Donald M. Snow invites readers to consider what criteria should be evaluated when considering whether the United States should engage in military action across the globe: when its vital interests are at stake and when the endeavor can reasonably be considered feasible, what Snow refers to as the "IF factor." It is hard to justify promoting an application of American military force to a situation where its use will not succeed or where US interests are not clearly vital, but, Snow argues, that is exactly what has happened frequently since Vietnam. The book is organized into three sections, examining a historical overview of how the United States became involved in intervening in asymmetrical warfare, the problem of internal war in the developing world, and future American military involvement, particularly in conflicts in the Global South and Ukraine.

An acclaimed expert on violence and seasoned peacebuilder explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process. It's easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It's also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen-and most of the time it doesn't. Around the world there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. Too many accounts of conflict forget this. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, we should ask: what kept rivals from compromise? Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. From warring states to street gangs, ethnic groups and religious sects to political factions, there are common dynamics to heed and lessons to learn. Along the way, we meet vainglorious European monarchs, African dictators, Indian mobs, Nazi pilots, British football hooligans, ancient Greeks, and fanatical Americans. What of remedies that shift incentives away from violence and get parties back to deal-making? Societies are surprisingly good at interrupting and ending violence when they want to-even the gangs of Medellin, Columbia do it. Realistic and optimistic, this is book that lends new meaning to the old adage, "Give peace a chance."

The Oxford Handbook on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations presents an innovative, authoritative, and accessible examination and critique of the United Nations peacekeeping operations. Since the late 1940s, but particularly since the end of the cold war, peacekeeping has been a central part of the core activities of the United Nations and a major process in global security governance and the management of international relations in general. The volume will present a chronological analysis, designed to provide a comprehensive perspective that highlights the evolution of UN peacekeeping and offers a detailed picture of how the decisions of UN bureaucrats and national governments on the set-up and design of particular UN missions were, and remain, influenced by the impact of preceding operations. The volume will bring together leading scholars and senior practitioners in order to provide overviews and analyses of all 65 peacekeeping operations that have been carried out by the United Nations since 1948. As with all Oxford Handbooks, the volume will be agenda-setting in importance, providing the authoritative point of reference for all those working throughout international relations and beyond.

Women and Gender Perspectives in the Military compares the integration of women, gender perspectives, and the women, peace, and security agenda into the armed forces of eight countries plus NATO and United Nations peacekeeping operations. This book brings a much-needed crossnational analysis of how militaries have or have not improved gender balance, what has worked and what has not, and who have been the agents for change. The country cases examined are Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and South Africa. Despite increased opportunities for women in the militaries of many countries and wider recognition of the value of including gender perspectives to enhance operational effectiveness, progress has encountered roadblocks even nearly twenty years after United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 kicked off the women, peace, and security agenda. Robert Egnell, Mayesha Alam, and the contributors to this volume conclude that there is no single model for change that can be applied to every country, but the comparative findings reveal many policy-relevant lessons while advancing scholarship about women and gendered perspectives in the military.

With the end of the Cold War has come an upsurge in humanitarian interventions-military campaigns aimed at ending mass atrocities. These wars of rescue, waged in the name of ostensibly universal norms of human rights and legal principles, rest on the premise that a genuine "international community" has begun to emerge and has reached consensus on a procedure for eradicating mass killings. Rajan Menon argues that, in fact, humanitarian intervention remains deeply divisive as a concept and as a policy, and is flawed besides. The advocates of humanitarian intervention have produced a mountain of writings to support their claim that human rights precepts now exert an unprecedented influence on states' foreign policies and that we can therefore anticipate a comprehensive solution to mass atrocities. In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, Menon shows that this belief, while noble, is naive. States continue to act principally based on what they regard at any given time as their national interests. Delivering strangers from oppression ranks low on their list of priorities. Indeed, even democratic states routinely embrace governments that trample the human rights values on which the humanitarian intervention enterprise rests. States' ethical commitment to waging war to end atrocities remains episodic and erratic-more rhetorical than real. And when these missions are undertaken, the strategies and means used invariably produce perverse, even dangerous results. This, in no small measure, stems from the hubris of leaders-and the acolytes of humanitarian intervention-who have come to believe that they possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to bestow freedom and stability upon societies about which they know little.

