Brian Urquhart

About the Author: Brian Urquhart is a former undersecretary general of the United Nations. He has written several books on international relations, including Decolonization and World Peace.

Within the UN [United Nations], the end of the cold war has had its most immediate effect on the work of the Security Council. The Council has been able to make notable progress in peacemaking and peace-keeping tasks that had languished during the cold war—for example, in Namibia, Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, Cambodia, Central America, and Western Sahara. Now the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, to which the UN has made an unprecedentedly firm and united response, is putting to the test, as well as raising questions about, the concept of collective security itself.

The United Nations has so...