Description
This paper examines the tentative non-armed beginnings of the United Nation’s functional shift into field-based conflict response and peacekeeping in 1946. Beginning with an examination of the public calls for UN armament in the nuclear age, this paper tracks the formative public debates and organisational practices that each anticipated an aspect of the future armed peacekeeping project. From military observers during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 to the deployment of a - limited - military force in Korea in 1950, these early experiments in the military sphere helped pave the way for the first armed UN mission in 1956. It explores the incremental development of a ‘peacekeeping project’ with the construction of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO), established during the conflict in Palestine, and the later evolution of the UN Command in Korea. Experimenting with multilateral operations in military spaces, such as the Korean war, legitimised the waging of war – or military intervention – as a peaceable pursuit, authorised and managed by the international organisation. These foundational experiments in an ‘international military’ shaped the UN leadership's design of later armed battalions and foreshadowed the geopolitical authority of later UN peacekeeping missions. The UNTSO mission and the UN Command in Korea brought together a group of legal, military, diplomatic, and international bureaucratic actors into an epistemic community of liberal internationalists seeking military means to implement their politics and global ideals. Despite broadly sharing the same liberal internationalist vision, they debated alternative imaginaries of future UN peacekeeping, considering the construction of a permanent UN police force or, even, a standby peacekeeping army that would evolve into the UN peacekeeping project in 1956.
