ABSTRACT
The main aim of this study is to examine those activities carried out by the UN in the period 1946 to 2003 employing military and police personnel and coming under the rubric ‘UN Peacekeeping’. In particular, it seeks to ascertain whether those operations which took place in the period following the improvement of relations between East and West in the late 1980s were markedly different in terms of their nature and objectives from those which had gone before, and the impact upon operations of the changes in the international system post-Cold War. Certainly, the late 1980s witnessed a number of successes in peacekeeping, including the successful resolution of conflicts in Central America, Africa and the Middle East, while the early 1990s were marked by a significant increase in the number of authorisations of new missions. The diversity of missions and the range of new requirements seemed to fundamentally change the nature of peacekeeping; yet was this actually the case, or are many commentators guilty of oversimplifying the type of operations undertaken in the past while assuming new operations were of a more complex nature? Did the end of the Cold War explain the transformation of peacekeeping, or are there broader developments associated with globalisation that help to account for the growing demand for peacekeeping.1
