Reestablishing Law and Order in Peace-Maintenance

emand for UN intervention around the globe has been extraordinary since the end of the Cold War. As a result, the 1990s have witnessed the greatest number of peace operations in the UN's five decades. Most have been ambitious in scope and often muddled in execution, particularly in Somalia, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. Unprecedented difficulties emerged for the UN as circumstances required it to expand its role in the field. It increasingly had to undertake many onerous tasks for the first time and without any prior experience. This article sets out, for scholars and future policymakers and planners, the issues that have arisen and that require urgent consideration in the justice area of peace-maintenance. It does so fundamentally through the case history of Cambodia, but distills the requirements of success for the kinds of civilian missions described above in Sally Morphet's article. As states collapse, the former surrogate nations can no longer look to their previous sponsors for humanitarian, economic, and military assis tance. The end of the twentieth century has witnessed the disintegration of the strategic balance between two antagonistic superpowers that divided the world into rival ideological and political camps for nearly half a cen tury after World War II. Russia and the independent remnants of the So viet Union survive with few resources. And the United States, it seems, undergoes periodic, protracted domestic debate about whether to embark on international undertakings with the UN when asked to do so by world opinion driven, from time to time, by mass media attention. Unfortunately, new crises continue to erupt in multiple regions, sponta neously and without warning. The UN, asked to intervene again and again, will turn to domestically stable and reasonably wealthy member countries for help. The main institution called upon for short-term security in peace oper ations has been the military; but increasingly now civilian police (civpol) and legal experts are needed to establish in the longer term a rule of law.