Is UN Peacekeeping Losing its Appeal?

HALIFAX, CANADA - Almost 65 years after then-Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for initiating the first U.N. peacekeeping mission, his country – which long prided itself on its role in subsequent missions -- has only a few dozen remaining peacekeepers deployed around the world.

That is down from a record 3,300 Canadian troops deployed in peacekeeping missions in the early 1990s, part of a wider trend that Canadian military experts attribute to the changing nature of conflict in a post-Cold War world. U.N. peacekeeping is “falling out of fashion,” says Major Tim Dunne, a retired public affairs officer in the Canadian Armed Forces who deployed in numerous peacekeeping missions beginning in the 1970s and is currently a research fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dunne tells VOA, most global conflicts were driven by competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, creating the need for an impartial army to stand between them.