ABSTRACT
The two interventions of the United Nations in the Horn of Africa occupy opposite ends of the 'peacekeeping' spectrum in terms of techniques and objectives. The crises that precipitated them, however, had similar roots in the vicissitudes of global politics in the cold war and after. The Horn of Africa, bounded by the Indian Ocean to the east and the Arabian Sea to the north, occupied a position of special strategic importance in the 'second' cold war of the later 1970s and 1980s. More even than southern Africa, it became a cockpit of superpower rivalry. In Ethiopia the state, with much deeper cultural roots than that in Somalia, did not disintegrate. If the Congo intervention in the early 1960s had been emblematic of the ambitions of United Nations peacekeeping in the midst of global bipolarity, the operations in Somalia thirty years later occupied a similar place in the organization's post-cold war agenda.
