Review: Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2007
| Author | Ramesh Thakur |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300121 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Winter 2007-08 | 229 |
| Reviews |
ANNUAL REVIEW OF GLOBAL PEACE OPERATIONS 2007
Center on International Cooperation
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 391pp, US$25.00 paper (ISBN 978-
1588265098)
The world is a better place because of the United Nations: because it exists,
because of what it does, and because of how it does it. One unexpected but
vital component of the organization’s overall success story is its history of
peacekeeping. That is a story that needs telling by a skilled narrator and
then constant retelling with each passing year, lest we forget.
A hundred years ago, war was an accepted institution with distinctive
rules, etiquette, norms, and stable patterns of practices. In that Hobbesian
world, the only protection against aggression was countervailing power that
increased both the cost of victory and the risk of failure. Since 1945, the
United Nations has spawned a corpus of law to stigmatize aggression and
create a robust norm against it. Now there are significant restrictions on the
authority of states to use force either domestically or internationally.
The trend towards narrowing the permissible range of unilateral resort
to force by nation-states has been matched by the movement to broaden the
range of international instruments available to settle their disputes by
peaceful means. The United Nations incorporated the League proscription
on the use of force for national objectives, but inserted the additional—and
in theory mandatory—prescription to use force in support of international,
that is UN, authority. This is integral to organizing a system of collective
security. However, efforts to devise an operational collective security system
proved a nonstarter. Instead, the instrument of choice by the United
Nations for engaging with the characteristic types of contemporary conflicts
is peacekeeping, which evolved in the grey zone between pacific settlement
and military enforcement.
Traditional or classical international peacekeeping forces could never
keep world peace, for they lacked both the mandated authority and the oper-
ational capability to do so. Yet even while failing to bring about world peace,
UN forces successfully stabilized several potentially dangerous situations.
The number of UN operations increased dramatically after the end of the
Cold War as the United Nations was placed centre-stage in efforts to resolve
outstanding conflicts.
Traditional peacekeeping aimed to contain and stabilize volatile regions
and interstate conflicts until such time as negotiations produced lasting
peace agreements. By contrast, the newer generation of peacekeeping saw
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