Using the case studies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland this book dissects internationally-supported peace interventions. Looking at issues of security, statebuilding, civil society and economic and constitutional reform, it proposes using the concept of hybridity to understand the dynamics of societies in transition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1994 genocide in Rwanda claimed the lives of at least 500,000 Tutsi --some three-quarters of their population --while UN peacekeepers were withdrawn and the rest of the world stood aside. Ever since, it has been argued that a small military intervention could have prevented most of the killing. In The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, Alan J. Kuperman exposes such conventional wisdom as myth.

Combining unprecedented analyses of the genocide's progression and the logistical limitations of humanitarian military intervention, Kuperman reaches a startling conclusion: even if Western leaders had ordered an intervention as soon as they became aware of a nationwide genocide in Rwanda, the intervention forces would have arrived too late to save more than a quarter of the 500,000 Tutsi ultimately killed. Serving as a cautionary message about the limits of humanitarian intervention, the book's concluding chapters address lessons for the future.

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.

Neither willing to engage in a meaningful way to save targeted civilians in Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda nor to stand entirely aside as massive violations of humanitarian law occurred, states embraced safety zones as a means to 'do something' whilst avoiding being drawn into open warfare. Humanitarian Intervention and Safety Zones: Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda explores why and how effectively safety zones were implemented as a way to protect civilians and displaced persons in three of the most important conflicts of the 1990s. It shows how states consistently sought to reconcile their political and humanitarian interests, a process which often led to problematic and ambiguous outcomes, and assesses in fascinating detail the difficulties and controversies surrounding the use of such zones, variously called safe havens, safe areas, secure humanitarian areas, and zones humanitaires sures . The book also asks whether or not such zones could serve as precedents for possible future attempts to ensure the safety of civilians in complex humanitarian emergencies.

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?

This book takes a quantitative look at ICT-generated event data to highlight current trends and issues in Nigeria at the local, state and national levels. Without emphasizing a specific policy or agenda, it provides context and perspective on the relative spatial-temporal distribution of conflict factors in Nigeria. The analysis of violence at state and local levels reveals a fractal pattern of overlapping ecosystems of conflict risk that must be understood for effective, conflict-sensitive approaches to development and direct conflict mitigation efforts. Moving beyond analyses that use a broad religious, ethnic or historical lens, this book focuses on the country's 774 local government areas and incorporates over 10,000 incidents coded by location, date and indicator to identify patterns in conflict risk between 2009 and 2013. It is the first book to track conflict in Nigeria during this period, which covers the Amnesty Agreement in the Niger Delta and the birth of Boko Haram in the North. It also includes conflict risk heat maps of each state and trend-lines of violence. The authors conclude with a discussion of the nuanced factors that lead to escalating violence, such as resource competition and trends in terrorism during this critical point in Nigeria's history. Violence in Nigeria is designed as a reference for researchers and practitioners working in security, peacebuilding and development, including policy makers, intelligence experts, diplomats, national defense and homeland security experts. Advanced-level students studying public policy, international relations or computer science will also find this book useful as a secondary textbook or reference.

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.

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 provides a critical examination of NATO's evolving strategic and operational roles in the Western Balkans since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991, with a particular focus on Bosnia, Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, in both the conflict and post-conflict phases. While there is a myriad of literature available on the various conflicts that engulfed the former Yugoslavia after the collapse of communism, less has been written on NATO's overall role in these conflicts. This text, therefore, fills the gap, offering a thematic study of NATO's roles and duties in this region from the early 1990s to the present day. The 'levels of analysis' introduced by Mulchinock provide a new framework for examining NATO's response to the Yugoslav wars of secession, focusing on the role of key NATO member states and the role of different NATO Secretaries-General, along with the impact of inter-institutional cooperation (and conflict) with other international organisations.

In 1981 the Organization of African Unity (OAU) mandated and fielded the first regional peacekeeping operation since the Arab League's mission in Kuwait 20 years earlier. Battalion-sized contingents from Nigeria, Senegal, and Zaire were joined by smaller observer contingents from other OAU members in an effort to provide a buffer zone between the two main factions in the Chadian civil war.

Mays opens his analysis by providing an overview of the concept of peacekeeping. Several definitions are offered to help distinguish between the various types of peace operations. After examining the concept hegemon, he looks at the ways regional and subregional hegemons utilize peacekeeping operations as foreign policy tools as they protect their interests. Mays argues that Nigeria, as a West African hegemon, served as the moving force behind the mandating and fielding of the OAU peacekeeping mission in Chad. Rather than being purely humanitarian in nature, Nigeria's motivation included the removal of French and later Libyan soldiers from a weak state on its border. However, Nigeria could not perform the task alone. France and the United States were instrumental as well in the mandating and fielding process. French and American interests stemmed from concern over Libyan motives in Chad. Nigeria kept the effort to mandate the peacekeeping operation alive for two years; France proved to be the stimulus behind persuading the Chadian government to accept the deployment of OAU peacekeepers and prompting the Senegalese to contribute a battalion to the mission; the United States contributed by keeping France and Nigeria focused on a peacekeeping solution and helping persuade Zaire to join the mission.

Mays offers the first comprehensive examination of the OAU peacekeeping mission and reviews the political and military organization of the force as well as its deployment, redeployment plans, logistics, and operations between the Chadian factions. Utilizing an extensive collection of resources, including interviews with participants, diplomats, and government documents, he provdies a detailed examination of every meeting/conference between 1979 and 1981 that discussed a peacekeeping option for Chad. Factors of success in traditional peacekeeping operations are applied to the OAU mission, and he concludes by reviewing the impact of the 1981-1982 OAU operation on current African peacekeeping trends. An invaluable analysis for scholars, students, and other researchers involved with peacekeeping, international relations, and African studies.

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.

What role should national militaries play in an increasingly globalised and interdependent world? This book examines the often difficult transition they have made toward missions aimed at protecting civilians and promoting human security, and asks whether we might expect the emergence of armed forces that exist to serve the wider human community.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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'.