The chapter examines the afterlife of peace agreements aimed at ending civil wars in the post-Cold War era. Assessing the ‘success’ or otherwise of these agreements is not possible without an appreciation of the context – historical, political, cultural and normative – within which they have been negotiated, concluded and implemented. While context is thus all-important, the history and fate of peace accords have also been shaped by the content of individual agreements, as well as by the manner of their implementation. The record shows that poorly designed and inadequately supported peace agreements can entrench pre-war patterns of conflict, exacerbate intra-elite competition, and accentuate socio-economic and political grievances within war-torn societies. By contrast, agreements that are properly designed, adequately resourced, and underpinned by constructive political support from parties, regional actors and international sponsors, can strengthen the political forces and dynamics favouring long-term stability and societal transformation towards self-sustaining peace. Peace agreements after civil wars are often best approached as living documents whose flexible and politically informed interpretation can help parties and mediators chart political avenues out of protracted violence.

The relationship between the history and evolution of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping on the one hand, and the emergence of the doctrine of a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) on the other, is intimate, complex and paradoxical.

The element of intimacy is most obvious in relation to the immediate origins of R2P. The central idea underlying it – that individual states and, should they fail, the ‘international community, through the UN’, have a ‘responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity’ – is very closely connected to the traumatic experiences of UN peacekeeping in the early post-Cold War period. The impotence of UN peacekeepers in the face of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and the cruel irony of a ‘UN Protection Force’ unable to protect civilians in the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in 1995, powerfully stimulated a normative shift, already encouraged by the passing of the Cold War, in favour of the justice-related provisions of the Charter. R2P, to which member states committed themselves in principle at the UN World Summit in 2005, remains the most notable expression of that shift.

The complexity of the relationship derives from the fact that the normative force which R2P idea has acquired, notwithstanding the continuing and inevitable controversies to which its ‘operationalisation’ remains subject, has itself influenced the evolution of UN peacekeeping and the debate about its purposes. This is evident, above all, in the now widely held presumption that one of the chief tasks of UN peacekeepers is to ‘protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence’. Indeed, it is a task explicitly envisaged for nearly all of the peacekeeping operations authorised by the Security Council since 1999.

The mandate to protect civilians, however, even though it is now routinely inserted in Council resolutions, has created expectations which UN peacekeepers have manifestly found very difficult to meet. And it is this reality that has given rise to the paradoxical aspect of the relationship between peacekeeping and R2P: by raising expectations yet failing to deliver on the promise of protection, situations have been created in which, perversely, mass atrocity crimes of the kind that R2P is fundamentally concerned to prevent have not only been allowed to occur but, in some cases, have become more likely to occur.

NATO IN AFGHANISTAN: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OR THE END OF THE BEGINNING?

In October 2006 the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan – under North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command since August 2003 – assumed operational control of the whole of the country. With nearly forty thousand troops drawn from more than thirty-five countries, the Alliance was now charged with providing security and bringing stability to a deeply fractured country outside its treaty-defined area of operations. The range of tasks given to NATO forces in Afghanistan is broad and complex, from combat operations at one end to the rebuilding of roads, bridges, and schools at the other. On the face of it, the assumption of such extensive responsibilities is testimony to an extraordinary transformation on the part of the Alliance, evidence of just how far it has come from its early and initially timid forays into peacekeeping on the European continent in the early 1990s.

And yet, NATO's first operation outside the Euro-Atlantic area has proved a far greater challenge than initial planning assumptions, some of them simplistically lifted from its experiences in the Balkans, appeared to suggest. By early 2009, progress made in extending the authority of the Afghan government outside Kabul remains, at best, patchy. Critically, military operations have failed to reverse the resurgence of Taliban influence since 2002, which now extends beyond the movement's traditional strongholds in the southern provinces of Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar.

The original edition of this volume, The New Interventionism, 1991–1994, published in 1996 and edited by James Mayall, offered an initial assessment of the United Nation's (UN) interventions in the immediate post-Cold War. The volume concentrated on three case studies; Cambodia, former Yugoslavia and Somalia and included extensive chronologies, and the relevant Security Council Resolutions for each case, in several appendices.

In this volume we develop the debates on UN intervention post-1990 by updating the original three case studies and adding to them five more: Rwanda, Haiti, East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. In each case, the causes and consequences of UN intervention are examined in the context of the history of each specific crisis, as well as against the backdrop of wider changes – of both a normative and geopolitical kind – in international relations. The case selection is primarily driven by the extent of UN intervention and the significance of the UN experience in these crises for the functioning of the organisation and its international standing, as well as by their chronological and geographical scope.

As stated by James Mayall in the Introduction, this volume concentrates on the ‘prospects for international cooperation, the preconditions for success, the causes of failure, and the constraints that must be overcome if the UN Charter is to act as a constitution for international society, rather than as a mere list of lofty but unattainable principles’.

The United Nations (UN) operation in Cambodia from 1992 to 1993 was, at the time, the most ambitious and expensive undertaking in the peacekeeping experience of the organisation. At a cost of around US $1.7 billion, 22,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed to implement the Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, the Paris Agreement, which had been concluded at an international conference in Paris on 23 October 1991. That settlement made provision for a UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) charged with holding the ring politically, so that elections under its aegis could determine the future governance of a country long afflicted by violent upheaval and human suffering.

UNTAC was provided with exceptional resources but its mandate was restricted to peacekeeping. Peace enforcement, which had been demonstrated early in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, was not part of UNTAC's remit, which was confined, in essence, to a quasi-administrative role. The critical problem confronted by UNTAC virtually from the outset of its deployment was how to discharge its responsibility for filling a political vacuum in the face of obstructive violence by contending Cambodian parties.

The notorious Khmer Rouge refused totally to cooperate in implementing the Paris Agreement, which it had signed, while the incumbent administration in Phnom Penh used violence to force the outcome of the elections. In the event, UNTAC took a calculated risk in embarking on elections, which were conducted without serious disruption.

The United Nations operation in Cambodia during 1992–3 was, at the time, the most ambitious and expensive undertaking in the peacekeeping experience of the Organisation. At a cost of around US $1.7 billion, 22,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed to implement the Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict which had been concluded at an international conference in Paris on 23 October 1991. That settlement made provision for a United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) charged with holding the ring politically so that elections under its aegis could determine the future governance of a country long afflicted by violent upheaval and human suffering.

UNTAC was provided with exceptional resources but its mandate was restricted to peacekeeping. Peace enforcement, which had been demonstrated early in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, was not any part of UNTAC's remit which was confined, in essence, to a quasiadministrative role. The critical problem confronted by UNTAC virtually from the outset of its deployment was how to discharge responsibility for filling a political vacuum in the face of obstructive violence by contending Cambodian parties.

The notorious Khmer Rouge refused totally to cooperate in implementing the Paris Agreement which it had signed, while the incumbent administration in Phnom Penh also used violence to force the outcome of the elections in which it would participate. In the event, UNTAC assumed a calculated risk in embarking on elections, which were conducted without serious disruption. No single party secured an overall majority, which paved the way for a coalition government which excluded the Khmer Rouge. They had repudiated the electoral process but failed to disrupt it with an effective military challenge.