The United Nations and the Termination of Armed Conflict, 1946–64

Abstract

United Nations, to endeavour to restore international peace and security. It is surprising that there is so little published material in any language on the variety of means available to the international community when it seeks to halt the fighting, especially when one considers the vast resources devoted to the deterrence or winning of war. In the course of my own research, I encountered only half a dozen publications on the subject in English, the one substantial work having-been published more than sixty years age and today only of historical interest. It is noteworthy that all of the six items were by authors whose countries were or had recently been at war when they wrote, and this fact no doubt coloured some of the writing. Before reviewing this meagre literature, let me mention a book which is not strictly about war termination but which deals incidentally with intra-war deterrence. This is Every War Must End, by Fred Ikle, an American strategic analyst.' Ikle wrote during the Vietnam war but deliberately refrained from trying to be contemporary. He notes en passant that the subject of war termination has been neglected, and he calls for historical studies to fill out the abstract reasoning of strategic analysis. Ikle is especially concerned with the way in which decisions about the conduct of military operations may affect the process of war termination. I should also mention the important studies of Lewis Coser on conflict in general. In 1961, he published a paper on the termination of conflict;' later included in his book Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict> Coser was writing of conflict in general rather than international armed conflict, but he. stresses that conflicts do not normally end with outright victory and defeat, but