No Size Fits All

The UN has been in the business of peacekeeping since 1948. During the Cold War, UN missions were mostly restricted to placing lightly armed observers between warring states to monitor compliance with cease-fire agreements. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, however, more UN operations have been set up to implement comprehensive settlements to resolve civil wars and rebuild political systems, sometimes from scratch: from complex peace operations in Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and Namibia in the early 1990s to the even more complex administration of collapsed territories, such as Kosovo and East Timor in the late 1990s. Today, the UN manages 17 operations on four continents, with more than 70,000 military, police, and civilian personnel drawn from more than 100 countries. A new complex operation in Sudan is in the works, and the UN's role in Iraq may expand.

One of the UN's most difficult challenges has been to translate general lessons from those disparate experiences into a blueprint for rebuilding war-torn societies. Three accomplished political scientists believe they might have found a way to do so. In At War's End, a survey of how war-torn countries that have hosted UN peace operations in the 1990s have fared, Roland Paris concludes that, although most are still at peace, few are fully democratic and prosperous. He believes that more intrusive UN operations, including those that temporarily take over a state's administration, are the best way to ensure that liberal democracies will emerge from war. Kimberly Zisk Marten also endorses the values of liberal democracies, but in Enforcing the Peace: Learning From the Imperial Past, she claims it is a "pipe dream" to think that international administrators can bring them to war-torn societies. Calling for a much less ambitious type of international intervention, which she terms "security-keeping," Marten argues that international missions should confine themselves to maintaining security, allowing local actors to devise their own political and economic systems. In The Remnants of War, John Mueller presents a third model for the future of international peacekeeping: "police-keeping." What war-torn countries need the most, Mueller claims, is not to redress a democratic deficit or reconcile a "clash of civilizations," but to develop functioning state institutions that can police their territories effectively.

Each author draws attention to important lessons that deserve serious consideration from policymakers and practitioners. Paris, like a growing number of experts in the field, warns that the rush to hold elections can overshadow the need to build state institutions. Similarly, Mueller demonstrates that the way governments exercise power is as important as the way they attain it: their ability to manage "high-intensity crime" through the police and the judiciary can often mean the difference between war and peace. Finally, Marten draws a sharp distinction between when the international community should assert a heavy hand and when it should tread lightly: well-trained and nimble international security forces are often needed to buy time and space for local actors to rebuild state institutions, but the international community often invites trouble by dictating the pace of political and economic reform.

Still, these authors make too much of the similarities among the cases they study and not enough of the differences. And by using them to extrapolate bold models for state reconstruction, the authors belie the inherent complexities of the task. What worked in East Timor, a small island with a largely homogeneous population, would probably not have worked in Afghanistan, a far more vast, populated, and fractured state. The specifics of these conflicts--their scale as well as their historical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic roots--should inform how peace is brokered and maintained. Yet none of these books pays enough attention to such fundamental considerations.

BALLOTS AND BULLETS

Throughout much of the 1990s, the holding of elections in war-torn countries was seen as a harbinger of their recovery and democratization. Elections are clear-cut, identifiable benchmarks of progress and popular legitimacy: only the people can grant leaders their authority; the UN, or other outsiders, cannot.

Yet Paris, Marten, and Mueller sensibly warn that it is counterproductive to envision peacekeeping and peace building solely through this narrow prism. Expectations about how fast war-torn countries can be transformed into flourishing market democracies are often wildly unrealistic; Afghanistan cannot be transformed into Canada with two or three years of international peacekeeping. And the rush to hold free elections or to liberalize economies (which Paris calls economic "shock therapy") often glosses over fundamental problems that must be addressed before peace can become self-sustaining.

In his methodical and detailed presentation of the role that elections have played in 14 transitions from conflict to peace in the 1990s, Paris convincingly argues that holding elections prematurely can do more harm than good. The "winner-take-all" elections that were conducted in Angola in 1992, before the disarmament and demobilization process had advanced, exposed the parties' unwillingness to accept any result other than total victory. Yet some were surprised that Jonas Savimbi, the late Angolan rebel leader, rejected his defeat at the polls, plunging the country back into war. Other experiences, Paris demonstrates, also show that liberalization sometimes subjects fragile, war-ravaged societies to more strain than they can handle. In Rwanda, premature liberalization prompted a return to chaos; in Cambodia, suppression of the electorate's will; in Guatemala, deeper economic inequalities; and in post-Dayton Bosnia, reinforced ethnic divisions.