Facing threats ranging from Islamist insurgencies to the Ebola pandemic, African regional actors are playing an increasingly vital role in safeguarding peace and stability across the continent. But while the African Union has demonstrated its ability to deploy forces on short notice and in difficult circumstances, the challenges posed by increasingly complex conflict zones have revealed a widening divide between the theory and practice of peacekeeping. With the AU's African Standby Force becoming fully operational in 2016, this timely and much-needed work argues that responding to these challenges will require a new and distinctively African model of peacekeeping, as well as a radical revision of the current African security framework. The first book to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of African peace operations, The Future of African Peace Operations gives a long overdue assessment of the ways in which peacekeeping on the continent has evolved over the past decade. It will be a vital resource for policy makers, researchers and all those seeking solutions and insights into the immense security challenges which Africa is facing today.

Do States, through their military forces, have legal obligations under human rights treaties towards the local civilian population during UN-mandated peace operations? It is frequently claimed that it is unrealistic to require compliance with human rights treaties in peace operations and this has led to an unwillingness to hold States accountable for human rights violations. In this book, Kjetil Larsen criticises this position by addressing the arguments against the applicability of human rights treaties and demonstrating that compliance with the treaties is unrealistic only if one takes an 'all or nothing' approach to them. He outlines a coherent and more flexible approach which distinguishes clearly between positive and negative obligations and makes treaty compliance more realistic. His proposals for the application of human rights treaties would also strengthen the legal framework for human rights protection in peace operations without posing any unrealistic obligations on the military forces.

Is sustainable peace an illusion in a world where foreign military interventions are replacing peace negotiations as starting points for postwar reconstruction? What would it take to achieve durable peace? This book presents six provocative case studies authored by respected peacebuilding practitioners in their own societies. The studies address two cases of relative success (Guatemala and Mozambique), three cases of renewed but deeply fraught efforts (Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Palestinian Territories), and the case of Sri Lanka, where peacebuilding was aborted but where the outlines of a new peace process can be discerned.

Spring 2008 witnessed the first positive signs of a thaw in relations between the two sides of the divided island of Cyprus since the dramatic failure of the Annan Plan in 2004. The historic meeting of the two Presidents of Cyprus and the symbolic opening of the Ledra Street border crossing in the heart of Nicosia may herald a bright new future for this Mediterranean island. Yet Cyprus has been in this situation before. What makes this new initiative different and why should it succeed where so many others have failed?

"Reunifying Cyprus" is the first book to analyze fully the reasons for the continuing failure to re-unite the two states of Cyprus after over forty years of division. It focuses especially on the Annan Plan--the popular name for the UN initiative to find a "Comprehensive Solution to the Cyprus Problem in anticipation of Cyprus" accession to the EU--and the reasons for its ultimate failure. How did Cypriots receive the Annan Plan? What were the real or imagined flaws? Was this a missed opportunity? And what place does the Annan Plan have in future blueprints to reunify the island?

"Reunifying Cyprus" will be invaluable for anyone interested in conflict resolution and international politics as well as students of the Eastern Mediterranean.

How and why does order emerge after conflict? What does it mean in the context of the twenty-first century post-colonial city? From Kabul, Kigali and Kinshasa to Baghdad and Basra, people, abandoned by the state, make their own rules.With security increasingly ghettoised, survival becomes a matter of manipulation and hustling. In this book, Alice Hills discusses the interface between order and security. While analysts and donors emphasise security, Hills argues that order is much more meaningful for people's lives. Focusing on the police as both providers of order and a measure of its success, the book shows that order depends more on what has gone before than on reconstruction efforts and that tension is inevitable as donors attempt to reform brutal local policing. Policing Post-Conflict Cities provides a powerful critique of the failure of liberal orthodoxy to understand the meaning of order.

