Extreme Frustration

Reading "Aspects of Peacekeeping" by D.S. Gordon and F.H. Toase to get a sense of what guidelines armed forces representing the international community are given, and it's been of little help so far. behind in my work and feel that it needs to be pared back. I keep coming across the same vague statements in regard to what peacekeepers are authorized to do; it reinforces the impression that any kind of effective intervention in an ongoing conflict is up to individual countries.

The UN Security Council and peacekeeping forces are massive bureaucracies that do not have set procedures in place, so there isn't a substantive report I feel capable of giving on what can be changed besides more boldness in general, which is no kind of answer. I feel very negative about this project right now. The only things that seem important enough to write about in a composition are more or less facts transferred from books to a Word document with me rearranging the words. I understand that that is by and large what a research project is, but I feel stuck; every two sentences I have to halt and wait until I find a related bit of information that might not be coming for 100 pages or might be in an entirely different book. If I do it another way, I feel like I'm cherrypicking information.

Right now I'm still trying to get a foundation of historical data and international response protocols down so I can actually draw some conclusions about it and put together coherent thoughts. Last night I watched a documentary, "The Devil Came on Horseback" about the Sudan conflict and took like an hour-long walk. Essentially I want to capture the feeling that these situations are not just appallingly evil in the way that Nazism or Stalinism was; they're tragically frustrating because a defense capable of saving half a million lives in many cases would consist of something like the Alabama National Guard taking turns standing in shifts behind a makeshift fence, and cost something like what the government spends on employing meter maids. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people are not dying because they're within the grasp of an evil empire, they're dying because there's something like a line of 500 people who would all have to sign a sheet of paper agreeing to help. That's the idea I would like to get across and not have the paper come off as some shrill list of acronyms and numbers, but I feel like if anything I'm getting farther away from being able to convey that.