This debate provides us with yet another opportunity to look into an importa...

This debate provides us with yet another opportunity to look into an important tool in the architecture for the maintenance of international peace and security: peacekeeping operations. Those operations, in a changing international situation that is increasingly complex, have had to adapt and now function in a different way to how they were originally conceived. Thus, beginning in the late 1980s, the traditional model was supplanted by an increasingly multidimensional kind of operation with civilian, military, political, rule of law, human rights, humanitarian aid, reconstruction, gender and civilian protection components, among others. Whatever its nature, a peacekeeping operation must be undertaken pursuant to the guiding principles of consent of the parties; impartiality; use of force only in self-defence or in defending the mandate; and unswerving compliance with the Charter of the United Nations.