INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY

One of the primary purposes of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security. Since its creation, the UN has often been called upon to prevent disputes from escalating into war, to persuade opposing parties to use the conference table rather than force of arms, or to help restore peace when armed conflict does break out. Over the decades, the UN has helped to end numerous conflicts, often through actions of the Security Council — the primary organ for dealing with issues of international peace and security.

The Security Council, the General Assembly and the Secretary-General all play major, complementary roles in fostering peace and security. . United Nations activities cover the principal areas of conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, enforcement and peacebuilding.

Civil conflicts

During the 1990s, the end of the cold war led to an entirely new global security environment, one marked by a focus on internal rather than inter-state wars.

The UN has therefore reshaped and enhanced the traditional range of instruments at its command, strengthening its peacekeeping capacity to meet new challenges, increasingly involving regional organizations, and enhancing its post-conflict peacebuilding capability.

To deal with civil conflicts, the Security Council has authorized complex and innovative peacekeeping operations. Since its establishment, the UN has played a major role in ending conflict and fostering reconciliation, including successful missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, in Cambodia and Mozambique, in Sierra Leone and Liberia and Tajikistan, to name but a few.

Other conflicts, however - such as in Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s - often characterized by ethnic violence and the lack of any internal power structure to deal with security issues, brought new challenges to United Nations peace-making and peacekeeping. Confronted with the problems encountered in these conflicts, the Security Council did not establish any new operation from 1995 to 1997.

But soon the essential role of the UN was dramatically reaffirmed.

Continuing crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone led the Council to establish five new missions as the decade drew to a close.

Peace-building

The experience of recent years has also led the United Nations to focus as never before on peacebuilding - efforts to reduce a country's risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development. Experience has shown that the creation of lasting peace can only be achieved by pulling together all resources to help countries foster economic development, social justice, respect for human rights and good governance.