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Multilateral Peacekeeping During the Cold War: The United Nations Intervention in the Korean Crisis of 1950

Daisy Mbre Bennett, Ime Ufford Ibanga and Okoroafor Nwachukwu O.I

Abstract

Five years after its founding, the United Nations authorized the first large-scale military enforcement action in its history: the 1950 intervention in Korea. This article revisits that intervention as a critical case for theorizing the relationship between collective security doctrine and great-power hegemony under bipolar constraint. Drawing on Security Council records, declassified Cold War archives, and the security studies literature on collective security, institutionalism, and peace operations, the article argues that the Korean case is best understood not as an application of the Charter's collective security model, but as a hegemonic enforcement action that borrowed the United Nations' institutional legitimacy. Its possibility rested on a contingent accident, the Soviet boycott of the Security Council over Chinese representation, rather than on the great-power unanimity the Charter's framers had assumed would underpin collective security. Engaging the realist, liberal institutionalist, and collective security literatures, and situating Korea against both the 1948 observer-mission precedent and the 1956 consent- based model (UNEF I), the article shows how the operation's legal and institutional innovations, the delegated unified command and the Uniting for Peace mechanism, shaped subsequent enforcement doctrine while entrenching a durable tension between multilateral legitimation and unilateral command that persists in coalition operations today.

Keywords

collective security; United Nations Security Council; Korean War; peace enforcement; Chapter VII; Uniting for Peace; Cold War multilateralism; hegemonic order

References

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