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Peacekeeping

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Casualties of the New World Order

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Abstract

With a peacekeeping mission, the UN enters the civil war conflict environment. But despite their helmets, side arms, and APCs, the peacekeepers’ function remains more diplomatic than military. Their purpose is to work with the belligerents, rather than to compel them using offensive military action. This basic fact, as in mediation missions, means that the existence of underlying structural weaknesses can jeopardize the mission’s ultimate success. Such weaknesses can be even more problematical when directly exposed to the conflict dynamic, and their consequent vulnerability to more complex forms of exploitation and aggravation by the less co-operative belligerents. This chapter searches for the presence of these weaknesses and the effects of their exposure to a civil war dynamic in a failed peacekeeping mission. It then tests a successful mission for the absence of these weaknesses or the mission’s escape from the effects of the conflict dynamic.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Asia-Australia Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Michael Wesley

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  1. Michael Wesley
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© 1997 Michael Wesley

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Wesley, M. (1997). Peacekeeping. In: Casualties of the New World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391055_3

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