Leadership Quote by Harri Holkeri

“Peace enforcement” is the phrase that punctures the comforting myth that wars end the moment diplomats shake hands. Harri Holkeri, a Finnish politician steeped in the UN’s late-Cold War and post-Cold War realities, draws a hard line between two operations that sound like synonyms to civilians and are anything but to the people tasked with executing them.

Peacekeeping presumes a deal already exists: consent from the parties, a mandate to monitor, the fiction of neutrality that lets blue helmets stand between former combatants without becoming the story. Peace enforcement admits the darker truth: sometimes there is no peace to keep. There are spoilers, militias, warlords, states in collapse. The mission stops being an umpire and becomes, unavoidably, an actor with leverage - coercion backed by force, sanctions, arrests, air power, raids. That shift detonates every easy promise associated with “peace”: legitimacy becomes contested, impartiality becomes a target, and casualties become politically toxic back home.

Holkeri’s intent is bureaucratic but not bloodless: he’s warning policymakers against selling enforcement as a simple upgrade to peacekeeping. The subtext is accountability. If you authorize enforcement, you are authorizing escalation, not symbolism, and you need the resources, intelligence, rules of engagement, and political spine to sustain it.

Read in the shadow of 1990s failures and debates (Bosnia, Rwanda, the uneasy evolution of UN mandates), the line functions as a small act of realism: language won’t do the job; power, clarity, and consequences will.