....UN peace operations have become essential instruments for the international community in maintaining international peace and security. The challenges and the numbers are unprecedented: UN peacekeeping currently maintains 20 operations on four continents with more than 100,000 men and women in the field.The budget for peacekeeping is expected to grow from US$5 to US$7 billion over the 2007-8 biennium, US$1.28 billion of that for Darfur alone. New UN political missions were also deployed to the field, even as existing operations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East faced continuing challenges in preventing and resolving conflict.
Once a mechanism for keeping the peace after a conflict had ended, UN peacekeeping operations and personnel are now being asked to deploy into still fractious environments, and are expected to protect civilians, mitigate conflicts before they widen, and keep societies and regions from further disintegration.
The growing challenges stretched the capacity of the Organization and demanded innovation: in his first year in office, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon initiated a comprehensive programme of internal restructuring, reorganizing the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and establishing a separate Department of Field Support.This enabled a major augmentation of resources along with new capacities and integrated structures to match the growing complexity of mandated activities and to ensure unity of command and integration of effort.....
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