The Silence of the UN Security Council: Conflict and Peace Enforcement in the 1990s

The UN Security Council has increasingly become the focus of attention since it seemingly awoke from its slumber in the closing stages of the Cold War. Those evaluating the performance of the Council have almost invariably focused on examining how successful the Council has been in its attempts at peacekeeping, peace enforcement and enforcement action, as seen in the abundance of literature on the Council’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and to conflict in such places as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Haiti. More recently, the Council’s response to situations in Kosovo and Iraq has come under scrutiny, as powerful Council members and their allies chose in each case to bypass the Council and go to war.
Considering that the Council did not take action in response to the majority of major conflicts in the 1990s (and in some cases, did not even discuss them), an evaluation of the Council based solely on what it sets out to accomplish is able to provide but a partial picture of its performance.
Aiming to present a more comprehensive assessment of the Council’s performance, this work concerns itself primarily with an overall examination of its response (or lack thereof) to conflict as it occurred throughout the world in the 1990s and up until the present, comparing the level of conflict with the level of Council response. Secondly, it examines the Council’s performance in the maintenance and restoration of peace (through peace enforcement) in the select instances in which it did attempt to intervene.