Our Next Seminar

SEMESTER 2 2025/26

Jonathan Carrol (Sandhurst) and Brian Drohan (West Point)

'Crossing the Mogadishu Line? The utility of force in peace operations'

Venue: K114, Newman Building

Date: Thurs 5 February 2026

Time: 4pm

Brian Drohan:

Brian Drohan is Associate Professor in the Department of History and War Studies at the U.S. Military Academy – West Point and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He led an armored platoon in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division, worked at the U.S. Embassy to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and served as a strategist at Eighth Army headquarters in South Korea. He is the author of Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Cornell University Press 2018) and earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brian’s research examines the intersection of humanitarianism, human rights, and military intervention during the post-1945 period.

Jonathan Carroll:

Jonathan Carroll is an Associate Professor of Modern War Studies and Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the author of the recent monograph Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995. A doctoral graduate of Texas A&M University, and a former infantry officer in the Irish Defence Forces, Jonathan specializes in analysing modern military operations with a current focus on the military history of 1990s conflict and stabilization operations. In addition to his recent work on the intervention in Somalia, Jonathan is working on research projects focusing on the UNAMIR mission during the Rwandan Genocide, and the UN/NATO intervention during the Bosnian War.

Drohan Abstract:

Following the theme of this panel, this paper examines the fundamental premise at the heart of British Lieutenant General Michael Rose’s well-known phrase, the “Mogadishu Line,” in which peacekeeping – with the impartiality and non-use of force that usually defines it – becomes warfighting and peacekeepers transform into another party to the conflict. Today, many United Nations peacekeeping operations authorize the use of force, often for the purpose of protecting civilians. Strengthening the authority to use force enables peacekeepers to better protect civilians from, resist violent actors around them, and accomplish the mission’s mandate, as the logic goes. Armed peacekeepers, after all, have the capability to strike back.

But having the ability to fight makes it all the more surprising – and intriguing – when, in some of the most complex and challenging conflict situations of the late Cold War period, armed peacekeepers responded to wartime violence without resorting to violence themselves. Using documents from the underutilized United Nations archives, this paper challenges the notion of UN peacekeeper impartiality and re-evaluates the non-use of force principle by examining how UN peacekeepers responded during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I argue that, in both conflicts, peacekeepers responded by asserting a role as protectors of civilians through the provision of humanitarian assistance. In Cyprus, peacekeepers delivered aid to Greek and Turkish Cypriot enclaves and escorted refugees out of threatened areas. In Lebanon, peacekeepers delivered relief supplies to Palestinian refugees in Israeli-occupied territory and insisted on Palestinian access to aid. Through their humanitarian efforts, UN peacekeepers became active participants in each conflict – not as belligerents, but as battlefield actors who nonetheless influenced the conduct and course of the fighting.

Carroll Abstract:

In 1994, while commander of the increasingly controversial UN Protection Force mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, British General Michael Rose countered arguments to confront the Bosnian Serbs by claiming he would not cross the “Mogadishu Line.” Coined specifically by Rose, alluding to the outbreak of violence in the concurrent UN nation-building mission in Somalia, this line represented the conceptual Rubicon surrounding the use of force wherein peacekeeping ended and warfighting began.1 Rose argued crossing such a line meant that political reconciliation in a post-civil war conflict zone would end, and the UN would lose impartiality to the point of becoming simply another participant in the conflict. Cited widely in scholarship surrounding peace operations, the Mogadishu Line, this paper argues, has resulted in an entrenched suggestion that the use of force in such operations is not viable for the reasons Rose articulated. This paper argues however, that an analysis of UN missions in both Bosnia and Somalia demonstrate that the Mogadishu Line, as Rose defines it, was not actually crossed in either operation. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the widespread acceptance of the Mogadishu Line as a concept has undermined subsequent scholarly analysis of the factors shaping the course of such peace operations. The result has been misunderstandings as to what variables shape the course of past and future interventions, and a lack of understanding of the dynamic differences between peacekeeping and peace enforcement. The core argument of this paper is to highlight that the calibrated use of force was a successful feature of the UN missions in Bosnia and Somalia without the corresponding loss of impartiality that Rose suggested. The Mogadishu Line as a concept is outdated, especially for the dynamic peace operations of the 21st Century.