The Changing Role of UN Peacekeeping Forces: The Relationship between UN Peacekeepers and NGOS in Rwanda

Abstract

There are several factors which help explain the re-emergence of the UN and NGOs as prominent actors in the international arena. There was the change in attitude among the permanent members of the Security Council which transformed Council proceedings from ideological sparring to unprecedented consensus. The Council also began addressing a variety of intra-state as well as inter-state concerns including ‘non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields’.¹ At the same time, members of the Security Council, and indeed many citizens of the world, recognised the expanding scope of security: that international security is as much threatened today by the possibility of collapse of the economic system, the scourge of international terrorism, drug trafficking or by ethnic and social unrest as by inter-state armed conflict.²