Rethinking the United Nation's Role in Peacekeeping: Lessons from El Salvador

Abstract

Since the Cold War the United Nations has greatly expanded its role in peacemaking and peacekeeping operations. By focusing on what is touted as one of the United Nation's most successful operations, El Salvador, this paper analyzes the United Nation's general strengths and weaknesses in this expanded peacekeeping role. While highlighting the United Nation's unique strengths of impartiality and moral authority, it also illuminates its weaknesses, including limited expertise in many peacebuilding measures, such as institutional design and reintegration. In conclusion, given the financial limitations it faces, the United Nations should focus its resources on coor­dination of international efforts and creation of international standards in post-conflict reconstruction and not in the imple­mentation of peace accords. Undertaking this new, more limited, role would provide an authoritative role for the United Nations, improving the overall performance of comprehensive peacebuilding initiatives by limiting current cross-purpose interactions of UN and non-UN activists and implementers without threatening its main source of strength: its reputation.