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The Charter of the United Nations gives the UN Security Council the power and responsibility to take collective action to maintain international peace and security. For this reason, the international community usually looks to the Security Council to authorize peacekeeping operations. Most of these operations are established and implemented by the United Nations itself with troops serving under UN operational command. In other cases, where direct UN involvement is not considered appropriate or feasible, the Council authorizes regional organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Economic Community of West African States or coalitions of willing countries to implement certain peacekeeping or peace enforcement functions.
In 1957, Lester Bowles Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in defusing the Suez Crisis through the United Nations. The United Nations Peacekeeping Force was Pearson's creation and he is considered the father of the modern concept of peacekeeping.
United Nations peacekeeping initially developed during the Cold War era as a means to resolve conflicts between States by deploying unarmed or lightly armed military personnel from a number of countries, under UN command, between the armed forces of the former warring parties. Peacekeepers could be called in when the major international powers tasked the UN with bringing closure to conflicts threatening regional stability and international peace and security, including a number of so-called “proxy wars” waged by client States of the superpowers.
Peacekeepers were not expected to fight fire with fire. As a general rule, they were deployed when the ceasefire was in place and the parties to the conflict had given their consent. UN troops observed from the ground and reported impartially on adherence to the ceasefire, troop withdrawal or other elements of the peace agreement.This gave time and breathing space for diplomatic efforts to address the underlying causes of conflict.
The end of the Cold War precipitated a dramatic shift in UN and multilateral peacekeeping. In a new spirit of cooperation, the Security Council established larger and more complex UN peacekeeping missions, often to help implement comprehensive peace agreements between protagonists in intra-State conflicts. Furthermore, peacekeeping came to involve more and more non-military elements to ensure sustainability. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations was created in 1992 to support this increased demand for complex peacekeeping.
By and large, the new operations were successful. In El Salvador and Mozambique, for example, UN peacekeeping provided ways to achieve self-sustaining peace. Some efforts failed, perhaps as the result of an overly optimistic assessment of what UN peacekeeping could accomplish. While complex missions in Cambodia and Mozambique were ongoing, the Security Council dispatched peacekeepers to conflict zones like Somalia, where neither ceasefires nor the consent of all the parties in conflict had been secured. These operations did not have the manpower, nor were they supported by the political will, to implement their mandates. The failures—most notably the 1995 massacre in SrebrenicaSrebrenica is a town in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a small mountain town, main industry being salt mining and a nearby spa. The town's surroundings were the site of the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995 of thousands of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serbs. ( Bosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and Herzegovina is a mountainous country in the western Balkans. Its capital is Sarajevo and it was formerly one of the six federal units constituting Yugoslavia. The republic gained its independence in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and due to the) and the 1994 genocide in RwandaRwanda is a country in central Africa. It is bordered by Uganda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. The indigenous population consists of three ethnic groups. The Hutus, who comprise the majority of the population, are farmers of Bant—led to a period of retrenchment and selfexamination in UN peacekeeping.
As of October 2004, there have been 59 peacekeeping operationsAs of October of 2004, the UN has authorized 59 peacekeeping missions. These do not include interventions authorized by the UN like the Korean War and the Gulf War. The 1990s saw the most UN peacekeeping operations to date. 1940s 1948 UN Truce Supervision since 1948, with sixteen operations ongoing.
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