Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 04 June 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article focuses on the United Nations Observer Group in Central America (ONUCA), a peacekeeping mission deployed by the UN Security Council from November 1989 to January 1992 to monitor the implementation of a far-reaching peace agreement (known as the “Esquipulas II Agreement”) following almost three decades of civil war, violence, and authoritarianism in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. After providing an overview of the conflicts in the five Central American countries, the article outlines ONUCA’s mandate as well as its operational achievements and limitations in terms of confidence-building, ceasefire monitoring, separation of forces, disarmament, and demobilization. It also discusses the lessons that can be learned from ONUCA’s experience.

Keywords: ONUCA, peacekeeping mission, UN Security Council, peace agreement, civil war, Central America, confidence-building, disarmament, demobilization

Joachim A. Koops

Joachim A. Koops is Research Professor and Senior Associate Researcher for European Foreign and Security Policy. He is also the Dean of Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel as well as Course Director of the Executive Course in Global Risk Analysis and Crisis Management and the European Peace and Security Studies (EPSS) Programme.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.