The United Nations, Intra-State Peacekeeping and Normative Change

Esref Aksu teaches International Politics at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

This study explores the normative dimension of the evolving role of the United Nations in peace and security and, ultimately, in governance. The book examines both the UN's changing raison d'etre and the wider normative context within which the organization is located. The study looks at the UN through the window of one of its most contentious, yet least understood, practices: active involvement in intra-state conflicts as epitomized by UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the conceptual tools provided by the "historical structural" approach, this study seeks to understand how and why the international community continuously reinterprets or redefines the UN's role with regard to intra-state conflicts. The study concentrates on intra-states "peacekeeping environments," and examines what changes, if any, have occurred to the normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts from the early 1960s to the early 1990s.