Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, Civil wars are the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. As Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal'. Thus, in the current scenario, massive violence, destruction and killing tend, to happen within states borders and not in an inter-state context. Moreover, empirical studies show that among the total casualty figures of internal wars since 1945, (the so-called wars of the third kind'), 'approximately 90% of the casualties were civilians'. As an international organization whose primary purpose is to promote global peace and the respect of human rights, the UN can be expected to intervene in order to protect the victims of these civil wars and to establish peace. However this idea is often undermined by the concept of state sovereignty.
