Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping

Controversy has largely replaced the euphoria which accompanied the end of the Cold War and the promise this development held for the United Nations as an instrument for furthering world public order. Sparking the controversy has been the UN's recent, extensive, and too often, highly problematical involvement in operations which go beyond traditional peacekeeping. Thus, the organization stands today at a crossroads, deliberating how much further it should push into a new era of non-traditional operations or whether it should, instead, retrench into safer traditional practices. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners who explicate the issues at the heart of these deliberations. They review the past and particularly the present status of UN peacekeeping and recommend how the organization and member states should proceed. Dedicated analyses and case-studies focus on issues of sovereignty and intervention, national commitments to non-traditional missions, and operational efficiency and effectiveness when undertaking them.