Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict

Shawcross uses his high-level access (he travelled with Kofi Annan across the globe) and journalist experience to write a critique of UN peacekeeping missions, with his condemnation aimed at the member states of the UN and their inability to act, rather than the organisation of the UN itself. While history is still to decide if Annan was a great leader or a failure (for never can important figures sit somewhere between those two extremes) Shawcross gives a sympathetic portrayal of the man, and the missions he attempted to bring about, most of which were little more than band-aid operations.

Some of the chapter stray fairly far from the topic of peacekeeping, but the book is a very good narrative of the major peacekeeping events in the 1990's. The author lays the blame for UN failure squarely at the feet of the member states, particularly the P5.