Chapter I

Achieving peace and security

Introduction

62. During the 1990s, we have witnessed major changes in the patterns of global conflict and in the international community's responses to them. Today, more than 90 per cent of armed conflicts take place within, rather than between, States. With relatively few inter-State wars, traditional rationales for intervention have become decreasingly relevant, while humanitarian and human rights principles have increasingly been invoked to justify the use of force in internal wars, not always with the authorization of the Security Council. Sanctions have been used far more frequently in the 1990s than ever before, but with results that are ambiguous at best.

63. One of the more encouraging developments of the last decade has been an increase in the number of conflicts settled by negotiation. Three times as many peace agreements were signed in the 1990s as in the previous three decades, reflecting a more than 30 per cent decline in the overall number and intensity of armed conflicts around the world from 1992 to 1997. With the sharp upturn in the number of wars in 1998, however, it seems doubtful that the positive trend of the previous five years will be sustained.

64. Comprehensive peace agreements have led to complex implementation processes involving many different agencies. While some traditional peacekeeping operations remain, peacekeepers throughout this decade have been involved in the broader post-conflict peace-building processes associated with the implementation of peace agreements. Post-conflict peace-building involves the return and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons, reconciliation, rebuilding judicial systems, strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights, electoral assistance and assistance in rebuilding war-torn political, economic and social infrastructures, as well as more traditional peacekeeping tasks.

65. In response to the changing international normative climate, the number of legal instruments, particularly relating to humanitarian and human rights law, has increased considerably. Growing public concern about gross human rights violations provided much of the political impetus for the creation of the International Criminal Court; concern about the humanitarian costs of landmines fuelled the successful campaign to ban them.

66. The past decade has also been a period of tension and difficulty for the United Nations as it has sought to fulfil its collective security mandate. Earlier this year, the Security Council was precluded from intervening in the Kosovo crisis by profound disagreements between Council members over whether such an intervention was legitimate. Differences within the Council reflected the lack of consensus in the wider international community. Defenders of traditional interpretations of international law stressed the inviolability of State sovereignty; others stressed the moral imperative to act forcefully in the face of gross violations of human rights. The moral rights and wrongs of this complex and contentious issue will be the subject of debate for years to come, but what is clear is that enforcement actions without Security Council authorization threaten the very core of the international security system founded on the Charter of the United Nations. Only the Charter provides a universally accepted legal basis for the use of force.

67. Disagreements about sovereignty are not the only impediments to Security Council action in the face of complex humanitarian emergencies. Confronted by gross violations of human rights in Rwanda and elsewhere, the failure to intervene was driven more by the reluctance of Member States to pay the human and other costs of intervention, and by doubts that the use of force would be successful, than by concerns about sovereignty.

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