The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (115 page)

This table aims to give a general overview of Security Council involvement (or otherwise) in a wide range of events relating to international peace and security since 1945. It seeks to be inclusive rather than definitionally narrow, but makes no claim to completeness. First and foremost, it encompasses a wide range of armed conflicts (including international wars, civil wars, and internationalized civil wars). It is notoriously difficult to establish clear criteria of what constitutes a war and what does not: numerical criteria for wars, such as 1,000 battle deaths as used by some studies, would exclude certain armed conflicts which we have included in this list.

We have also included in this list some examples of certain other types of event, especially in cases where they had significant implications for international security: (a) military conquests of territory even if there was no fighting and no casualties; (b) international crises with few or no casualties but with a high potential of escalation into war or even nuclear war, such as the Berlin crises in 1948 and 1958–62 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; (c) certain crises or episodes that had a predominantly peaceful character, but nonetheless involved major change, such as the events contributing to the end of communist rule in certain European countries in 1989; (d) certain cases of internal violence within a state falling well short of civil war; and (e) certain major international terrorist events.

Three limitations of this table should be noted. (1) The starting and ending years of conflicts or crises are frequently difficult to determine, especially in the case of civil wars: consequently, some of the dates might differ from other compilations of conflicts. (2) Our assessments of the degree of Security Council involvement are subjective, and the comments provide additional information we consider useful to understanding the conflict and the Council’s role. In the comments we have only occasionally mentioned the involvement of other bodies – including the UN General Assembly and various regional organizations – even when in some cases it was considerable. (3) While very approximate figures for deaths are offered, this table does not include any figures for the number of wounded, or for the number of people displaced by conflicts – figures which affect any assessment of the scale and intensity of a conflict. Estimates of deaths in past as well as ongoing conflicts need to be revised periodically in light of new information. They are our best estimates, based on a number of widely available sources, including the list by Marshall mentioned below. In addition, certain other sources, mainly for estimated deaths, are stated in footnotes.

The table is based on a wide range of printed and web-based sources. Printed sources include
Keesing’s Record of World Events
and its predecessors and, for the years since 1966,
Strategic Survey
, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (IISS). Some of the web sources are: Monty G. Marshall, ‘Major Episodes of Political Violence 1946–2006’, available at the website of the Center for Systemic Peace at
members.aol.com/CSPmgm/warlist.htm
(which also refers to other key sources); the various websites listed in the SIPRI FIRST database:
first.sipri.org/index.php
; the Nobel Foundation’s Conflict Map at
nobelprize.org/educational_games/peace/conflictmap/
and, for armed conflicts since c.2000, the IISS Armed Conflict Database, available at
acd.iiss.org/armedconflict
.