Peacekeeping, as a mission, was first created in response to the Suez Crisis in
1956. The crisis began when, in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal
by the government of Egypt, the United Kingdom and France invaded and occupied
the area surrounding the Canal, supported by an attack by Israel on the Sinai peninsula.
The idea of a UN-sponsored force to replace British, French, and Israeli forces
in Egypt, with the consent of all parties, was suggested by Lester Pearson, the
Canadian Foreign Minister (a suggestion for which he later won the Nobel Peace
Prize). The concept of peacekeeping caught on, because it allowed the Security
Council to play a less ambitious, less politically contentious, but still useful role in
international dispute resolution at a time when the realities of the Cold War prevented
full-fledged Chapter VII interventions. By the middle of 2004, the UN had
listed sixteen ongoing peacekeeping operations, although some of these might be
better described as state-building operations (see below). These missions employed
close to 60,000 personnel, and cost close to $3 billion annually. The longest running
current operation, the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP),
has been in continuous operation since 1964.6
The second new mechanism for the promotion of international peace and security
that has evolved in Security Council practice more recently is often referred to as
state-building. This new mission, which the Security Council only really got involved
in after the end of the Cold War, has UN forces oversee the administration of postconflict
areas and the building of local capacity for self-governance. State-building is
thus a curative and preventive mechanism, rather than an enforcement mechanism
per se. In helping areas that have been the sites of threats to international security
to build viable self-governance structures, the hope is that they will not once again
degenerate into security-threatening behavior. State-building missions have had
considerable success in stabilizing several countries around the globe over the past
decade, ranging from East Timor to Bosnia to Sierra Leone to Honduras. The missions
have certainly not made any of these places model states, but conditions in all
of them are significantly better than before the UN arrived, and probably much
better than had the UN not arrived.
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