How and why does order emerge after conflict? What does it mean in the context of the twenty-first century post-colonial city? From Kabul, Kigali and Kinshasa to Baghdad and Basra, people, abandoned by the state, make their own rules.With security increasingly ghettoised, survival becomes a matter of manipulation and hustling. In this book, Alice Hills discusses the interface between order and security. While analysts and donors emphasise security, Hills argues that order is much more meaningful for people's lives. Focusing on the police as both providers of order and a measure of its success, the book shows that order depends more on what has gone before than on reconstruction efforts and that tension is inevitable as donors attempt to reform brutal local policing. Policing Post-Conflict Cities provides a powerful critique of the failure of liberal orthodoxy to understand the meaning of order.

The recent efforts to reach a settlement of the enduring and tragic conflict in Darfur demonstrate how important it is to understand what factors contribute most to the success of such efforts. In this book, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie review data from all negotiated civil war settlements between 1945 and 1999 in order to identify these factors.

What they find is that settlements are more likely to produce an enduring peace if they involve construction of a diversity of power-sharing and power-dividing arrangements between former adversaries. The strongest negotiated settlements prove to be those in which former rivals agree to share or divide state power across its economic, military, political, and territorial dimensions.

This finding is a significant addition to the existing literature, which tends to focus more on the role that third parties play in mediating and enforcing agreements. Beyond the quantitative analyses, the authors include a chapter comparing contrasting cases of successful and unsuccessful settlements in the Philippines and Angola, respectively.

The military intervention by NATO in Kosovo was portrayed in American media as a necessary step to prevent the Serbian armed forces from repeating the ethnic cleansing that had so deeply damaged the former Yugoslavia. Serbia trained its military on Kosovo because of an ongoing armed struggle by ethnic Albanians to wrest independence from Serbia. Warfare in the Balkans seemed to threaten the stability of Europe, as well as the peace and security of Kosovars, and yet armed resistance seemed to offer the only possibility of future stability. Leading the struggle against Serbia was the Kosovo Liberation Army, also known as the KLA.

"Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency" provides a historical background for the KLA and describes its activities up to and including the NATO intervention. Henry H. Perritt Jr. offers firsthand insight into the motives and organization of a popular insurgency, detailing the strategies of recruitment, training, and financing that made the KLA one of the most successful insurgencies of the post-cold war era. This volume also tells the personal stories of young people who took up guns in response to repeated humiliation by "foreign occupiers," as they perceived the Serb police and intelligence personnel. Perritt illuminates the factors that led to the KLA's success, including its convergence with political developments in eastern Europe, its campaign for popular support both at home and abroad, and its participation in international negotiations and a peace settlement that helped pave the long road from war to peace.

This study focuses on the questions of when and how military intervention in conflicts can achieve humanitarian benefits. It uses the standard that an intervention should do more good than harm to evaluate the successes and failures. The author develops a methodology to determine the number of lives saved, as a minimalist measure. The analysis of 19 military operations in the 6 case studies of Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor reveals both successful and unsuccessful interventions in the same locations. The study posits that an intervention's short-term effectiveness depends primarily on six factors within the control of the intervenor, rather than factors inherent within the conflict. Political and humanitarian dimensions are combined to create a typology that compares the needs of populations suffering from conflict with an intervenor's military intervention strategies, motives, capabilities and response time. Hypotheses derived from the model are tested in the case studies and policy implications are offered.

In two earlier volumes, the authors defined nation building as the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to promote a transition to democracy. By various actors, it is often called stabilisation and reconstruction, peace building, or state building, but at any name these missions have become more frequent, and frequently more complex and ambitious. As American forces entered Iraq, little effort was made to marshal abundant, recent, and relevant experience in support of the new nation-building mission in Iraq, with severe consequences.This guidebook is designed to contribute to future nation building efforts. It is organized around the components that make up any nation-building mission: planning, military and police contingents, civil administrators, humanitarian and relief efforts, governance, economic stabilization, democratisation, and infrastructure development. This guide should help practitioners avoid repeating earlier mistakes, help political leaders evaluate the cost and likelihood of success of any proposed operation, and help citizens evaluate their government's consequent performance.

In a nation-building operation, outside states invest much of their resources in establishing and maintaining the host country's police, internal security forces, and justice system. This book examines post-Cold War reconstruction efforts, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and assesses the success of U.S. and allied efforts in reconstructing internal security institutions.

