policies of liberalization are manipulated opportunistically and imposed thereby imposing unequal and heavy environmental and social burdens in populations that are still recuperating from war..

The peacekeepers must acknowledge the effect of their own actions on corruption. This is because their expansive engagement in the post-conflict nations' political economy commends them with the crucial responsibility in a nations' conflict to peaceful change (Hughes, 2009). Their engagement also adds value to the creation of corruption prospects. To comprehend fraud's character in scores of conflict-impacted nations, it's effects on peacekeeping operations besides developing strategies that contain corruption, it is essential that people comprehend how modern peacekeeping practices and policies instigates corruption.

The swift inflow of aid linked to peacebuilding practices destroys local economies besides offering adequate prospects for rent seeking. Although the ability to hold aid is restrained following conflict, yearly help to nations such as Afghanistan and Liberia has instigated manifold local Gross Domestic Product and legal blueprints that controls the abrupt inflow of funds are weak (Kahler, 2013). The link between corruption and peacebuilding is intricate. Similar to tranquility, fraud is a political issue that cannot be handled vial technical fixes. This implies that building anti-corruption agencies and improvement of public administrations cannot be efficient in devoid of actual political support from leaders.

Conclusion

According to Rosett (2006), the founding objective of the United Nations was to enhance prosperity and peace in the world. However, in the age of terror, the United Nations have been useless and in some ways dangerous. The lesson from the Saddam Hussein era demonstrated that the UN is corrupt and it lends itself to criminal activities such illegal drug trade, smuggling illegal sale of weapon and money laundering. In case of Haiti, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and conflict-affected nations, the UN peacekeepers facilitated formation of criminal networks dealing with illegal drug, human trafficking and prostitution. All these corrupt activities hold negative effects of their host's economy as it creates false economy, leads to inflation, destabilizes peace and promote conflict.