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"Ralph Bunche was unquestionably the original practical architect of...United Nations peacekeeping, and he probably did more to develop the technique than any other person. He started in this function by accident when it became clear that the mediator in Palestine would have to have an operational team to supervise the truces or cease-fires in the Arab-Israeli war...In 1948, this turn of events came as a considerable surprise to the United Nations, which had been set up primarily as a diplomatic organization with little provision for operational effort...
As Bunche himself described it in 1949, 'We started from scratch...we had to improvise as we went along. We made many mistakes. but if we produced results—and we did produce results—it was because of the fact that we had intelligent, adaptable, devoted members of this Secretariat who were even willing to risk their lives in order to carry on their mission'."
—Excerpt from "Ralph Bunche and the Development of UN Peacekeeping" by Brian Urquhart, from the collection "Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times" edited by Benjamin Rivlin.
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