Security Council Peacekeeping Operations: U.N. Failure at Keeping the Peace

By Emily von Werlhof
Emily von Werlhof, Editor-in-Chief of International Law Studies, is a third year student at Albany Law School concentrating in International Law. She is a native Californian and alumna of the University of Washington.
At the Law School, Emily has been active in Albany Law's Women's Law Caucus and the Family Violence Litigation Clinic and Immigration Project (FVLC). She was a member of the first student team to handle an immigration case, and she helped get freedom from domestic violence declared to be a fundamental human right in Albany. She recently spent her summer interning for a judge on the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as working on immigration and refugee law as an intern for the Legal Resources Center in Cape Town.
Emily has also worked with the Albany Law Pro Bono Society Veteran’s Project, was last year’s chair of the Donna Jo Morse Client Counseling and Negotiation Competition, and is currently an article editor for the Albany Government Law Review.
She prepared this paper as an Independent Research Project with Prof. Alexandra Harrington.


The United Nations (U.N.) Security Council was established through the U.N. Charter as one of the six main organs of the United Nations. Pursuant to Chapter V, Article 24 of the U.N. Charter, membership of the U.N. confers on the Security Council “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.”

The Security Council first met in London, in 1946, and is now permanently located in the U.N. Headquarters in New York. In order to carry out the Security Council’s responsibility, peacekeeping forces have been utilized.

The U.N. Security Council is responsible for U.N. Peacekeeping Operations around the world. The first peacekeeping operation was launched in 1948. Currently, U.N. Peacekeeping forces are deployed on four continents with 15 active operations.

This paper will discuss the effectiveness of the U.N. Security Council in carrying out its primary responsibility by evaluating the ability of U.N. Peacekeepers to successfully complete their mandate, and comparing that success to the monetary, social, and political costs of deploying Peacekeepers. The first section of this paper will examine the structure of the U.N. Security Council and its operating constraints. The second section will evaluate the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, Pakistan, Congo, Lebanon, and Sudan, as well as their ability to successfully carry out their mission mandate.

The third section will discuss the monetary, social, and political costs of the several operations evaluated in section two. The fourth section will conclude by arguing that the U.N Security Council has failed to uphold its primary responsibility because the monetary, social, and political costs of deploying peacekeepers significantly outweighs the success of peacekeeping operations and is in need of restructuring.
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To read the paper, open HERE

Humanitarian Intervention in the Twenty First Century

Would the Security Council Intervene to Stop the Genocide in Rwanda if it Happened Today?

By Anna Ovcharenko

Anna Ovcharenko is a third-year student at Hofstra Law School and President of the Hofstra International Law Society. She is a magna cum laude graduate from Tomsk State University, Russia, where she majored in International Relations. Before law school, Anna served as a diplomat at the Russian Mission to the United Nations where she specialized in international development, children’s rights and environmental issues. In March 2010, she visited Rwanda as part of the UN official delegation. Past summer, Anna worked at the Global Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. In Spring 2013, she will start her legal internship at the Immigration Clinical Practicum.

This paper was prepared for Professor James Hickey’s International Human Rights Seminar at Hofstra Law School.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda claimed the lives of at least 800,000 people while the United Nations withdrew its peacekeepers and the rest of the world stood aside. Had the UN Security Council mandated humanitarian intervention, it would have saved the lives of many innocent people.

This paper examines the development of the humanitarian intervention doctrine and analyzes whether it could have been used by the U.N. Security Council in the case of Rwanda. Specifically, it provides the factual context for the genocide in Rwanda and summarizes the lack of effective action by the Security Council to prevent it. It analyzes the international law of humanitarian intervention as it stands today and examines several instances of the use of force by the Security Council in situations amounting to genocide.

The paper concludes with a recommendation that the international community needs to develop a clearer framework for the use of force by the Security Council in the future.

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To read the paper, open HERE.

Use of Force for Humanitarian Intervention

Permissibility Under the United Nations Charter
By Rajiv R. Haté
Rajiv Haté, a third year student at Albany Law School, is a senior editor for International Legal Studies. He is from Toronto, Canada and is a graduate of the University of Toronto.
He prepared this paper for the International Law of War and Crime Seminar, Fall 2011.


Prior to 1945 there was no customary international law prohibiting a state’s unilateral resort to force. This changed in 1945 when international politics was introduced to the Charter of the United Nations (UN), in which Article 2(4) prohibited states from the unilateral resort to force. When the Charter was adopted, States agreed to refrain from the use of force or the threat of force in their international relations and instead consented to an obligation to settle all disputes by peaceful means.


The use of force for humanitarian intervention is one circumstance in which the stringent UN restrictions on the use of force comes into question. Humanitarian intervention is the use of force by a foreign nation in the internal conflict of another state for the purpose of preventing and/or stopping large-scale atrocities or acute deprivations, such as genocide and crimes against humanity. Humanitarian intervention only arises when effective peaceful measures have been exhausted, meaning that before the use of force for humanitarian purposes can be invoked, it must be demonstrated that such use of force is absolutely necessary to prevent whatever human rights violations are occurring.


However, since the UN strictly restricts the use of force unless it meets one of the two exceptions of self-defense or the authorized use of force by the Security Council, technically the use of force for humanitarian purposes is illegal unless it is authorized by the Security Council. The problem with this is that, to reach an agreement to take forceful action on a state for humanitarian purposes is extremely difficult considering that some evidence may be ambiguous, some will argue it is an internal conflict that foreign countries should not get involved in, and in any given case there may be major powers resisting such an attempt at intervention.


On the other hand, to wait until there is enough evidence or until a consensus is reached or until the Security Council authorizes the use of force for humanitarian purposes, is likely to result in the loss of thousands of lives which could have been saved had the use of force been authorized earlier.*
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* Citations to references in this introduction are available in the paper.
To read the entire paper, open HERE.