United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Ad Hoc Missions, Permanent Engagement.

• Author: Resnick, Evan N.

Edited by Ramesh Thakur and Albrecht Schnabel

New York: United Nations University Press, 2001, 280 pages

What a difference a decade makes. In the early 1990s, the United Nations seemed to emerge with a new lease on life after almost 50 years of Cold War paralysis. Buoyed by its successive and successful state-building operations in Namibia and Cambodia, as well as its pivotal coalition-building role in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, the United Nations appeared poised to occupy a central position in the so-called new world order.

Just over 10 years later, this lofty aspiration lies in tatters, and, in retrospect, appears to have been the product of extreme naivete and groundless idealism. Botched efforts to keep or enforce peace in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone have purveyed the near-universal impression of the United Nations as an impotent, weak and perhaps even irrelevant actor on the international stage. In recent months, the UN's relatively low profile in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC, and the subsequent US-led war in Afghanistan has done little to dispel this image.

This new era of self-doubt and shaken credibility provides the backdrop for an edited volume published by the United Nations Press that critically assesses the string of recent failures in order to draw lessons for future peacekeeping missions. The sobering nature of the task undertaken in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, edited by Ramesh Thakur and Albrecht Schnabel, both of the United Nations University, is clearly reflected in the volume's subtitle, Ad Hoc Missions, Permanent Engagement. In their effort to glean as comprehensive an evaluation as possible, the editors cast their net widely. They include essays written not only by academic analysts of peacekeeping but also by some of the practitioners who have been intimately involved in the missions that the project places under a microscope.

Thakur and Schnabel divide the volume into four sections. The first contains four essays that broadly depict the challenges of post-Cold War peacekeeping. In the second section three essays survey regional experiences with peacekeeping missions. The four essays in the third section review various aspects of some of the most prominent recent peacekeeping operations, those of Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and East Timor. The two essays in the final section review the overall post-Cold War record of UN peacekeeping and judge efforts by the United Nations to learn from its prior mistakes.

Forming the analytical...