Learning the lessons of UNPROFOR: Canadian peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia

The UN peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia, UNPROFOR, offers many lessons for the international community. This paper focuses on the major lessons that Canada can take from the UNPROFOR experience. In describing the UNPROFOR mission and Canada's role in it, Cohen and Moens extract three main lessons to assist Canada in the post‐cold war era of peacekeeping. First, political objectives and military means need to be more closely coordinated. Second, traditional peacekeeping and coercive diplomacy are fundamentally incompatible. Third, an impartial and lightly armed force may prove ineffective for protecting humanitarian relief in post‐cold war conflicts.