Keeping the Peace: Regional or Global Responsibility?

Abstract

The explosion of international peace and security operations after the Cold War has led to some complex changes in the ways in which the international system seeks to contain conflict and rehabilitate societies devastated by conflict situations. The institution of choice for these purposes has been the United Nations (UN), which has had decades of experience with peace and humanitarian operations. Since the 1990s, however, the UN has not always been the lead institution in these operations. By choice or by political necessity, other multilateral mechanisms have come to the fore—including a variety of regional institutions. The United Nations and Regional Security: Europe and Beyond, edited by Michael Pugh and Waheguru Sidhu, examines these cases. Commissioned by the International Peace Academy, the contributions to the volume look at how these post-Cold War regional arrangements have functioned, either instead of the UN or as part of larger UN-led operations. The United Nations and Regional Security is the latest of several studies over the past decade that have tried to draw lessons from the experiences of United Nations peace and security operations (see, for example, Diehl 1994; Ratner 1996; Otunnu and Doyle 1998). Many of these studies have been internal reports of the UN, such as the Brahimi report (Panel of Experts 2000), and most, including those sponsored by the United Nations University (Thakur and Schnabel 2002), have focused on the operations undertaken by the UN itself. Regional peacekeeping, in part because it has been less frequent, has been given less attention, (see, for example, Mackinley and Cross 2003). By comparing operations involving nonuniversal institutions and by documenting the functions performed, The United Nations and Regional Security helps fill the gaps.