The first comprehensive analysis of Britain's complex relationship with UN peacekeeping operations during two formative decades. It charts the evolution of British views on an international organization running its own military forces and examines policy-makers' efforts to influence, contain and exploit individual operations: in Palestine, Kashmir, Egypt (following the Suez Crisis), Lebanon, Congo and Cyprus. Benefits included shedding colonial responsibilities, containing conflicts, face-saving, and burden-sharing; perceived risks included interference in remaining colonies and threats to postcolonial interests.

When states collapse, human and global security are threatened. Order and stability must be restored. This title provides an account of the pursuit of security at the edge of the global order. It sheds light on reform of state police and armed forces, and analyses the security structures that emerge in the absence of the state.

The author explores the practice and effects of the European Union's democracy promotion efforts vis-a-vis its authoritarian neighbours in the Middle East and North Africa. She argues that the same set of factors facilitated both international cooperation of authoritarian regimes on democracy promotion and their persistence during the Arab Spring.

Ho-Won Jeong and a cast of experts explore the ways in which the dynamics of post-conflict situations can be transformed to sustainable peace. Contributors focus on designs and models of peacebuilding, functions of peacekeeping, capacity building through negotiations, reconciliation, the role of gender in social reconstruction, and policy coordination among different components of peacebuilding. The analysis illustrates past and current experiences of peacebuilding and suggests conceptual and policy approaches that can overcome the weaknesses of existing strategies.

For much of the last half century, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has seemed the outlier in global peace. Today Iraq, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, and Syria are not just countries, but synonyms for prolonged and brutal wars. But why is MENA so exceptionally violent? More importantly, can it change? Exploring the causes and consequences of wars and conflicts in this troubled region, Ariel Ahram helps readers answer these questions. In Part I, Ahram shows how MENA's conflicts evolved with the formation of its states. Violence varied from civil wars and insurgencies to traditional interstate conflicts and affected some countries more frequently than others. The strategies rulers employed to stay in power constrained how they recruited, trained, and equipped their armies. Part II explores dynamics that trap the region in conflict--oil dependence, geopolitical interference, and embedded identity cleavages. The catastrophic wars of the 2010s reflect the confounding effects of these traps, culminating in state collapse and intervention from the US and Russia, as well as regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Finally, Ahram considers the possibilities of peace, highlighting the disjuncture between local peacebuilding and national and internationally-backed mediation. War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa will be an essential resource for students of peace and security studies and MENA politics, and anyone wanting to move beyond headlines and soundbites to understand the historical and social roots of MENA's conflicts.

Do international bureaucracies have a meaningful influence on world politics? Using the UN Secretariat and the evolution of UN peacekeeping as an example, this book shows that even international bureaucracies with limited autonomy can shape international politics. Peace operations are the UN's flagship activity. Over the past decades, UN Blue Helmets have been sent all over the globe and have been performing an expanding set of intrusive tasks, while being supported by increasingly professional institutional structures. Silke Weinlich covers these operational, conceptual and institutional dimensions and focuses on three specific decisions that have been crucial to the evolution of UN peacekeeping: the establishment of the UN transitional administration in East Timor, the development of a peacekeeping doctrine, and the establishment of the Standing Police Capacity. With its integrative framework of analysis, this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate on the agency of international organisations.

The future of public education and democracy is at risk. Powerful forces are eroding commitment to public schools and weakening democratic resolve. Yet even in deeply troubling times, it is possible to broaden social imagination and empower effective advocacy for systemic progressive reform. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy explores challenges and opportunities for restructuring public education to establish and sustain more broadly inclusive, deeply democratic, and effectively transforming approaches to social inquiry and civic participation. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy adopts a non-traditional format to extend social awareness and imagination. Within each chapter, one episode of an evolving strategic narrative traces the life cycle of a systemic reform initiative. This is followed by an exploratory essay that draws from theory, research, criticism, and practice to prompt consideration of focal issues. Woven through each chapter is a poetically framed meditative stream informed by varied historical and cultural conceptions of oracles. A developmental sequence of social learning strategies (exploratory democratic practices), accompanied by thematic bibliographic references, are included to model democratic teaching and learning applicable in classroom and community settings.

Violent politcs in Northern Ireland has lasted thirty years and cost four thousand lives and billions of pounds. Many such conflicts afflict the world. This book describes the search for causes and solutions. It identifies the key factors driving violent politics and the range of counter-strategies. It analyzes the course of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the results of the counter-measures used. The conclusions are disturbing. The recommendations are controversial, but difficult to escape.

Politics is one method of solving conflicts. War is another. Violent politcs - lying in the zone between peace and war - is a third, used increasingly to trump conventional politics. Michael Addison, soldier and scholar, explores the history and myths of terrorism; he describes the search for causes and solutions; he identifies the key factors driving violent politics and the range of counter strategies. In particular, he challenges conventional thinking on thirty-three years of conflict in Northern Ireland, through battle, tribal warfare, stalemate then peace process. With thousands dead, tens of thousands injured or maimed and bilions spent, Violent Politicsasks: Could the people of Northern Ireland have been better served? Should the Peace Process fail, what next?

