Much has been written about UN peacekeeping and the United Nations has conducted at least three comprehensive high-level reviews of its peacekeeping operations. Here we want to leave aside the many issues these reviews have raised: from the increasing delays in mobilizing peacekeepers to its missions being heavily underresourced, from being hampered by a growing bureaucracy to being challenged by the sexual contact of some of its peacekeeping forces.

In this annex, we want to look at a specific and a more fundamental problem for UN peacekeepers, namely, that peacekeepers no longer act as a neutral third party to a conflict but become themselves a party in the conflict they come to solve. This, we will argue, is not due to any misunderstandings or political naivety, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift in UN peacekeeping at the end of the Cold War from facilitating the end of interstate wars to finding peace in intrastate armed conflicts. To understand the vital importance of this shift, we have first to go back to the beginning of UN peacekeeping.

When in June 1945, delegates from 46 countries and 4 so-called sponsoring countries signed the UN Charter in San Francisco, nobody considered the possibility that the United Nations should have its own troops to enforce UN decisions. In its Chapter VII, the Charter outlines possible enforcement actions, but its founding fathers had in mind a pattern used during WWII. Enforcement would be done through allied forces; after all, the United Nations was created by the victorious allied forces against Nazi Germany in WWII.

The still fresh memories of two world wars during which regular armed forces had created so much death, misery, and destruction is what led to the discrediting of armed forces playing any role in this new organization charged with maintaining global peace. Chapter VII was to be applied only in exceptional cases; the main work of the United Nations would rely on Chapter VI, which dealt with the peaceful settlement of disputes through diplomacy and negotiation. The sending of a UN military force such as UN peacekeepers was nowhere mentioned in the UN Charter. The “invention” of peacekeeping was due to outstanding personalities such as Folke Bernadotte, Ralph Bunche, and Lester Pearson. The image of the United Nations today is very much that of the so-called Blue Helmets.