UN Peace Keeping Operations — Principles, Case studies and Critical Appraisal

The UN Charter never once uses the word "peacekeeping". The idea was improvised in the 1950s to fill a gap the Charter's own drafters had not planned for, a way to put soldiers on the ground between two sides without either invading a state or waiting for the Security Council's five permanent members to agree on war. Seven decades and dozens of missions later, this is still one of the most tested topics in the paper, and the exam wants the three principles that hold it together, not just a list of countries the UN has sent troops to.

In two minutes

UN peacekeeping is the deployment of UN personnel, usually with the consent of the parties, to help implement or monitor a peace process, and it rests on three principles: consent of the parties, impartiality, and non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – III: International Relations on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.