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This study explores the normative dimension of the evolving role of the United Nations in peace and security and, ultimately, in governance. What is dealt with here is both the UN's changing raison d'être and the wider normative context within which the organisation is located. The study looks at the UN through the window of one of its most contentious, yet least understood, practices: active involvement in intra-state conflicts as epitomised by UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the conceptual tools provided by the ‘historical structural’ approach, it seeks to understand how and why the international community continuously reinterprets or redefines the UN's role with regard to such conflicts. The study concentrates on intra-state ‘peacekeeping environments’, and examines what changes, if any, have occurred to the normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. One of the original aspects of the study is its analytical framework, where the conceptualisation of ‘normative basis’ revolves around objectives, functions and authority, and is closely connected with the institutionalised values in the UN Charter such as state sovereignty, human rights and socio-economic development.
normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts has evolved unevenly but appreciably in terms of both objectives and authority, with the shift in the pattern of prescribed functions emerging as one important indicator of this change. Objectives were conceptualised here with reference to four key principles enshrined in the UN Charter, namely peace and security, state
normative basis of UN peacekeeping and the UN’s evolving role in world politics. The literature on the UN’s Cambodia experience has rightly pointed to the ‘comprehensive’ nature of the mission. What is less well understood is the normative meaning and implications of this comprehensiveness, which is what this chapter seeks to elucidate. Here we explore the local, regional and global interests
, functions, and authority as detected in peacekeeping environments Our concentration on peacekeeping environments is intended to uncover any changes to the normative connection between the UN and intra-state conflicts. In this context we have already made reference to the ‘normative basis’ of UN peacekeeping, alluding to its connection with three crucial concepts that we use in
T HE CHANGING MACROPOLITICAL landscape brought in its wake both continuities and discontinuities in the normative basis of intra-state peacekeeping, which we will closely examine in the context of four detailed case studies. Each case study in the following chapters will of necessity be handled in its ‘own’ time, in seemingly static fashion. This chapter will
maintenance of international peace and security. No doubt, these beliefs find some support from the wording of the Charter. However, does the UN’s actual practice not raise serious doubts about their correctness? The organisation’s active involvement in intra-state conflicts is a case in point. It may well be the case that international players are redefining the UN’s ‘normative basis’, that is its ideal
fact which is likely to shed light on possible changes in its normative basis, especially in terms of authority. Another interesting aspect of the UN presence in Angola is the doubt that it casts on the ‘evidence’ of normative shift suggested by the so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’. Such UN operations as the ones in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda are frequently taken to imply that human rights had by
South had exercised in the early 1960s in defining the normative basis of the UN’s peace and security function had for the time being markedly diminished. 109 At the same time, the fusion of the two previous axes of global conflict enhanced the widespread perception of a rapidly ‘globalising’ world 110 in that the territorial and conceptual ‘boundaries’ along the East–West and
signified its neutrality vis-à-vis the North–South and the East–West conflicts. There were strong structural constraints on the normative basis of UN action. Up until that point, the Security Council had defined its own role purely in relation to a perceived inter-state conflict. In one sense, nevertheless, the Security Council’s overall attitude was quite revolutionary, since the conflict in question had