In 2023 the United Nations will mark the 75th anniversary of one of its most significant—though arguably unintended—contributions. Scarred by the devastation of the Second World War, the framers of the UN Charter invoked the word “peace” nearly fifty times. By contrast, the word “peacekeeping” is nowhere to be found. Yet in the decades since the Charter was signed in San Francisco, peacekeeping has emerged as one of the most impactful of the UN’s activities—as well as one of the costliest. Born out of necessity, peacekeeping was an innovation and an evolution.
While no one person can claim the mantle of the creator of UN peacekeeping, a strong case can be made that one man did more than any other to develop and implement the concept. That man, the late American diplomat and Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, became a legend in the 1950s for his mediation skills in hotspots around the globe. Yet it was peacekeeping that Bunche himself saw as his greatest accomplishment—and, as with many things, on this he was almost surely correct.
Previously a professor at Howard, Bunche moved into the Roosevelt administration in 1941 as the Second World War was raging. From there, after helping to negotiate the UN Charter, he joined the new organization’s secretariat, quickly becoming the most famous, able, and influential staffer in its early history. A rare Black man in a field that was notoriously “Pale, Male, and Yale,” Bunche went from a childhood in South Central LA to the very pinnacle of global diplomacy. His career and the history of UN peacekeeping are deeply intertwined. Drawing on my new biography of Bunche and the UN, this article explores the birth and evolution of peacekeeping through his life and legacy – as it was in large part Bunche who truly launched peacekeeping as a tool of stability, one that often proved critical in the essential, revolutionary, but at times violent, postwar process of decolonization.
Palestine and the First UN Military Observers
UN peacekeeping began in one of the most conflict-prone regions of the world. 75 years ago, the General Assembly, in one of its first major decisions, passed a resolution that called for the division of the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The decision closely tracked a report, ostensibly by the UN Special Committee on Palestine but in practice largely written by Bunche, which had advocated partition. When Arab states attacked Israel in the wake of its declaration of independence six months later, the Security Council responded by calling for a truce. In a significant decision, the Security Council added that the truce would be monitored by impartial military observers. This observer corps—known in the clunky UN style as UNTSO, or the UN Trust Supervision Organization—is commonly viewed as the UN’s first peacekeeping mission. Remarkably, it is still operating today.
UNTSO’s claim as the first peacekeeping team is subject to some question, as its mission was and remains primarily observation. The following year a similar task was assigned to troops deployed at the India-Pakistan border (the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan). These early efforts can be distinguished from the UN peacekeepers that followed, who at times had much more robust mandates. These later missions went well beyond observation into actual fighting—and sometimes, as with the Congo operation of 1960, even employed airpower.
Bunche, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful mediation of the fighting in the Middle East the year after UNTSO was created (the truce, despite its UN supervision, did not really hold) was present at the creation of all these early peacekeeping efforts. Indeed, formally the military observers in Palestine were there to assist the UN Mediator, a post Bunche took up in late 1948 after the first mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was brazenly gunned down in an ambush in…