UN Peacekeeping

Military and civilian operations intended to restore or preserve peace in a specific area of conflict. Although peacekeeping is not a prerogative of the United Nations, most often it is carried out by that organization.

United Nations peacekeeping has evolved from small emergency operations to large multidimensional mobilizations. Since 1948, there have been 59 United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations involving troops from 130 nations. The diversity of the participating forces is reflected by the fact that Canada and Fiji—hardly global military powers—have taken part in almost all UN peacekeeping operations. A total of 1,800 soldiers from more than 100 countries have been killed while serving on peacekeeping missions. Thirty percent of the fatalities occurred in the years 1993–95.

Historic Overview

The UN Charter does not mention the concept of peacekeeping, nor does it provide specific provisions for implementation. Indeed, peacekeeping was not envisaged as one of the original missions of the United Nations. However, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and Canadian Foreign Minister Lester B. Pearson developed the idea of preventive diplomacy in the 1950s as a concept to limit superpower confrontation. Peacekeeping subsequently became the primary means of preventive diplomacy.

Traditional Peacekeeping

The first UN peacekeeping operation took place in response to the Greek civil war in 1947. This mission was authorized by the United Nations General Assembly rather than the UN Security Council. A second mission occurred in 1948 when the United Nations sent a group of military observers, the UN Truce Supervision Organization, to oversee the cease-fire in the Arab-Israeli conflict. A similar team was sent to the India-Pakistan border in 1949. These operations, the forerunners to traditional peacekeeping, aimed to supervise cease-fires and monitor activities in the territory.

Pearson, who was now the Canadian prime minister, developed the concept of traditional peacekeeping in the 1950s, an achievement for which he was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The goal of traditional peace-keeping is to help war-torn countries create and maintain conditions conducive to long-term, sustainable peace. Traditional peacekeeping generally takes place in the period between a cease-fire in a conflict and a political settlement to the conflict. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld embraced the idea of traditional peace-keeping, which provided the United Nations a new collective security role with peacekeeping at its core.

The first traditional peacekeeping mission was established in 1957 at the end of the Suez Crisis in the Middle East. The second mission, which took place in 1960–64 in Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo), was larger and more complex. Almost 20,000 troops were deployed, as well as a significant number of civilian staff. This mission was extremely costly. The Soviet Union and France claimed the mission exceeded its mandate and refused to pay their UN dues, provoking a UN funding crisis that has never been fully overcome. As a consequence, peacekeeping expenses were removed from the general UN budget and became part of a separate budget.

Several large-scale traditional peacekeeping missions established in the 1960s and 1970s are still ongoing. These include one launched in Cyprus in 1964, to supervise the cease-fire between Egyptian and Israeli forces in 1973. In general, however, Cold War tensions and rivalries produced dissent in the Security Council over proposed peacekeeping operations, and the number of missions declined significantly. [Page 757]The only mission authorized in the 1970s was in Lebanon and was deployed between 1974 and 1987.

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