People fight for all sorts of reasons, sometimes even for What’s Right. A policeman may live in a safe, affluent neighborhood, but spend his time patrolling the other side of the tracks because he wants to fight crime and that’s where the crime is. He’s not protecting his own neighborhood (except indirectly), he’s protecting people who aren’t his neighbors but who are more directly threatenend by crime.
Being a sovereign body makes it easier to secure funding, locate bases, and conscript troops, but it’s not a prerequisite. There has been many a rebel army or private militia that was not run by a soverign body. Al Qaeda arguably was/is an army. They get their funding thru donations, use(d) territory by permission or in places where the soverign body lacks control, and recruits volunteers internationally.
The premise of the OP is that there might be some people arount the world willing to fight to make the world a better place, and if the lagal technicalities and logistices could be worked out, it might be somthnig worth considering.
Hell, considering the cliche of “fighting for your buddies, not for your country”, I’d wonder how many people actually really do fight for their “country” per se.
sqweels: perhaps I should revise that to “legitimate army”. Rebel armies are trying to gain legitimacy by becoming government, and private militias don’t really have the kind of legitimacy or recognition required for the sort of roles that a UN force would need.
(How common are they, BTW, as opposed to rebel groups or simple terrorists and/or thugs?)
Really, it’s the logistics. Even if you got the people together, supplying and paying them would be difficult unless the UN had sources of revenue that states couldn’t arbitrarily cut off whenever they were displeased, or at the very least a method by which the UN could ensure serious repercussions for such actions (such as suspension from U.N.-brokered treaties or organizations or the like)
Sam: isn’t the reason why those countries are on the human rights commission because of the regional representativeness required by that body? I seem to recall the great hue and cry over the U.S. being kicked out and Sudan et al staying in being answered by something of the like. If you’re trying to find representatives from certain dodgy regions, you’re going to get people from nasty regimes no matter what you do.