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Virgil Hawkins
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The Silence of the UN Security Council |
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Conflict and Peace Enforcement in the 1990s |
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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.
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Virgil Hawkins
Virgil Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in International Public Policy from the Osaka School of
International Public Policy (OSIPP), Osaka University. He served an internship at the
Australian Mission to the United Nations in New York, covering the Security Council. He
is currently a technical adviser with the Japan-based NGO, Association of Medical Doctors
of Asia (AMDA), with which he has served in Cambodia and Myanmar. |
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