Books & Occasional Papers Archive

The United Nations and Regional Security: Europe and Beyond, edited by Michael Pugh and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu Events in Europe over the past decade have created a dynamic requiring significant conceptual and practical adjustments on the part of the UN and a range of regional actors, including the EU, NATO, and the OSCE. This volume explores the resulting collaborative relationships in the context of peace operations in the Balkans, considering past efforts and developing specific suggestions for effective future interactions between the UN and its regional partners. The authors also consider the implications of efforts in Europe for the regionalization of peace and security operations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
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The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman, editors Globalization, suggest the authors of this collection, is creating new opportunities—some legal, some illicit—for armed factions to pursue their agendas in civil war. Within this context, they analyze the key dynamics of war economies and the challenges posed for conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Thematic chapters consider key issues in the political economy of internal wars, as well as how differing types of resource dependency influence the scope, character, and duration of conflicts. Case studies of Burma, Colombia, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka illustrate a range of ways in which belligerents make use of global markets and the transnational flow of resources. An underlying theme is the opportunities available to the international community to alter the economic incentive structure that inadvertently supports armed conflict.
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China and India: Cooperation or Conflict?, by Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu and Jing-dong Yuan. A project of the International Peace Academy and the Monterey Institute of International Studies. What is the reality of the increasingly important security relationship between China and India? The authors explore a range of key issues, including mutual distrust and misperception (perhaps the most important factor), the undemarcated border, the status of Tibet and Sikkim, trade, the tussle over various nonproliferation treaties, terrorism, the regional roles of the US and Pakistan, and the impact of domestic public opinion and special interests. They do see a trend toward a more pragmatic approach in Beijing and New Delhi to managing differences and broadening the agenda of common interests. Nevertheless, they conclude, significant obstacles remain to the amicable relationship necessary for regional peace and stability, posing a daunting challenge to policymakers in these two rising powers.
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From Promise to Practice: Strengthening UN Capacities for the Prevention of Violent Conflict, edited by Chandra Lekha Sriram and Karin Wermester. How can the United Nations, regional and subregional organizations, government donors, and other policymakers best apply the tools of conflict prevention to the wide range of intrastate conflict situations actually found in the field? The detailed case studies and analytical chapters in this book offer operational lessons for fashioning strategy and tactics to meet the challenges of specific conflicts, both potential and actual. The cases included are Burundi, Colombia, East Timor, Fiji, Georgia, Kenya, Liberia, Tajikistan, and Tanzania/Zanzibar.
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From Cape to Congo: Southern Africa’s Evolving Security Challenges, edited by Mwesiga Baregu and Chirsitopher Landsberg. From the ongoing war in Angola, to sporadic instability in Zimbabwe and Lesotho, to the conflict in the Congo, to issues of land reform and the ravages of AIDS, Southern Africa faces varied and complex threats to its peace and security. The authors of the volume assess the region’s major security challenges, as well as the roles of local, regional, and external actors managing them. Their theoretically informed – but practical – approach encompasses the political, economic, and military arenas.
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Liberia’s Civil War, by Adekeye Adebajo. Offering the most in-depth account available of one of the most baffling and intractable of Africa’s conflicts, the book unravels the tangled web of the war by addressing four questions: Why did Nigeria intervene in Liberia and remain committed throughout the seven-year civil war? To what extent was ECOMOG’s intervention shaped by Nigeria’s hegemonic aspirations? What domestic, regional, and external factors prevented ECOMOG from achieving its objectives for so long? And what factors led eventually to the end of the war? In answering these questions – drawing on previously restricted ECOWAS and UN reports and numerous interviews with key actors – Adebajo sheds much needed light on security issues in West Africa. The concluding chapter assesses the continuing insecurity in Liberia under the repressive presidency of Charles Taylor and its destabilizing effect on the entire West Africa sub-region.
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Ending Civil Wars: The Success and Failure of Negotiated Settlements in Civil War, edited by Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens. Based on the study of every internationally negotiated civil war settlement between 1980 and 1998, this volume presents the most comprehensive effort to date to evaluate the role of international actors in peace implementation. It looks into promises made by combatants in peace agreements and examines when and why those promises are fulfilled. The authors differentiate between conflicts, showing why Guatemala is not Bosnia, and why strategies that succeed in benign environments fail in more challenging ones. Going beyond attributing implementation failures to a lack of political will, the volume argues that an absence of political will reflects the judgment of major powers of the absence of vital security interests. Overall, the authors emphasize that implementers must tailor their strategies and give priority to certain tasks in implementation, such as demobilizing soldiers and demilitarizing politics, to achieve success.
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Sanctions and the Search for Security: Challenges to UN Action, by David Cortright and George A. Lopez Following on the publication of The Sanctions Decade – lauded as the definitive history and accounting of UN sanctions in the 1990s – David Cortright and George Lopez continue their collaboration to examine the changing context and meaning of sanctions and of the kinds of dilemmas that the Security Council now faces. Cortright and Lopez note that some changes have occurred in sanctions mechanisms. Despite widespread disagreement about the effectiveness of UN sanctions and the need for reform, the Security Council continues to impose sanctions, and it maintains ongoing measures in eight countries. Exploring the dynamics of recent developments, the authors assess a range of new multilateral approaches to sanctions and economic statecraft, review the heated debate over the humanitarian impact of sanctions, and consider the increasingly important role of NGOs in UN policymaking. They conclude with a framework for future policy, as well as specific recommendations for enhancing the viability of “smart sanctions” strategies.
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From Reaction to Conflict Prevention: Opportunities for the UN System, edited by Fen Hampson and David Malone Prevention of conflict is the first promise in the UN Charter, and yet, local parties, governments, and international organizations constantly betray it. Preventive action is at the center of international health policy and action, is vital to environmental improvements globally, and is accepted in many human rights treaties and in efforts to reduce the number and scale of natural disasters. However, prevention is practiced poorly and piece-meal. The essays in this volume represent some of the best scholarly and policy-relevant work on the practical challenges of conflict prevention within the UN system. They review some of the recent findings regarding conflict trends and their causes with a view to better informing conflict prevention strategy and implementation undertaken by the host of UN Departments and Agencies active in this area. They also identify opportunities for making existing and nascent capacity for conflict prevention more effectively operational within the UN system at large.
