IB MYP Individuals and Societies – Warfare and peacekeeping Study Guide

This study guide teaches warfare and peacekeeping for IB MYP Individuals and Societies, aligned to the International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014. It suits MYP years 4 and 5 (there is no SL/HL split in the MYP). “Warfare and peacekeeping” is one of the topics the brief lists for the individuals and societies on-screen examinations, which are available in history, geography and integrated humanities.

MYP has no prescribed content list: schools design their own units, so your teacher may use different case studies. This page gives you a secure core of concepts and accurate cases that you can apply to whatever your school has taught.

Use it with the revision notes and the practice questions. For the course overview, see the course hub and the printable checklist.

What this unit covers

Area	What you must be able to do	Level
Causes of conflict	Sort causes into long-term, short-term and trigger; group them by type (political, economic, territorial, ideological)	MYP years 4–5
Types of war	Classify a conflict (interstate, civil, total, limited, proxy, guerrilla) and justify it	MYP years 4–5
Consequences	Separate short-term from long-term, and human, economic, political and social effects	MYP years 4–5
The UN’s role	Explain collective security, the Security Council and Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter	MYP years 4–5
Peacekeeping and peacebuilding	Define both, state the three principles of UN peacekeeping, judge success with evidence	MYP years 4–5

Causes of conflict

A cause is a factor that made war more likely. Historians rarely accept a single cause, so you need a way to organise several.

By timescale:

• Long-term causes build up over years (rivalries, alliances, arms races).
• Short-term causes raise tension in the months before war (a diplomatic crisis, an ultimatum).
• The trigger is the event that starts the fighting. A trigger is not the same as the most important cause.

By type: political (power, security, alliances), economic (resources, trade, markets), territorial (disputed borders), ideological (competing belief systems such as communism and liberal democracy), and nationalist, ethnic or religious (claims to self-rule or to a homeland).

A useful idea is the security dilemma: when one state arms to feel safe, its neighbour feels less safe and arms too, so both end up less secure.

Worked example: the First World War

Task: organise the causes of the First World War by timescale.

1. Long-term. Two alliance blocs had formed: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (1882) and the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia (complete by 1907). Great powers competed for colonies and built up their armies and navies. Nationalism in the Balkans threatened Austria-Hungary.
2. Short-term. In July 1914 Austria-Hungary sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum and then declared war on it on 28 July 1914. Mobilisation by Russia and Germany followed.
3. Trigger. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
4. Link them. The alliances explain how a local Balkan crisis became a general European war: Germany backed Austria-Hungary, Russia backed Serbia, and Britain entered on 4 August 1914 after Germany invaded Belgium.

Notice step 4. Listing causes earns little; explaining how they connect shows the related concept of causality, which the brief names as an example related concept.

Types of war

Type	Meaning	Example
Interstate	Between two or more states	Falklands War, April–June 1982
Civil war	Between groups inside one state	Spanish Civil War, 1936–39
Total war	Whole society and economy mobilised; civilians become targets	Second World War, 1939–45
Limited war	Aims, area or weapons deliberately restricted	Korean War, 1950–53
Proxy war	Outside powers back opposing sides instead of fighting each other directly	Vietnam War, ending with the fall of Saigon, 30 April 1975
Guerrilla war	Small, mobile forces avoid open battle and use raids and ambushes	Tactics used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam
Cold war	Rivalry kept below direct large-scale fighting	USA and USSR, c.1947–1991

One conflict can fit several types. The Vietnam War was a civil war, a proxy war and, for the Viet Cong, a guerrilla war. Always say which feature of the conflict fits the label.

Consequences of war

Sort consequences two ways: by time (short-term or long-term) and by area.

Area	Example after the First or Second World War
Human	Military and civilian deaths; refugees and displaced people
Political	German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires collapsed after 1918; the United Nations founded in 1945
Territorial	Treaty of Versailles (signed 28 June 1919) returned Alsace-Lorraine to France
Economic	War debts and reparations; US Marshall Plan aid to Western Europe, 1948–52
Social	Wider employment of women in war industries; in the UK, some women over 30 gained the vote in 1918
Legal	Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, 1945–46

The Treaty of Versailles shows how a consequence can become a cause. It limited the German army to 100,000 men and, in Article 231, blamed Germany for the war. Resentment of the treaty helped the Nazis win support, and Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 started the Second World War in Europe.

Worked example: interpreting displacement data

Fictional data: before a civil war, Norland had 6.0 million people. By the ceasefire, 1.5 million were internally displaced and 0.9 million were refugees abroad. Two years later, 0.6 million refugees had returned.

Total displaced        = 1.5 + 0.9 = 2.4 million
Share of population    = 2.4 ÷ 6.0 × 100 = 40%
Refugees returned      = 0.6 ÷ 0.9 × 100 = 66.7% (3 s.f.)
Refugees still abroad  = 0.9 − 0.6 = 0.3 million

Interpretation: two in every five people lost their homes, so rebuilding housing is a long-term consequence. Two-thirds of refugees returned within two years, which suggests growing confidence in the peace, but 0.3 million remain abroad. Always add a limitation: return figures depend on who counts people crossing the border.

