![]() ![]() Realistic recommendations for improvement are offered in Chapter four, and are summarized in the chart below. The third chapter reviews some of the major previous recommendations for UN peacekeeping reform, and offers suggestions as to why those recommendations were never adopted. The second chapter examines the current UN peacekeeping structure and many of the improvements already adopted by the Secretariat. The recommended fix is simple: state the actual “mandate” in a separate document that contains all terms of the UN mission and is attached to the Security Council resolution to provide a comprehensive guide for UN peacekeeping forces. For example, many authors have stressed the need for clear mandates, but without closely examining the mandates in use, the reader would not realize that the real issue is that “mandates” are not contained in one document to which a UN Force Commander can refer, but instead are scattered through several Security Council resolutions that refer to recommendations in other documents not included in the resolution. Using the Somalia mission also provides insights into peacekeeping challenges by reference to historic examples to validate the challenges and to serve as a basis for recommendations for improvement. The UN Somalia mission is used because it was the first Chapter VII peace enforcement mission and because it embodied most of the challenges faced by the UN in complex peacekeeping missions since then. In contrast, this study examines past UN peacekeeping operations to discover the challenges and recommends structures and procedures for improving the planning and execution of UN peacekeeping operations – improvements that are possible to accomplish under existing UN structures and possibly within current funding – hence, the subtitle “Embracing the Possible.” The study begins with a detailed look at the UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions in Somalia in 1992 to 1995. But many of these well-researched writings propose ideal solutions that are simply not politically acceptable. Much has been written over the past fifty years suggesting improvements to UN peacekeeping capabilities. Today, the United Nations is grappling with defining its role in global security, especially as we enter an era of widespread terrorism. Several nations, dismissive of the UN’s role as world peacekeeper, undertook to solve regional disputes on their own, although still seeking the sanction of UN ratifying resolutions. ![]() But in the early 1990’s, UN missions to restore peace in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia failed to accomplish their goals, leading many to question whether the UN should take any role in global security. The UN, freed from the shackles of a superpower Security Council veto, sought to contain these eruptions of discord. Especially in these failed states, but elsewhere as well, racial, ethnic and religious animosities that had been subsumed by the Cold War, began to erupt. Moreover, a new phenomenon threatened regional peace and security – failed states – in which no one wielded the power to maintain order. ![]() National actors and sub-national groups no longer feared that one or the other superpower would, in order to maintain the superpower peace, prevent them from acting with force to achieve their goals. The end of the Cold War removed many of the barriers to minor conflict. The UN entered “peacekeeping” tentatively acting always with the consent of disputing parties, maintaining neutrality between the parties, and using minimal force to defend its personnel and property, and then only when attacked. Nevertheless, the United Nations achieved notable success in a number of minor crises that could have spun out of control. The two superpower protagonists – the United States and the Soviet Union - suspicious of any move by the other, prevented united efforts to solve most world crises. That United Nations organization was given the force of arms to use if need be to put down aggression and it was contemplated that the combined forces of the five great powers would act in concert, under their combined Chiefs of Staff, to react with massive power of modern armies to overwhelm an aggressor and to restore peace. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious allied powers believed that they could build on the failed League of Nations experiment that followed the First World War, and create an organization that united the nations of the world under their leadership to preserve peace. The challenges of preserving global peace and security have never been easy.
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