Preface [to

Abstract

"The origins of the United Nations’ role in peacekeeping operations, as this testimony of a close staff member in his office confirms, are inextricably linked with the organisation’s second Secretary-General. The initial two involvements of direct UN presence in precarious local settings preceding them were military observer missions, which monitored a truce in Palestine and in Kashmir respectively. With the Suez crisis in 1956, military observers were no longer enough. It was then that the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces in larger numbers came about. By resolutions 1000 and 1001 of 5 and 7 November 1956 respectively the United Nations General Assembly established the practice of this kind of intervention, thereby actively assuming already in broad terms what more recently has been termed the ‘responsibility to protect’, albeit in a slightly different context. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was subsequently created to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities under a commander appointed by the Assembly. [...]", p. 5