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Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure, by Bruce D. Jones The 1990s has seen an explosion of attention to the phenomenon of civil wars. A proliferation of actors has added complexity to conflict resolution processes. Recent theoretical research has highlighted the importance of inter-connections between parallel or overlapping conflict resolution activities. With this context in view, this book explores the connections between different regional and international conflict resolution efforts that accompanied the Rwandan civil war (from 1990 to 1994), and assesses the individual and collective impact they had on the course of that conflict. Jones explores the reasons for the failure of wide-ranging peace efforts to forestall genocidal violence in Rwanda in 1994. The book traces the individual and collective impact of both official and unofficial mediation efforts, peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian aid. It sets the peace effort in Rwanda in the wider context of academic theories about civil war and its resolution, and identifies a range of policy implications and challenges relating to conflict prevention, negotiation, and peacemaking.
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Managing Armed Conflicts in the 21st Century, edited by Adekeye Adebajo and Chandra Lekha Sriram This special volume of International Peacekeeping, was largely written by a diverse group of younger scholars. The work examines the conflicts of the 1990s and suggests new approaches and tools for conflict management in the new millennium. The topics covered by this special issue include the paradoxical similarities between war and peace, the role of natural resources in fueling conflicts, the changing nature of UN peacekeeping, the use of force in peace operations, building peace through transitional authority mandates, truth commissions and the quest for justice, civil-militia relations and the protection of civilians in conflicts, the role and utility of private security firms or ‘mercenaries’, the need for greater burdensharing within the NATO alliance, the rise and fall of UN peacekeeping in Africa, and the travails of keeping peace in nuclear South Asia.
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Civilians in War, edited by Simon Chesterman. A project of the International Peace Academy, 2001. In World War I, only 5% of all casualties were civilian; in World War II that number was 50%; and in conflicts in the 1990s, civilians accounted for up to 90% of those killed. Clearly, the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians, while recognizing the changing face of war, has not succeeded in reversing the trend. Focusing on the intrastate conflicts that characterized the late twentieth century, this book seeks to expand the tools available to national and international actors endeavoring to protect civilians in times of war. The authors present a range of perspectives on the evolving norms of international humanitarian law and how humanitarian actors can persuade-or compel- belligerents to respect those norms.
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Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law, by Simon Chesterman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. This book critically examines the right of humanitarian intervention, asserted most spectacularly by NATO during its 1999 air strikes over Kosovo. The UN Charter prohibits the unilateral use of force, but there have long been arguments that such a right might exist as an exception to this rule, or linked to the changing role of the Security Council. Through an analysis of these questions, the book puts NATO’s action in Kosovo in its proper legal and historical perspective.
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Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, edited by Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar, with Karin Wermester. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. Although the idea of postconflict peacebuilding appeared to hold great promise after the end of the Cold War, within a very few years the opportunities for peacebuilding seemed to pale beside the obstacles to it. This volume examines the successes and failures of large-scale interventions to build peace in El Salvador, Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, edited by Mats Berdal and David M. Malone. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers; Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2000. This path-breaking volume identifies the economic and social factors underlying the perpetuation of civil wars, exploring as well the economic incentives and disincentives available to international actors seeking to restore peace to war-torn societies.
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The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s, by David Cortright and George A. Lopez. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. This book, based on more than two hundred interviews with officials from the UN and sanctioned countries, and other involved actors, provides the first comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of UN sanctions during the 1990s.
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Decision-Making in the UN Security Council: The Case of Haiti, by David M. Malone. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. This unique and intriguing study examines how and why the UN Security Council took its decisions on Haiti, including authorization in July 1994 of the use of force by a US-led multinational coalition against the de facto regime.
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Keeping the Peace: Lessons from Multidimensional UN operations in Cambodia and El Salvador, edited by Michael W. Doyle, Ian Johnstone and Robert C. Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. This publication, representing the culmination of a three-year research project conducted by IPA, compares the strengths and weaknesses of the UN peacekeeping operations in Cambodia and El Salvador.
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Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century, edited by Olara A. Otunnu and Michael W. Doyle with a foreword by Nelson Mandela. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. A collection of papers solicited to stimulate debate about key issues concerning the future direction of peacemaking and peacekeeping, reflecting discussions which took place at a special symposium jointly sponsored by IPA and The Government of Austria in March 1995.

Military Adviser to the Secretary-General, U.N. Peacekeeping and the Congo Crisis, by Major General Indar Jit Rikhye. London: Hurst & Company; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. This publication follows the tortuous course of events throughout the Congo during the four turbulent years following its independence in 1960, and presents a vivid portrayal of the leading participants in the Congo imbroglio.

Soldiers, Peacekeepers and Disasters, edited by Leon Gordenker and Thomas G. Weiss. London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Contributions to this volume deal with a host of critical issues at the interface between instability and civil strife, on the one hand, and the international community’s ability to provide succor, on the other.

Humanitarian Emergencies and Military Help in Africa, edited by Thomas G. Weiss. London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Fifty experts with a variety of experience and backgrounds from over twenty nations explore the interface between the delivery of humanitarian emergency aid and military security.