Class Year

2023

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2019

Department 1

Political Science

Abstract

Of everything the United Nations does, probably one its most scrutinized programs is its peacekeeping missions across the globe. Even though humanity is experiencing an unprecedented level of peace, deadly civil wars still occur across the world, especially in developing nations. The UN has become involved in many of these conflicts, sending peacekeeping forces to the country in crisis. UN peace efforts are very important because they have the potential to save thousands of lives and preventing the further damages of war. It is for this reason that it is vital to examine the UN peacekeeping missions and evaluate the outcomes these have produced.

My research into this question will briefly look at the process of peacekeeping and its results based on reports after peacekeeping missions leave the nation in question. The overall question I seek to answer is “Do UN peacekeeping forces leave a civil war-stricken country in a better or worse condition since they have arrived?”. Essentially I seek to asses the UN’s effectiveness in peacekeeping overall. In order to find an answer to this question, I will examine various scholarly debates and papers all evaluating the UN’s performance in various conflicts. These papers range in backgrounds and hypotheses but they break down these conflicts into various tests in order to identify the outcomes and come to a general conclusion. Each of these studies also highlights specific conflicts as examples in support of their argument, thus providing the research with more credibility, while still showing the vast complication of peacekeeping.

UN peacekeeping forces, in the majority of cases, fail to bring about stable peace in civil wars. I believe this because, from what I have seen, there seems to be a lot of civil wars that keep occurring or fail to stop, for example, Syria. While Syria has caught quite the attention and action of the UN, its war has no end in sight. Conflicts in various African nations such as Somalia fail to end as well, thus bringing me to what I hypothesize.

Comments

Written for POL 103: Intro to International Relations.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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