Interventions by Kofi Annan

dramatic reduction in size of the Soviet military, particularly in its presence in Eastern Europe. This signaled the end of the Cold War, with profound implications for the UN’s role in the world. The Security Council, envisaged by the UN’s founders as the prime body for international peace and security, had been in a state of near-constant deadlock for forty years due to the superpower rivalry of its two most powerful members, the United States and the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev’s speech heralded an end to this confrontation and the paralysis it had caused within the Security Council.
    For the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, at first, the consequences of this change were significant, but manageable. Before 1988, only a dozen peacekeeping operations were launched in all of the UN’s forty-three years. But in the brief period between 1988 and 1992, the Council created another ten. The Council was now able to agree, in a way that they had not been able to before, on its response to crises suitable for the intervention of peacekeepers. UN peacekeepers were now deployed, for example, to monitor cease-fires between Iraq and Iran, to supervise the political transition in Nicaragua and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, as well as other operations elsewhere.
    What then followed from 1992 was an explosion in operations. This was driven not by a peacekeeping mission but by Operation Desert Storm. In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Council, in complete unity, passed a resolution mandating the full use of military force as provided for under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This led to the deployment of 956,600 men and women from 34 countries, resulting in the successful liberation of Kuwait in 1991. It was a UN-authorized, U.S.-led coalition that reversed an overt act of war and conquest by one member state against another—precisely the task for which the UN had been founded.
    The full potency of this new and active Security Council was now exposed, stirring a desire among the Council’s members to sustain the Council’s central importance in world affairs. As a result, in January 1992, the first-ever meeting of the Security Council at the level of heads of state and government was held to consider how to take forward this ambition. They commissioned Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to report on how the UN might be utilized in the transformed geopolitical climate. In the resulting document,
An Agenda for Peace,
Boutros-Ghali focused on the civil wars gripping different parts of the world. He noted that these conflicts were now receiving an unprecedented level of international attention and stressed the need for the Council to take the lead in responding to them.
    But
An Agenda for Peace
, crucially, also encouraged the Council to consider peacekeeping—with its long-standing history—as a well-tested instrument for carrying this agenda forward. It suggested moving away from a previous crucial condition for almost all peacekeeping operations: specifically, that henceforth peacekeepers might not necessarily be deployed with the full consent of all the parties to the conflict. This was a small change on the page of peacekeeping principles, but one with potentially huge implications regarding what peacekeepers might be tasked to do.
    Even as
An Agenda for Peace
was released, a new range of major operations in response to civil wars—in the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia, and in Cambodia—had already been launched by the Security Council under the rubric of UN peacekeeping. Managing this task was in the hands of the new United Nations Department of Peackeeping Operations, founded that year to take over the responsibilities of the office of Special Political Affairs led over many years by Sir Brian Urquhart. Yet the department—then led by Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding—had barely increased in staff size while managing a gargantuan