The United Nations opened up large global horizons in 1945. But the steps taken by member states since then have been small, hesitant and limited. The 1945 dream of a world community equal in rights and united in vision has never come close to being realised. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Nobel Prize acceptance address, described the United Nations as a place where the peoples of the world are served up to the designs of governments.1 Captured by governments, the UN became increasingly distant from ‘We, the peoples’.
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Notes
Quoted in Rosemary Righter, UtopiaLost: The United Nations and World Order (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), p. 85.
United Nations Peace-keeping (New York: UN Document DPI/1306/Rev.4, February 1995).
See Paul F. Diehl, ‘Peacekeeping in Civil Wars’, in Ramesh Thakur and Carlyle A. Thayer, eds, A Crisis of Expectations: UN Peacekeeping in the 1990s (Boulder: Westview, 1995), pp. 223–36.
See Ramesh Thakur, ‘From Peacekeeping to Peace-Enforcement: The UN Operation in Somalia’, Journal of Modern African Studies 32 (September 1994), pp. 387–410.
Brian Urquhart, ‘Who Can Police the World?’, New York Review of Books, 12 May 1994, p. 29.
Peace-keeping and Human Rights (London: Amnesty International, 1994).
USlS Wireless File EPF406, 01/19/95.
Gareth Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 85.
See Ramesh Thakur and Samuel M. Makinda, ‘The Asia—Pacific Region and the United Nations’, Contemporary Southeast Asia 8 (September 1996), pp. 119–34.
Barbara Crossette, U.N. ‘Chief Chides Security Council on Military Missions’, New York Times, 6 January 1995.
Don McKinnon, ‘Address to the United Nations General Assembly’, 27 September 1994, p. 10.
Quoted in Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 378.
Evans, Cooperating for Peace, p. 99.
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Thakur, R. (1998). Introduction. In: Thakur, R. (eds) Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26336-3_1
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