Intelligence Within the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations or the Blue Helmets’ Myth of Sisiphus

While Intelligence and the UN still appear as an oxymoron because of an old mistrust that goes back to the Cold war era and secret attempts of instrumentalization of the United Nations by its member States, Military Intelligence has been gradually considered as an essential factor of operational efficiency of peacekeepers deployments. The analysis of former PKOs shows that they are valued as intelligence missions, of which the main activity is the collection through information by observation, in total conformity with peacekeeping principles. The multiplication of the PKOs in strongly deteriorated contexts, and additionally subjected to asymmetric threats, makes PKOs strongly dependent on Military Intelligence, which is henceforth widely considered as a great multiplier of effects and strengths. This phenomenon also leads to an exponential increase of gathered information as well as the necessity of better exploiting them and of storing them, just as well at the operational level, as at the strategic one. The emergence of the concept of protection of the civilians, placed at the core of each and every PKO mandate, makes inescapable the holding of an autonomous Intelligence capacity, in order to allow the senior UN authorities to decide and to act with full awareness. Indeed the nature of Intelligence is hardly compatible with the state of multilateralism, for it relies on a deep relationship of trust between the various producers and consumers of Intelligence. Acquiring an autonomous capacity of collection and analysis thus requires to develop a doctrinal corpus adapted to the United Nations and to formalize the actions of Intelligence in order to reassure its member States.

Keywords : Intelligence – Information – Peacekeeping – Peacekeeping Operations – PKO – Protection of civilians – Robustness – Crisis management.