ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War has been marked by an unprecedented degree of interventionism in response to civil strife worldwide. Since 1991, the UN Security Council has authorized the use of force to address threats associated with intra-state conflicts in more than a dozen states and territories. States have also intervened unilaterally-without Security Council authorization-in response to a number of violent civil or transnational local wars. This “new interventionism” has manifested itself in other ways as well, including the international prosecution of war crimes committed in the context of internal wars; the creation of a permanent international criminal court with jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; and the adoption of a wide range of post-conflict, peace-building measures by the United Nations, the World Bank, donor states, and non-governmental organizations that have had as their aim the consolidation of peace in the wake of civil unrest. There are several reasons for this heightened international activism in the
face of civil strife. With the end of the Cold War, the vast majority of major armed conflicts have been of an internal nature. These conflicts have given rise to savage atrocities often involving large numbers of civilian non-combatants, many of these atrocities the consequence of flagrant violations of humanitarian law (Kaldor 1999: 9; Human Security Report 2005: 23). Internal conflicts, moreover, have sometimes so incapacitated states that they have rendered them incapable of performing even the most basic governmental functions, further exacerbating the humanitarian plight of civilians. States have also been motivated to intervene out of strategic considerations, notably concerns about the spill-over of conflicts into neighboring states and the potentially destabilizing consequences of refugees fleeing from war zones. Increased international engagement in the rehabilitation of war-torn societies, meanwhile, reflects recognition of how fragile a peace may be and how easy it is for terminated conflicts to restart. It is this latter area of international intervention with which this chapter is
chiefly concerned: post-conflict peace-building and, in particular, some of the more ambitious efforts that have been made in an attempt to create a sustainable peace in the wake of violent conflict, extending to the establishment
of virtual trusteeships in the cases of Cambodia, Eastern Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor. The chapter situates these efforts in the broader context of post-Cold War security trends and discusses the debate over their effectiveness. Analysts are divided in their assessments of the contribution these efforts have made to building a stable peace (compare Chandler 2006 and Barnett 2006 with Caplan 2005 and Dobbins et al. 2005). Yet what achievements there have been, it will be argued here, are qualified in two important respects: first, internationally led peace-building has often inhibited the development of the local capacity for self-government, which is vital for maintaining a durable peace; and, second, the achievements often owe themselves to local conditions that may not obtain elsewhere, thus rendering these efforts limited in terms of the wider application they may have.
