The Protection of Civilians and the United Nations

摘要

The world has changed significantly since the founding of the United Nations and so have its conflicts. During the mid-twentieth century, the pre-eminent challenge for multilateral cooperation was the awesome prospect of a Third World War. Today, in the aftermath of the Cold War, we see a more elaborated focus on the prevention of conflict and the protection of communities and peoples-both as a sovereign responsibility of the modern nation-state as well as a central focus of the United Nations peace engagements. Today, while the challenges facing us have changed, our core responsibility to maintain international peace and security has not. Through much of the latter half of the 20th century, security was largely viewed through an East-West lens. With some exceptions, the theory and practice of peacemaking and peacekeeping was directed at keeping armies apart. By serving as a midwife to decolonisation, however, the United Nations gave impetus to the globalisation of human rights and their protection. There could be no distinctions between people with regard to their rights. There were also significant developments in humanitarian law and in international human rights jurisprudence that served to extend the breadth and depth of human rights in war and in peace. These included the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Refugee Convention and the Fourth Geneva Convention. By the 1990s, the end of the Cold War had eased the tensions of a bipolar world. But it also saw the eruption of destructive intra-state conflicts in Africa, Asia and Europe. Faced with these challenges, and others, the United Nations would witness a nearly seven-fold increase in its peacekeeping presence between 1989 and 1994. It would drop and rise again. United Nations peacekeepers had not only to deal with inter-state conflicts and national rivalries, but insert themselves in the more complex terrain of politically manipulated inter-ethnic, religious and sectarian animosities.