Should the UN go back to basics?

 

From the institution of the United Nations’ peacekeeping there have been constant developments of this peacekeeping format. Branching away from the traditional peacekeeping efforts of positioning between conflicting sides in order to monitor a ceasefire, UN peacekeeping has evolved to include multidimensional peace keeping; humanitarian interventions; and peace enforcement. However developments such as seen in Bosnia and Somalia induced calls for a return to the basic goals for UN peacekeeping of cease fires.

However calling for a return to basics implies that the UN is simply going past the boundaries it was given. Instead some consideration should be given to the needs of the international community. The Bosnian experience saw UN peacekeepers act on 80 Security Council resolutions performing the complicated negotiation between consent and dissuading use of military force (Gray 2001:57). Circumstances such as this require new approaches to peace keeping while adhering to the fundamentals.

A return to the basics seems in many regards like the logical step, for UN peacekeepers have been both efficient and successful in aiding cease fires and fulfilling the role of traditional peacekeeping. Gray drew attention to the rapidly changing roles of UN Peacekeepers stating that, “if UN peacekeeping has acquired a certain elasticity in recent years, it is precisely because circumstances have lead the world to make demands on the military capacity of the United Nations which vastly exceeds anything it was called upon to do as recently as three or four years ago” (Gray 2001:53). However this does not mean that peacekeeping should evolve until it is unrecognisable (Gray 2001:56). Peacekeeping should have the essential element of consent. Without this ‘basic’ guiding principle the evolution of peacekeeping would be without foundation.

I believe that the UN should not go back to basics for although the UN is successful in traditional peacekeeping, the international community have greater expectations and indeed needs which cannot be fulfilled through the limited goals of traditional peacekeeping. Because the international community requires greater efforts by the UN forces, returning to the basics would ignore the ways in which the world has changed and the new needs it has created.