An Analysis of the Future of United Nations Peacekeeping and India’s Continued Participation

As it evolved over the years, UN peacekeeping became an extraordinary art that called for the use of the military personnel not to wage war but to prevent fighting between belligerents. To ensure the maintenance of cease-fires, and to provide a measure of stability in an area of conflict while negotiations were conducted. To that extent, it is important to distinguish between the concept of ‘collective security’ and peacekeeping in the international environment. Whereas ‘collective security’ is a punitive process designed to be carried out with some degree of discrimination, but not necessarily impartially, ‘UN peacekeeping’ is intended to be politically impartial and essentially non-coercive. Hence peacekeeping was, and has always been, based on a triad of principles that give it legitimacy, as well as credibility; namely, consent of the parties to the conflict, impartiality of the peacekeepers, and the use of force by lightly armed peacekeepers only in self-defence.