Confronting the past has become an established norm for countries undergoing transitions from violence to peace, from authoritarianism to democracy, or both. This book draws from two bodies of literature-peace building and transitional justice-to examine whether truth-telling mechanisms can contribute to sustainable peace and, if so, how and under what conditions. The authors approach these questions by examining whether truth telling contributes to the following elements, all of which are deemed to be constitutive of sustainable peace: reconciliation, human rights, gender equity, restorative justice, the rule of law, the mitigation of violence, and the healing of trauma. While the transitional-justice literature appears to have grasped the importance of truth telling for securing sustainable peace, few studies have undertaken empirical analysis and evaluations of the long-term impact of such mechanisms. Contributors to this interdisciplinary volume-from the fields of political science, law, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology-accomplish that by closely examining how societies emerging from violence must in some way examine, acknowledge, and account for violence committed in the past in order to move forward.

This is the first book to focus on the effects of violence in internal conflicts after peace agreements have been signed. Since the mid-1990s many peace processes, including those in Israel-Palestine, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Northern Ireland, have reverted to violence while seeking to implement formal peace agreements. In all these cases the persistence and forms of violence have been among the main determinants of the success or failure of the peace process. Violence and Reconstruction adopts a four-part analysis, examining in turn violence emanating from the state, from militants, from destabilized societies, and from the challenge of implementing a range of policies including demobilization, disarmament, and policing. Leading scholars explore in detail each of these aspects of postwar violence. Their findings draw attention to the increased willingness of the state to turn to militias to carry on violence by proxy; to the importance of distinguishing between the aims and actions of different militant groups; to a postwar rise in violent conventional crime; and to the importance of the proper restoration of civil society.

This analysis describes in counterinsurgency terms where the United States has gone wrong in Iraq; what unique challenges the conflict presents to coalition military forces; and what light both shed on future counterinsurgency planning, operations, and requirements. 450-character abstract: For 50 years, the United States has had ill-fated experiences in effectively fighting insurgencies. In counterinsurgency terms, Vietnam and Iraq form two legs of a historically fraught triangle-with El Salvador providing the connecting leg. In light of this history, the author analyzes where the United States has gone wrong in Iraq; what unique challenges the conflict presents to coalition forces deployed there; and what light both shed on future counterinsurgency planning, operations, and requirements.

Most literature on peacekeeping narrowly focuses on particular peacekeeping operations, and the political bargaining between peacekeeping participants. However, there is very little published research on why nations actually commit forces to peacekeeping operations. This new book meets this need.
The authors focus specifically on the political and economic motivations that influence the decision to participate in peacekeeping. They consider how definitions of national interest frame the political debate, and what the reasons are for the military support for, or opposition to, peacekeeping operations. They also explore the role of inter-agency politics, the role of public opinion in peacekeeping decisions, the influence of pressure from other nations and non-nation actors to commit peacekeeping forces.

Peace Agreements and Human Rights examines the place of human rights in peace agreements against the backdrop of international legal provision. The book examines the role of peace agreements in peace processes, drawing on a comprehensive appendix of over 100 peace agreements signed after 1990, in over 40 countries. Four sets of peace agreements are then examined in details, those of Bosnia Herzigovnia, Northern Ireland, South Africa and the Israeli/palestinian conflict. The Human Rights component of each of these agreements are comapred with each othe- focussing not on direct institutional comparison, but rather on the set of trade-offs which comprise the 'human rights dimension' of the agreements. This human rights dimension is also compared with relevant international law. The book focusses on the comparison of three main areas: self-determination and 'the deal', institution-building for the future, and dealing with the past. The purpose of the comparison is to illuminate thinking at three levels. First, it aims to provide some clear analysis of the role of human rights in peace agreements and the role of peace agreements in peace processes and conflicts more generally. Second, it considers whether and how international law guides or influences the negotiators who frame peace agreements, or whether international law is running to catch up with the mechanisms turned to in peace agreements. Finally, to provide a context from which to examine the relationship between justice and peace, and law and politics more generally. The author argues that the design and implementation prospects are closely circumscribed by the self-determination 'deal' at the heart of the agreement. She suggests that the entangling issues of group access to power with individual rights provision indicates the extent to which peace-making is a constitution-making project. She argues in conclusion that peace agreements are in effect types of constitution, with valuable lessons about the role of law in social change in both violent conflict and more peaceful contexts.

