At the end of the Cold War, the UN Security Council awoke from its slumber and began to flex its peace and security muscles. The Council had only applied sanctions twice in the forty-five years from 1946 until 1989, but between 1990 and 2006 it established twenty-three new sanctions regimes. The Council also increased its activities exponentially in the field of peacekeeping, creating three times as many peace operations between 1990 and 2006 as it had during the Cold War. In many respects these two boom areas of Council business go hand in hand, as demonstrated by the concurrent existence of a number of peace operations in states subject to sanctions, including Somalia and Haiti in the early 1990s, Sierra Leone at the turn of the century, and Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Sudan in the early years of the twenty-first century. Both sanctions and peacekeeping aim to prevent further exacerbation of situations that threaten international peace and security.