Making war and building peace : United Nations peace operations

THE COLLAPSE OF STATE institutions in Somalia, a coup in Haiti, and civil wars in Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries have marked the distinctive contours of civil strife in the past twenty years. The international community's responses to these emergencies have been, despite sometimes major efforts, mixed at best: occasional successes in restoring a legitimate and effective government are matched by striking failures to do so. At the end of he Cold War, the member states of the United Nations (UN) expanded its agenda, defining a near revolution in the relation between what is in the legitimate realm of state sovereignty and what is subject to legitimate international intervention. From 1990 through 1993, the UN Security Council adopted a strikingly intrusive interpretation of UN Charter Chapter VII, the enforcement provisions concerning international peace and security. Member states thus endorsed a radical expansion in the scope of collective intervention just as a series of ethnic and civil wars erupted across the globe. Unfulfilled commitments, on the one hand, and escalating use of force, on the other, soon provoked a severe crisis in "peace enforcement". In Bosnia and Somalia "peace enforcement" amounted to "war-making" as the United Nations threatened to impose by force outcomes - ranging from disarmament, to safe havens, "no fly zones," and new state borders - on armed factions hat recognized no political authority superior to their own. Elsewhere, as in Rwanda, the UN record was a failure even to attempt to exercise enforcement as peace agreements fell apart. As a consequence, more than 700.000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus fell at the hands of genocidal extremists that had seized the government. The current balance sheet on