Jeffrey Herbst

Seven years after more than 500,000 Tutsi were massacred in Rwanda, the world still cannot explain why. Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers is a rich history of Hutu and Tutsi identity, but how it applies to the genocide is unclear.

The intervention in Somalia was not an abject failure; an estimated 100,000 lives were saved. But its mismanagement should be an object lesson for peacekeepers in Bosnia and on other such missions. No large intervention, military or humanitarian, can remain neutral or assuredly brief in a strife-torn failed state. Nation-building, the rebuilding of a state's basic civil institutions, is required in fashioning a self-sustaining body politic out of anarchy. In the future, the United States, the United Nations, and other intervenors should be able to declare a state "bankrupt" and go in to restore civic order and foster reconciliation.