ABSTRACT
Civil wars in Colombia, Sudan and Sri Lanka, as well as continued ethnonational tensions in the Balkans have informed the post-Cold war Zeitgeist in which the victory of Western liberalism over Soviet communism appears increasingly pyrrhic. Rarely, if ever, did Moscow or Washington provide a palliative to national tensions or ethnic rivalries in areas under their Cold War aegis. The rash of secessionist wars on the territory of the former Soviet Union, as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia, remain testament to the latent power of ethnic and national identities over ideological coercion. If freed from the vicissitudes of Cold War competition, the UN Security Council was still found wanting as a forum for collective security – a forum in which normative values enshrined in the UN charter would be upheld. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War has, of course, brought about a reconfiguration of global politics.
