The UN, Darfur and oil-deals in Beijing

Abstract

Largely neglected during the Cold War, UN peacekeeping has moved on from policing existing peace agreements to the much more ambitious task of trying to create peace where there is none.If two gangs start shooting at each other in the street we expect the police to step in and stop the fighting. If two countries' armies start firing we now expect the UN to get agreement on a ceasefireand send in a peacekeeping force. But this is a relatively recent trend - before World War Two there was no UN. Between the two World Wars there was the League of Nations but this was a toothless tiger,debating railway gauges while Hitler invaded Poland.Before the First World War there was nothing in any way equivalent to a global police force and the only hope for external intervention would have been for some more powerful government to bring pressureto bear on the two warring states to stop fighting. Certainly, the colonial powers often justified their interventions as keeping peace between warring groups (as in the Pax Britannica which was an imperialgoal long before it became a board game). Indeed, before the horrors of the trench warfare of World War One, many men glorified war and despised peace.