What determines where and when United Nations (UN) sends peacekeepers in civil wars? This is an important topic for at least two normative reasons. First, it is a necessary prerequisite for judging extent to which organization lives up to its aspirations for being a truly global body, capable of working to preserve international security and relieve suffering without preference to a state's choice of government, location, resources, or historical connection to great powers. Second, given various attempts to suggest criteria or benchmarks for humanitarian intervention, it is important to know which cases are selected for intervention in absence of such criteria. The procedures and standards of UN provide little guidance as to actual decisions of Security Council regarding when and where peacekeepers will be deployed. Peacekeepers are deployed with reference to Chapters 6 or 7 of UN Charter. Although these chapters differ with regard to use of force or pacific means to resolve disputes, they agree that prerequisite for their enactment is a threat to or an endangerment of the maintenance of international peace and The question remains, why does Security Council consider some civil wars threats to international security? The charter is silent on what constitutes a threat to international security, and Security Council has shown enormous flexibility in invoking language of threat to justify deployment of peacekeepers. If previous deployments provide any indication, then one must wrestle with why civil wars in Mozambique, Somalia, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone were deemed essential for promotion of international security, whereas civil wars in Kashmir, Sudan, Chechnya, and Algeria were judged as peripheral to security. Despite importance of issue, amount of systematic research on topic is extremely small in comparison with dozens of other topics that come under heading of international cooperation. Partly as a consequence, unsupported claims by journalists, policymakers, and even some academics about where UN sends peacekeepers have proliferated over years. A common assertion is that peacekeepers go where permanent members of Security Council (or in some versions where United States) have important national interests. Alternatively, it is claimed that peacekeeping is imperialism in disguise and, therefore, peacekeepers are sent where great powers have an economic interest in access to raw materials and primary commodities. A different version holds that peacekeeping since 1990s embodies an ethos of democracy-building and that great powers, who have an interest in increasing number of democracies in world, choose cases in which democracy is in short supply yet has potential to take root.