Commentary
“Peace enforcement is a much more difficult kind of operation than peacekeeping.” — Harri Holkeri
Internal armed conflict constitutes the most significant challenge to the United Nations (U.N.) in its pursuit of global peace and stability. U.N. operations, in order to deal with these complex international issues, have evolved over time with ever-expanding roles blurring the lines of what the U.N. should realistically seek to accomplish. This morphing of roles has resulted in several notable disasters.  Continuing to fill a niche for which the U.N. is intrinsically ill-fitted will likely lead to similar results.  Despite its checkered past, however, the U.N. remains the chief architecture around which the international community can coalesce to address these multifarious problems….