Widespread intra-state conflict is not a new phenomenon. Its rise to the centre of attention in international policy circles is. UN involvement in intra-state conflicts is not new either. What is new is the increasing systematisation of UN involvement in conflict-torn societies. It is these two novelties of the post-Cold War world that shape the main concerns of this study. What is problematised here is the connection between the UN’s evolving approach to intra-state conflicts and the value system of the international community.

There should be little doubt that the UN’s frequent involvement in domestic conflicts contributes to gradual change...

Until the late 1980s, international relations theory had a rather crude attitude towards normative research in general. Although, after decades of neglect, norms had finally found their way into mainstream international relations through the study of institutions in the early 1980s, the realist and liberal ‘paradigms’ of international relations, and for that matter, their ‘neo’ variants, pursued their rival research programmes on strikingly similar premises. They shared the same assumptions as they engaged in empirical research, and, as a by-product, either continuously re-created the same ‘reality’ in their findings¹ or were entrapped by shared dilemmas.² They proceeded, as Keohane aptly...

The un’s response to intra-state conflicts did not take shape in a vacuum. International normative preferences which had an impact on active UN involvement in intra-state conflicts drew their inspiration from and interacted with the international political milieu. No doubt the wider historical context in which the UN had to operate underwent constant change, as did the UN itself. The present chapter reviews, with the benefit of historical structural insights, the evolving international context in the aftermath of World War II. The purpose of recalling this well known historical record here is to discern the most significant ‘material’ and ‘ideational’...

The changing macropolitical landscape brought in its wake both continuities and discontinuities in the normative basis of intra-state peacekeeping, which we will closely examine in the context of four detailed case studies. Each case study in the following chapters will of necessity be handled in its ‘own’ time, in seemingly static fashion. This chapter will reinforce the change dimension that we introduced in the preceding chapter in which we tried to account for the historical trends impacting on the UN’s peace and security function and on the evolution of international normsetting understood as the gradual fleshing out and re-interpretation of...

Between 1960 and 1964, the UN conducted one of the most controversial peacekeeping operations in its history. ONUC¹ drew on 93,000 personnel from 34 states.² It involved 19,828 personnel at its peak,³ and cost US$400,130,793, provoking a serious financial crisis for the UN.⁴ The Congo case is interesting for our purposes not only because it aroused immense controversy, but also because the UN was ‘entrapped’ by a complex web of interlocking crises with obvious inter-state and intra-state dimensions.

In the Congo, the UN was originally expected to respond to an inter-state conflict that emerged out of the decolonisation process, but...

The cyprus conflict, too, emerged out of a colonial context. In Cyprus, some 6,500 peacekeepers were deployed at a time when, as a result of the Congo experience, several international actors were sceptical of UN peacekeeping.¹ As of 2002, the Cyprus mission was still continuing. However, its nature had changed considerably since the Turkish intervention in 1974. This chapter focuses on the early years of the operation, when the intra-state dimension of the conflict was arguably more visible. Until the status quo of 1974, the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) exhibited more than ‘inter-positionary’ peacekeeping, which indicates that it...

The un’s angola mission underwent four phases, starting with the first UN Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM I) in 1988, through UNAVEM II and III, and ending with the UN Observation Mission (MONUA) in 1999.¹ Angola is an illuminating case, not only because it is a point of temporal comparison with the Congo and Cyprus cases, but also because the evolution of the mission itself illustrates how an ever-expanding political space was created for the UN in relation to the conflict. In this chapter, we pay particular attention to the second phase of the operation, UNAVEM II, which marked a transition...

An examination of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)¹ should prove especially illuminating for our study in that this mission points to the growing willingness of the international community to involve the UN in intra-state governance. It helps us, in other words, to scrutinise more closely the relationship between the changing normative basis of UN peacekeeping and the UN’s evolving role in world politics.

The literature on the UN’s Cambodia experience has rightly pointed to the ‘comprehensive’ nature of the mission. What is less well understood is the normative meaning and implications of this comprehensiveness, which is what this...

The normative connection between the UN and intra-state conflicts is not static. It is a matter of continuous redefinition and reinterpretation as can be usefully observed in the context of intra-state peacekeeping environments. One of our contentions in this study is that, in the space of just three decades – that is, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s – the normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts has evolved unevenly but appreciably in terms of both objectives and authority, with the shift in the pattern of prescribed functions emerging as one important indicator of this change.

Objectives...