The Role of the United Nations in Maintaining Peace in the World - Essay

Garry Adams once said “I have realized that it is much more difficult to make peace than to make war”. No where is it more evident than in hollowed rooms of the United Nations. The world body was just born in the 14 points of Wood draw Wilson. His vision found very few supporters among his contemporaries and the world paid dearly for it in the shape of Second World War while there were various factors that led to the hostilities, on the was the weakness of the league of Nations. The European Leaders found themselves without any medium to resolve the communication gap between them and Nazi Germany. This short coming was realized only after countless lives had been lost in the most wide-ranging conflict till far. The answer was the United Nations the UN has been supposedly entrusted with the task of preventing any future conflict from escalation while it has various parts of the world; however, it has been the only forum where all warning sides have shown any willingness to negotiate their issues. It was also realized that maintaining peace is as much important as preventing war. Thus was born the concept of keeping “peace” and “force” necessary to enforce it.

The United Nations peace keeping forces are being employed by the world body to maintain or re-establish peace in an area of armed conflict. The UN may engage peace keeping forces in conflicts between states as well as struggles within states. The UN act as an impartial third party in order to prepare the ground for a settlement of the issues that have provoked armed conflict. If it proves impossible to achieve a  peaceful settlement, the presence of the UN Forces may contribute to reducing the level of conflict. Peace keeping initially developed as means of dealing with inter state conflict, and involved the deployment of military personnel from a number of countries, under UN command to help control and resolve armed conflict. To day peace keeping is increasing applied to intra-state conflict and civil wars in recent years peace keeping tasks have become more varied and complex and although military personnel remain the backbone of most peace keeping operations proportionally larger number of civilians work along side the military personnel.

Although peace keeping is not specially mentioned in the United Nations Charter, the charter gives the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. The council creates and defines peace keeping missions. The secretary general directs and manages UN peace-keeping operations and reports to the council on a mission’s progress.

Annual cost of UN peace keeping in 1993 was 3.6 billions in 1996 and 1997 it was 1.4 billions and 1.3 billions respectively. But 1998 cost dropped to 1 billion. But it raised in 1999 to 1.7 billion and 2.6 billion in 2000. All member states are obliged to pay their share of peace keeping cost.

UN peace keeping efforts have been successful in most of countries such as Somalia, Cambodia etc. The major proof of the UN peace efforts is that it has stopped third world war up today.