Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 8/5/2007
New Challenges for Peacekeeping: the “War on Terror”
2007 March
Abstract
Efforts to predict the future of peacekeeping almost always prove to be unsuccessful. In 1958, United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld reported to the General Assembly on the lessons of the UN Emergency Force deployed to Egypt during the Suez crisis two years before. He surrounded his observations with qualifications, as some “circumstances are of such a nature that it could not reasonably be expected that they would often be duplicated elsewhere. Nor can it be assumed that they provide a sufficient basis to warrant indiscriminate projection of the UNEF experience in planning for future United Nations operations of this kind.”1 Sure enough, when the UN began to deploy to the Congo two years later, the 1958 report was to prove “not especially pertinent” to the task at hand.
