ABSTRACT
In the decade after the creation of the Lebanon operation in 1978 no new UN peacekeeping operations were established. In the following ten years more than twenty new ventures were begun. The reason for this was quite simple: the end of the cold war. UNIFIL in Lebanon began just as détente was beginning to give way to a return to cold war between the superpowers. The second cold war proved to be an even more unfriendly environment for UN peacekeeping than the first. There may have been major conflicts over the political direction of the Congo operation and damaging wrangles over the financing of peacekeeping as a whole in the 1960s and 1970s, but operations were established and in most cases served an important role in maintaining stability on the peripheries of the international system through some very delicate times. In the 1980s, in contrast, such new multilateral peacekeeping as there was took place outside the United Nations when western states constructed forces to help achieve primarily western interests, such as the two Multinational Forces in Beirut and the MFO in Sinai.
