ABSTRACT
The 1990s saw a vast expansion of effort by a variety of actors to prevent, manage and/or resolve conflicts around the world, including Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Cambodia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and elsewhere with mixed results. The first years of the new millennium have seen more missions in even more apparently hopeless places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The primary mission for the military inserted into these situations is to create a “safe and secure environment”1
so that the rest of the peace implementation (or nation-building) processes can take place. What seems to be relatively unproblematic in Bosnia in 2007 is extraordinarily difficult in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the situations in these three countries are most dramatic, all countries face the problem of providing security to their populations.2 This is the basic task of government, but it is not an easy one. In practice, a key complication is that governments not only provide security to their people but also serve as perhaps the most dangerous threat. Abuses by governments can threaten individuals and groups far more powerfully than their opponents, including dissidents and insurgents. The universal problem that is the focus of this book is that governments must provide security to their citizens but also remain restrained enough that they do not become the primary threat. We address both the domestic and international dynamics involved as the internal balancing act can be upset by outsiders, and external actors (including the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the African Union, individual countries, and other organizations) have increasingly played a role in restoring the internal security of countries.
