ABSTRACT
On 31 January 1992 the United Nations (UN) Security Council held an extraordinary summit meeting at the level of heads of state and government. It was the first such meeting ever and was convened to consider “The responsibility of the Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security … [in] timely recognition of the fact that there are new favourable international circumstances under which the Security Council has begun to fulfill more effectively its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” (United Nations Security Council 1992, S/23500). It was an extraordinary time. The UN had already played important
roles in ending the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Namibia’s successful transition to independence, the peace process in Central America, the enforcement action that secured Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait, and the intrusive effort to destroy its weapons of mass destruction. The UN was in the process of taking up its responsibilities for implementation of the Paris Peace Agreement in Cambodia. At the conclusion of the January 1992 summit, the council members asked Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali to prepare “his analysis and recommendations on ways of strengthening and making more efficient … the capacity of the UnitedNations for preventive diplomacy, for peacemaking and for peace-keeping” (United Nations Security Council 1992, S/23500). He was given a 1 July deadline for the report. When An Agenda for Peace was delivered on 17 June 1992, it included
a number of sections that were not listed in that presidential statement.
Among them was “post-conflict peace-building.” The former Secretary-General himself has since commented, “The most important idea in The Agenda for Peace is that 1) the process of peace is a continual process, 2) the prevention of conflict takes place both before and also after the conflict because it can have a relapse, 3) it is necessary to link urgency, rehabilitation, reconstruction and development in order to consolidate the peace (peace-building).” He added, “Coming back to the concept of ‘peace-building’ that I have developed, I would say, without false modesty, [that I] invented. This concept is extremely important.”1