Post-conflict peacebuilding efforts can fail if they do not pay sufficient attention to natural resources. Natural resources - diamonds, oil, and minerals - are frequently at the heart of historic grievances, and have caused or funded at least eighteen conflicts since 1990. The same resources can play a central role in post-conflict peacebuilding, providing revenue for cash-starved governments, basic services for collapsed economies, and means for restoring livelihoods. To date, there is a striking gap in knowledge of what works, what does not, and how to improve peacebuilding through more effective and systematic management of natural resources. Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Management addresses this gap by examining the growing literature on the topic and surveying experiences across more than forty post-conflict countries. The six-volume series includes more than 130 chapters from over 200 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

This book explains the international engagement with the Kosovo conflict from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to Operation Allied Force. It shows how Kosovo was deliberately excluded from the search for peace in Yugoslavia before going on to demonstrate how a shaky international consensus was forged to support air strikes in 1999. In doing so, it exposes many of the myths and conspiracy theories that have developed about the war and explains the dilemmas facing actors in this unfolding drama.

During the Cold War, Cyprus was of great strategic importance to the West. Britain, the US, and NATO all had valuable installations there, and any armed conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots could easily pull two nearby NATO members—Greece and Turkey—into war. When intercommunal fighting broke out in Cyprus in December 1963, the West was deeply embarrassed. This book examines the efforts of first Britain, and then the UN, to keep the peace.

Although all religions and cultures preach the gospel and virtues of peace, the history of mankind is the history of war and peace; millions have perished in international and domestic conflicts, and many wars have been fought on behalf of those same religions and people who call for peace around the world. During the 20th century, at the height of human civilization, we have seen two world wars and many devastating region conflicts. Although the last two decades have seen a prevalence of domestic, rather than international conflict, these have been as vicious and as destructive as any other war. Further, we are still facing the threat of nuclear confrontation, and a new kind of war - the war on terror - is also taking place.Although there is widespread desire for peace, there is no sustained advocacy of it by our political and cultural leaders. Citizens the world over have become more insecure because of international and domestic conflicts, genocide, terrorism, drug and criminal activities, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic threats of infectious diseases like Aids and HIV, natural disasters, poverty, resource constraints, climate change, threats to the international financial system, and much else. All these are interrelated at some level. In the name of international and domestic security, billions of dollars are wasted on unproductive military spending in both developed and developing countries, when millions are starving and living without basic human needs.This book contains a number of original articles relating to military spending, military industrial establishments, peace keeping, terrorism, environmental security and democratic peace, prepared by leading scholars in the field. Since we are living in a globalized world, global security rather than national security is the relevant issue. Global security must be consistent with and complimentary to a basic human security, which preserves freedom from threats to people's rights and safety. Because peace is not just the absence of violence. It is related to all the above issues - the socio-economic, political and physical environment of the world. Making this clear is the focus of the book.

Examining peacebuilding through the intersection of security, development and democracy, Castaneda explores how the European Union has employed civilian tools for supporting peacebuilding in conflict-affected countries by working at the same time with CSOs and government institutions.

This book is based on a multinational and multidisciplinary discussion between American and European researchers and practitioners on the moral, legal and political dilemmas raised by the use of force in today's world. Are humanitarian interventions and counter-terrorism just forms of war in disguise? Is the just war tradition still relevant? What role does the issue of legitimacy play in the actions of states? Does the notion of "the global war against terror" play into the hands of terrorists? What are the lessons of the recent military interventions, from Kosovo to Iraq? What role for the U.N., for international criminal justice? What consequences for international order? The book provides no definitive answers but is the clearest and most searching book available to students and to the general public.

In this straightforward exploration of core problems facing humanity, hope is combined with realism based on confidence in the energies and capacities of citizens outside government to meet the pressing challenges we face today. Saunders presents an eye-opening approach to politics, focusing on the cumulative, multilevel, open-ended process of continuous interaction over time in whole bodies politic across permeable borders, either within or between countries. Showing how this approach works on the ground through examples from West Virginia to South Africa, Tajikistan to China, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of the state of the world and the prospects of democracy.

