Their ability to make a difference will be determined by their ability to put aside differences. If the nations of the world cannot rise above ideology, hostility, suspicion and individual national interest to an unusual degree, they will find it difficult to set the tone which could launch far more powerful and effective peace-keeping in the years ahead. The United Nations has a battered image, and is often blamed for almost every disaster on the planet. The task now is to redefine what the UN can realistically do in the world, and give it the money, human resources, and political support to make it possible. The peacekeeping challenge After the collapse of Communism, the UN had to shift from its traditional style of peace-keeping to a far more interventionist form of peace keeping.
Civil war is the greatest threat, and often the hardest to stop.
Now the UN more often has to attempt internal policing over rebel movements. These rebel movements, of course, are not members of the UN, and they are not likely to respond to the sort of political pressures which can often be applied to erring governments. The UN's success in the 1990s was very mixed. Peacekeeping missions were a success in Namibia, Mozambique, and El Salvador and, at least partially, in Cambodia. But the UN's operations in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia were often a disaster, failing to stand up to and prevent appalling massacres, amounting in Bosnia and Rwanda to genocide.