Book Description

United Nations (UN) Charter Article 42 authorizes the Security Council to take military action by air, sea or land if non-armed solutions fail to restore international peace and Article 43 states that UN members will keep troops and equipment available for the use of the Security Council. However, Article 43 never went into effect, leaving the UN without an alternative to diplomatic solutions. Canada's UN representative, Lester Pearson Bowles, proposed instituting peacekeeping missions to address this handicap and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold established a peacekeeping framework, which included: agreement from the Security Council, agreement by parties involved, readiness of UN members to support mission, and the existence of a peace agreement. However, the UN's peacekeeping framework is often violated to address complex threats to international peace. This thesis will present an analysis of the UN peacekeeping framework and the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) and the UN Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) to establish how the conflict in El Salvador and Guatemala determined ONUSAL's and MINUGUA's missions and how these deviate from the UN peacekeeping framework. The purpose of this study is to establish specific modifications that must be made to the classic UN peacekeeping framework based on conflict specifics to prevent UN peacekeeping failures.