'At a time when peacekeepers are struggling to fulfil increasingly demanding mandates and UN peacekeeping is in danger of losing the distinct character that won it the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize, this important book argues for a clear theoretical redefinition within a conflict resolution framework and examines the practical implications for training. This is a valuable and original contribution to the peacekeeping literature.' - Dr. Oliver Ramsbotham, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford 'Both for the 'blue helmets' on the ground, and for the diplomats at UN headquarters, conflict resolution skills are essential for conducting peacekeeping operations. Betts Fetherstone's excellent study points the way forward to a synthesis between conflict management and peacekeeping?' - Hugh Miall, Research Fellow, European Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs The prevailing over-taxed ad hoc system of peacekeeping does not meet the growing demands posed by the post-Cold War world. This volume argues that peacekeeping needs to be placed on firm conceptual footing directly congruent with its peaceful third party role. The implications of this conceptualisation of peacekeeping for practice are then discussed. Training is cited as a key means of translating conceptual understanding into practice. Without this foundation work, UN has little chance of changing its existing, and largely ineffective, system of conflict management. At a time when peacekeepers are struggling to fulfil increasingly demanding mandates and UN peacekeeping is in danger of losing the distinct character that won it the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize, this important book argues for a clear theoretical redefinition within a conflict resolution framework and examines the practical implications for training. This is a valuable and original contribution to the peacekeeping literature.

In the late 1990s NATO dropped bombs and supported armed insurgencies in Yugoslavia while insisting that its motives were purely humanitarian and that its only goal was peace. However, George Szamuely argues that NATO interventions actually prolonged conflicts, heightened enmity, increased casualties, and fueled demands for more interventions.
Eschewing the one-sided approach adopted by previous works on the Yugoslavian crisis, Szamuely offers a broad overview of the conflict, its role in the rise of NATO's authority, and its influence on Western policy on the Balkans. His timely, judicious, and accessible study sheds new light on the roots of the contemporary doctrine of humanitarian intervention.

This original study explores three generations of approaches to ending conflict. Oliver P. Richmond examines how peacekeeping, mediation and negotiation, conflict resolution, peacebuilding approaches, and UN peace operations have played major roles in replicating an international system prone to intractable forms of conflict.

As the Cold War faded, Ambassador Hank Cohen, President George Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, engaged in aggressive diplomatic intervention in Africa's civil wars. In this revealing book Cohen tells how he and his Africa Bureau team operated in seven countries in crisis: Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan. He candidly characterizes key personalities and events and provides a treasure trove of lessons learned and basic principles for practitioners of conflict resolution within states.

In the face of emerging new threats, the EU's capacity to build a distinctive role in crisis management remains problematic. Analysing EU policies and actions, this collection sheds light on the EU's role in managing crises and peacekeeping, exploring avenues for a strategic EU vision for security and defense.

This book examines the continuing devastation in the Darfur region of Sudan, from the perspective of a multiplicity of conflicts of distinct types. The crisis reached its peak in 2003-2004, when certain Arab militias joined forces with the Sudan armed forces in a campaign against insurgent resistance movements. Engulfed in the tumult, Darfurians experienced systematic slaughter, sexual violence, and internal displacement on a massive scale. Although the violence has waned in recent years, the fighting continues to this day. The authors cast this crisis as a complex web of four distinct, yet interlacing, conflict types: long-standing disputes between farmers and herders and between different herder communities political struggles between the local elite leaders of the resistance movements, and those between traditional leaders (elders) and younger aspiring leaders long-standing grievances of marginalized groups against those at the national centre of power cross-border conflicts, primarily the proxy war waged between Chad and Sudan The crisis in South Sudan is also examined through the lens of conflict complementarity. This book will be of interest to students of African politics, genocide, political violence, ethnic conflict, war and conflict studies, peacebuilding and IR.

The book provides critical perspectives that reach beyond the technical approaches of international financial institutions and proponents of the liberal peace formula. It investigates political economies characterized by the legacies of disruption to production and exchange, by population displacement, poverty, and by 'criminality'.

This book seeks to explain why international donors may succeed in putting war-torn countries on the path of democratic transition and negative peace, but fail to consolidate the gains they make. Cambodia provides an excellent example for international peace builders: the donor community spent billions of dollars rebuilding the country between 1992 and 2006, but democracy remains unconsolidated and may even be receding towards "electoral dictatorship." Critical of neo-institutionalism, but sympathetic to historical and normative institutionalism, this book advances a theory called "complex realist institutionalism" to explain the limits of international democracy assistance to post-war societies.

This study investigates the role of youth in peacebuilding, and addresses the failure of states and existing research to recognise youths as political actors, which can result in their contribution to peacebuilding being ignored.

As one of South Asia's oldest democracies Sri Lanka is a critical case to examine the limits of a liberal peace, peacebuilding and external engagement in the settlement of civil wars. This book is based on nine years of research, and more than 100 interviews with those affected by the war, NGOs, and local and international elites engaged in the peace process.

A critical assessment of peacebuilding and the impact of economic recovery programmes on the peace process in Sri Lanka

Timely analysis - coming one and a half years after the war ended in Sri Lanka.

Based on over nine years of detailed research and over 100 interviews

A critical assessment of the liberal peace thesis

Addresses gap in the literature on peacebuilding - assessing the impact of peacebuilding-type programmes on the ground and challenging the widespread assumption that these activities link to peace.

Includes a first-hand account of the situation in Sri Lanka during the ceasefire in the war-affected district of Manner