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U.N. Peacekeeping, American Policy, and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s

Edited by William J. Durch
Reviewed by By Francis Fukuyama
May/June 1997
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Edited by William J. Durch
St. Martin's Press
1997
502 pp.
$49.95

This follow-up to the author's earlier edition, The Evolution of U.N. Peacekeeping, presents case studies of major recent U.N. peacekeeping operations in Angola, Cambodia, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. The collection details the by now familiar dilemmas of peacekeeping: many conflicts like Bosnia require peace enforcement rather than peacekeeping, but the contributing states are seldom willing to commit sufficient resources or to take sides in highly politicized situations, leaving U.N. forces on the ground as powerless hostages. This volume does not add anything surprising to the knowledge of peacekeeping, but the individual chapters are more comprehensive than many of the books on this topic in recent years.

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