The United Nations and international peacekeeping

With the demise of superpower hegemony, the increasing fragility of existing political structures and the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, international peace-keeping and the role of the UN have become vital to international politics. The end of the Cold War raised expectations among international relations analysts that the UN would play a more constructive role in maintaining peace and policing the international order. Agostinho Zacarias's book explains why these hopes were shattered.

By examining UN peace-keeping activities from 1956 up to the present, the book explains how UN involvement in peace-keeping missions has expanded over time to include functions traditionally thought of as governing functions. The book argues that present demands have stretched the UN's resources and organisational capacity to the limit, thus compromising its credibility. This implies that the concept of peace-keeping needs to be redefined and readjusted according to UN capacity.

To restore its credibility, the UN must draw a line between peace-keeping, peace-enforcement and post-conflict peace-building and insist that peace-keeping operations should be designed to keep peace.