Promoting peace in the face of terrorism

Marching Orders
How Canada abandoned peacekeeping – and why the UN needs us now more than ever

Promoting peace in the face of terrorism

UN peacekeeping, then, has proven to be adaptable and in demand. Has it been effective?

The experts say that the UN has been very successful since the end of the Cold War in bringing about more widespread peace in the world, despite the fears of international terrorism brought on by the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. This was a central finding in the 2005 Human Security Report, published by the Human Security Centre at University of British Columbia and led by Andrew Mack, former director of the strategic planning unit in the Executive Office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.31

The report proclaims that global conflict has been in decline since the end of the Cold War in 1989. Taking a long view of history, the authors note that between 1816 and 2002, there were 199 international wars (including wars of colonial conquest and liberation) and 251 civil wars. By the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s wars between states accounted for one-fifth to three-quarters of all wars waged. But in the 1980s and early 1990s, international wars declined rapidly, and since the late 1990s there have been almost none at all.

Although civil wars increased in the second half of the last century (from 2 in 1946 to 25 in 1991), after 1992 the number of civil wars also declined quickly – much faster than the rate at which the number grew in the preceding decades. In fact, in just 10 years following 1992, the number of civil wars fell by 80 per cent, according to the 2005 Human Security Report.

“The most persuasive explanation for the decline in civil [and international] conflict is found in the far-reaching political changes wrought by the end of the Cold War [in 1989],” Mack writes. Breaking down this analysis even further, Mack finds that as the end of the Cold War removed ideological drivers to both civil and international wars, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union stopped supporting their client states in proxy wars. According to Mack, this “liberated the UN, allowing it for the first time to play an effective global security role – and indeed to do far more than its founders had originally envisaged.”

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