From the League of Nations to the United Nations

Collective security means an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all, so members act together against the aggressor.

The League of Nations began work in January 1920. The USA never joined, and the League had no armed force of its own. It failed to stop Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 (Japan announced its withdrawal from the League in 1933) and Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. It was dissolved in 1946.

The United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945 and came into force on 24 October 1945, with 51 founding members. The UN now has 193 members. For the UN as an organisation beside NATO, the EU and others, see the superpowers, empires and alliances study guide; this page focuses on its peace and security role.

Key parts of the Charter for this topic:

• Article 2(4) bans the threat or use of force against another state.
• Article 51 keeps a state’s right of self-defence.
• Chapter VI covers peaceful settlement of disputes: negotiation, mediation, arbitration.
• Chapter VII lets the Security Council act against threats to peace, with sanctions (Article 41) or military force (Article 42).

The Security Council has 15 members: five permanent members with a veto (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) and ten elected for two-year terms. The veto means the UN cannot act against a permanent member or its close allies. During the Cold War this often blocked action.

Chapter VII has been used to authorise force. In June 1950, after North Korea invaded South Korea, the Security Council called on members to help South Korea while the USSR was boycotting the Council. In November 1990 it authorised force to remove Iraq from Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded on 2 August 1990. These are peace enforcement, not peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping

Peacekeeping means placing impartial military, police and civilian personnel, with the consent of the parties, to help keep a ceasefire and create conditions for lasting peace. The word does not appear in the Charter; the practice grew up between Chapters VI and VII.

The three basic principles of UN peacekeeping:

1. Consent of the main parties to the conflict.
2. Impartiality: the mission does not take sides.
3. Non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate.

Landmark cases:

• UNTSO (1948): the first UN peacekeeping mission, unarmed military observers in the Middle East.
• UNEF I (1956): the first armed UN peacekeeping force, sent after the Suez Crisis.
• UNFICYP (1964): in Cyprus, still running today. It shows peacekeeping can freeze a conflict without solving it.
• In 1988, UN peacekeeping forces received the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Rwanda (1994): a small UN mission (UNAMIR) was present when the genocide began in April 1994, and the Security Council cut its size that month. It could not stop the killing.
• Srebrenica (July 1995): in a UN-declared “safe area” in Bosnia, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed while lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers were present.

Rwanda and Srebrenica show the limits of the three principles: impartiality and minimal force do not work when one side sets out to kill civilians. Since the 1990s many missions have been multidimensional, with mandates to protect civilians, train police and support elections.

Peacebuilding

The sociologist Johan Galtung distinguished negative peace (no fighting) from positive peace (the causes of conflict, such as injustice and poverty, have been addressed). Peacekeeping mainly secures negative peace; peacebuilding aims at positive peace.

UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s report An Agenda for Peace (1992) set out a sequence:

Stage	Aim
Preventive diplomacy	Stop disputes turning into war
Peacemaking	Bring the sides to an agreement
Peacekeeping	Keep the agreed ceasefire
Post-conflict peacebuilding	Strengthen institutions so war does not return

Peacebuilding tools include DDR (disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of fighters), rebuilding courts and police, elections, and transitional justice. Rwanda used community courts called gacaca to try genocide cases; they closed in 2012. The UN set up a Peacebuilding Commission in 2005.

Concepts and global contexts

The brief says key concepts such as change, global interactions, time, place and space, and systems frame the curriculum. Warfare fits change (how borders and governments shift) and systems (alliances and the UN as systems of states). Causality is the natural related concept. Suitable global contexts include fairness and development (justice after war) and orientation in space and time (turning points).

How this topic can be examined

The brief sets out three on-screen examination tasks: Investigating (26 marks, criteria A and B), Communicating (18 marks, criteria A and C) and Thinking critically (36 marks, criteria A, C and D). Each criterion has eight achievement levels (1–8) in four bands. Your teacher will share the task-specific clarifications. For source skills, read the source-evaluation exam preparation page, and for what each criterion rewards, the criteria in practice guide.

Common errors

• Calling the trigger the main cause. The assassination in 1914 sparked the war; it did not by itself explain why five great powers fought.
• Confusing peacekeeping with peace enforcement. Korea (1950) and Kuwait (1990–91) were enforcement under Chapter VII, not peacekeeping.
• Saying the UN “has an army”. Troops are lent by member states.
• Treating one consequence as short-term only. Versailles was a consequence of one war and a cause of the next.
• Judging a mission a success because fighting stopped. Ask whether the causes were addressed (positive peace).
• Wrong or vague dates. “After the war” is weaker than “in 1945”.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014. The brief lists “warfare and peacekeeping” among the topics explored in the individuals and societies on-screen examinations; the case studies here are standard examples, and your school may use others.