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Overview
Since the end of the cold war, a series of costly civil wars, many of them ethnic conflicts, have dominated the international security agenda. The international community, often acting through the United Nations or regional organizations like NATO, has felt compelled to intervene with military forces in many of these conflicts -- four of which comprise the heart of this book: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention is a detailed examination by a host of distinguished scholars of these recent interventions in order to draw lessons for today's policy debates.
The contributors view ethnic conflict and internal war through the prism of the concept of the security dilemma -- a situation in which parties with strong incentives to cooperate wind up nonetheless in bloody competition out of distrust of the opponent. Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention assesses how international intervention can help solve the security dilemma in civil wars by designing political and military arrangements that make security commitments credible to the warring parties. The mixed record of partial successes, failures, and in some cases counterproductive interventions suggests an urgent need to extract lessons with a view toward developing a framework for making future policy choices.
Columbia University Press
Synopsis
Since the end of the cold war, a series of costly civil wars, many of them ethnic conflicts, have dominated the international security agenda. The international community, often acting through the United Nations or regional organizations like NATO, has felt compelled to intervene with military forces in many of these conflicts. Civil Wars, Insec
Booknews
Shows how fear and uncertainty can combine to promote and prolong civil wars, and uncovers conditions in which high levels of fear and uncertainty are likely to emerge within a country and how outside intervention may or may not help manage these issues. Early chapters assess the concept of the security dilemma, analyze why civil war adversaries walk away from peace negotiations, and discuss problems of demobilization and democratization. Later chapters offer four case studies on Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Cambodia. Final chapters examine the need for physical separation of competing ethnic groups, and consider why average citizens continue to support bloody wars. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Editorials
International Affairs -
This volume is a must for anyone interested in the management of ethnic conflicts as it does a good job of highlighting the difficulties and dilemmas that have to be overcome if interventions are [sic] be more successful in the future than they have been in the past.
International Affairs
This volume is a must for anyone interested in the management of ethnic conflicts as it does a good job of highlighting the difficulties and dilemmas that have to be overcome if interventions are [sic] be more successful in the future than they have been in the past.— Peter Viggo Jakobsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark