Challenges of United Nations' Preventive Diplomacy to Maintain Peace and Security

The purpose of this research paper is to examine the challenges facing the United Nations in practicing preventive diplomacy to maintain peace and security in the new world order. The main question of the research paper looked for answers to uncover the reasons behind the successes and failures of the preventive diplomacy tools used by the United Nations for about 90 armed conflicts after the post-Cold War era.

The increasing number of national and international conflicts covered with complexity, difficulty, and big costs, demands that the international community focus on making the ultimate positive use of preventive diplomacy. The words of the eighth United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon saying that preventive diplomacy is not an option but a necessity. Obviously, these words tell that the UN has to take the lead to conduct preventive diplomacy in the international community by preventing disputes and conflicts arising from interstate and intrastate relationships.

The research paper showed through discussing the definition and concept of preventive diplomacy in the UN context that the UN is mandated and possesses the means and tools to prevent disputes and conflicts from emerging and escalating into armed confrontation. The UN is empowered with its Charter which sets out the legal basis of preventive diplomacy. The paper showed the approaches of preventive diplomacy used in the UN in peace and war times. Then, examples if successes and failures of the UN operations around the world are presented leading to analysis and extracting the UN’s challenges in practicing preventive diplomacy.

The UN has performed well and succeeded in preventive diplomacy around the world, especially in collaboration with sub-regional organizations. At the same time, failures are recorded due to reasons related to the way of treating the disputes. The UN's options are limited to peaceful settlement of disputes and its action is restricted by rules of international law of intervention, especially with regard to the prohibition of the use of force.

The research paper found that the UN still has rooted problems. The research paper found that although the UN is achieving success through preventive diplomacy, the Organization still has core challenges related to the fund, the veto power the lack of capacity, the lack of coordination and the limitations of intervention, weak early warning systems. The research study illustrated that the principle of state sovereignty limits the UN's capability in preventing internal problems, especially at the pre-conflict stages. The UN became a place where the superpowers practice their policies in competition among them over the other UN members. This research paper is ended with recommendations to skip the obstacles, strengthening and support the collective preventive diplomacy of the UN in order to enhance conflicts early warning systems and encouraging the international community to work together could increase giving legitimacy to UN preventive diplomacy activities to maintain peace and security in the new world order.