ABSTRACT
Major powers have committed their military resources to peacekeeping in the post-Cold War period to an extent previously unprecedented. This is not to say that they had opposed peace operations, principally but not exclusively under UN auspices during the Cold War years (as has been suggested, the US, Britain and France in particular all have some history of commitment to peacekeeping in this period), but the scale and scope of their commitments thereafter was markedly
more significant. Given the peacekeeping experience of, and the renewed optimism surrounding the UN in the post-Cold War years, it was perhaps unsurprising that this should have been the preferred framework for major power peacekeeping and wider peace operation commitments in the early 1 990s. Contributions by the US in Somalia and Haiti; Russia in former Yugoslavia, Cambodia and Mozambique; Britain too in former Yugoslavia; France in former Yugoslavia and Cambodia; Germany in Cambodia, Somalia and former Yugoslavia; China in the Middle East and Namibia; and Japan in Namibia and Nicaragua - among many others - all bore witness to significant major power interest in UN peacekeeping.