Worldwide more and more governments have begun to buckle under a variety of strains, including the ongoing pressures of economic crisis, followed by structural adjustment programmes, and the impact of declining legitimacy, often resulting in the outbreak of civil war. In this study of aid policy, Joanna Macrae argues that the disintegration of state authority and civil order has created acute problems in aid management. Largely ignored by major aid organizations, insecurity and failures of governance are now the major obstacles to aid reaching those in most need. International aid has traditionally assumed the existence of stable, sovereign states capable of making policy. In a number of developing countries, including post-conflict regimes like Cambodia, Uganda or Kosovo, this is no longer the case. The big donor agencies have usually responded by suspending development aid and substituting some kind of emergency or relief assistance. Now, as the author shows, there are calls to make relief more development-oriented and for it to address the underlying conflicts which causes these crises. But she concludes from her investigations on the ground in a number of countries that relief and development aid are very distinct processes. In the absence of public policy-making authorities, aid becomes highly fragmented, often inadequate in scale, and certainly not capable of building local sustainability for particular programmes. The international aid system, she concludes, faces real dilemmas and remains ill-equipped to respond to the peculiar challenges of quasi-statehood that characterize chronic political emergencies and their aftermath. An important book for policy makers, scholars and students of the development process wrestling with 'real world' issues of aid delivery.

Survival, the bi-monthly publication from The International Institute for Strategic Studies, is a leading forum for analysis and debate of international and strategic affairs. With a diverse range of authors, thoughtful reviews and review essays, Survival is scholarly in depth while vivid, well-written and policy-relevant in approach. Shaped by its editors to be both timely and forward-thinking, the publication encourages writers to challenge conventional wisdom and bring fresh, often controversial, perspectives to bear on the strategic issues of the moment.

In 2011, South Sudan was welcomed into the United Nations as the world’s newest nation. Celebrations on the ground reflected palpable relief after more than 20 years of violent struggle. With unprecedented goodwill and optimism, the UN deployed 7,000 soldiers and another 2,000 police and civilian peacekeepers to the country to support its transition to independence. However, the mission failed and within less than three years South Sudan was plunged into a catastrophic civil war. Using firsthand accounts from senior UN officials and referencing hitherto unseen UN documents, this book explores the role of the peacekeeping mission in that failure. It challenges the resignation with which many in academia and the media greeted the underperformance of the peacekeepers. It suggests that, even while under-resourced, they could have done much more to prevent bloodshed in the new country and protected civilians from the chaos of the first years of the conflict. The UN has thus far avoided a thorough and public examination of its actions in South Sudan. It has avoided accountability and instead rewarded failed decision-makers. This book is an attempt to re-assess the legacy of that mission and to detail how its many mistakes can and should be avoided in the future.

This book considers contemporary international interventions with a specific focus on analyzing the frameworks that have guided recent peacekeeping operations led by the United Nations. Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-inspired approaches in the field of International Relations, it highlights how interventions can be viewed through the lens of governmentality and its key attendant concepts. The book draws from these approaches in order to explore how international interventions are increasingly informed by governmental rationalities of security and policing. Two specific cases are examined: the UN's Security Sector Reform (SSR) approach and the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. Focusing on the governmental rationalities that are at work in these two central frameworks that have come to guide contemporary UN-led peacekeeping efforts in recent years, the book considers: The use in IR of governmentality and its attendant notions of biopower and sovereign power The recent discussion regarding the concept and practice of international policing and police reform The rise of security as a rationality of government and the manner in which security and police rationalities interconnect and have increasingly come to inform peacekeeping efforts The Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework for peacebuilding and the rise of the UN's Protection of Civilians agenda. This book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of international relations, security studies, critical theory, and conflict and intervention.