Peacekeeping Interventions: Do They Succeed Or Fail?

The protection and human security of civilians is one of the primary purposes of the UN department of peacekeeping, yet evidence for whether or not they are actually effective in prevention of civilian deaths is a topic that has been controversially debated since the end of the cold war when peacekeeping interventions escalated. While the UN has been criticized for it’s failures, there is no doubt that some of their peacekeeping missions have been highly effective in the protection of citizen lives. There are diverging reasons behind why peacekeeping operations may either succeed or fail and there are several questions that should be addressed before the UN is to deploy any peacekeeping operations (PKO’s). Since the main goal is to improve the success of UN intervention missions, then it would be within the best interests of the international community to construct their operation strategies around specific questions that answer to both the size and …show more content…
If the correct number of troops, police, and military, were deployed to states involved in civil conflict, greater progress would be observed. Although third- party interventions have been accused of affecting and even escalating the severity of mass killings, many researchers have failed to look at PKO’s relationships in the long-term as opposed to simply looking at the “conflict year”. Each of the authors outlined in this essay have contended that, with time, foreign intervention through peacekeeping missions such as the UN Deployment of Peacekeeping offer the greatest opportunity for us to reduce violence in the long- term. The international community needs to become aware of this and make arrangements for PKO’s to become better outfitted in terms of skill, training, and equipment so that they are better fit to serve and protect civilians in civil war