Despite the many differences among the eleven peacebuilding operations launched between 1989 and 1998, these missions have pursued a broadly common strategy, seeking to transform war-shattered states into liberal market democracies on the assumption that doing so would help to consolidate a stable and lasting peace. As noted in Part I, this strategy rested on a proposition that liberal thinkers have propounded in one form or another since the eighteenth century, and which gained widespread acceptance among scholars and policymakers at the end of the Cold War: that liberal democracy and market-oriented economics offer the surest formula for peace, both in relations between states and within their borders. I labeled this the Wilsonian approach to conflict management and noted that this method of conflict management is still largely unproven, because questions such as whether the process of liberalization fosters peace, and whether democratization and marketization are reliable remedies for intrastate violence, remain largely unanswered. The case studies examined in the preceding chapters were conducted in the hope of gaining new insights into these questions.

Some missions were clear successes (Namibia and Croatia); others were obvious failures (Angola and Rwanda). The remaining operations fell in between these two extremes. In most of these eleven cases, the process of political liberalization, or economic liberalization, or both, produced destabilizing side effects that worked against the consolidation of peace. In some countries, liberalization exacerbated societal tensions, and in others it reproduced traditional sources of violence.

In contrast to Angola and Rwanda, where the democratization process might well have served as a catalyst for renewed conflict and the collapse of peacebuilding efforts, the results of postconflict democratization efforts in Cambodia and Liberia were widely viewed as positive. Both countries held largely free and fair elections under international supervision, and in both cases peacebuilding agencies declared their efforts a “success” and terminated their operations shortly after the elections. At first glance, then, Cambodia and Liberia seem to corroborate the Wilsonian hypothesis thatliberalization fosters peace in war-shattered states. Closer examination, however, raises serious doubts about the pacifying effects of democratization in these two cases. Even though both countries experienced a period of relative political stability following the departure of international peacebuilders, the adoption of democracy itself cannot be credited because the newly elected governments of both countries immediately backed away from their commitments to democracy and reverted to more autocratic forms of rule; and one country, Liberia, ultimately slipped back into war.

The Wilsonian hypothesis holds that violent conflict can be transformed into peaceful political competition when groups are allowed to pursue their interests freely through democratic political institutions. While this may help to explain the initial success of elections in Cambodia and Liberia, it does not explain the ensuing period, during which there was little real freedom to challenge the policies of governing cliques, and the behavior of both countries' elected leaders – Hun Sen in Cambodia and Charles Taylor in Liberia – was moredespotic than democratic.

Central America has historically suffered from chronic civil violence, insurgencies, coups, and military dictatorships. During the latter stages of the Cold War, armed revolutionary movements sought to overthrow the governments of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In Nicaragua, a group of dissidents backed by the United States and known as Contras fought an insurgency campaign against the left-leaning Sandinista government in Managua throughout the 1980s. In El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FLMN) launched a guerrilla war against the government in 1981 that cost an estimated seventy-five thousand lives and displaced roughly one-quarter of the country's population. In Guatemala, when revolutionary movements challenged the military government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Guatemalan regime responded with a brutal counterinsurgency effort that lasted into the early 1990s, mainly targeting indigenous Mayan communities in which many revolutionaries, including the major rebel group, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), were based.

Central American leaders met on several occasions during the 1980s to discuss possible solutions to these conflicts. At one such meeting – on August 7, 1987 in Esquipulas, Guatemala – the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica formally endorsed a peace plan presented by the Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias, which called for a cease-fire, national reconciliation, amnesty, democratization, termination of external aid to insurgent movements, and free elections.

The territory of the former Yugoslavia has hosted several peacebuilding missions. The first major postconflict operation was deployed to Bosnia in 1995. Other missions were created for Croatia (1995) and Kosovo (1999). This chapter focuses on the Bosnia operation and concludes with an analysis of the much smaller Croatia operation. The subsequent mission to Kosovo will be examined in Chapter 11.

Bosnia

War in the former Yugoslavia broke out in June 1991, after two of the country's then-constituent republics – Slovenia and Croatia – declared their independence from the Yugoslav federation. Fighting between Slovenian nationalists and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) lasted only ten days before the JNA withdrew from Slovenia. In Croatia, however, ethnic Serb residents formed paramilitary units (which were supplied and supported by the JNA) and waged a war against Croatian nationalist forces throughout the second half of 1991. A cease-fire came into effect at the end of the year, but only after Serb militias and the JNA had gained control of roughly one-quarter of the republic's territory. In February 1992, the UN Security Council created the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to monitor the cease-fire in Croatia.

One month later, in March 1992, a referendum on independence was held in neighboring Bosnia, which at the time was still part of Yugoslavia. The vote divided Bosnia along ethnic lines.

Might another approach to peacebuilding be better suited to creating stable and lasting peace in war-shattered states? I shall begin by considering two sweeping alternatives to Wilsonianism. The first is to abandon liberalization as a core element of peacebuilding in favor of establishing authoritarian regimes with international military and financial backing. The other is the strategy of partition, or the physical separation of warring communities and perhaps the creation of new states. I conclude that neither of these strategies offers a sound basis for peacebuilding, although there are limited circumstances in which they might be warranted.

Second, I shall propose a more feasible and prudent approach to peacebuilding: a modified form of Wilsonianism. Peacebuilders should continue to seek to transform war-shattered states into liberal market democracies, but with a different technique – by constructing the foundations of effective political and economic institutions before the introduction of electoral democracy and market-oriented adjustment policies, a strategy that I call Institutionalization Before Liberalization (IBL). This approach rests, I believe, on a more realistic understanding than that which has guided the practice of peacebuilding to date. Rather than assuming that liberalization will foster peace in countries just emerging from civil wars, we should start from the assumption that liberalization is an inherently tumultuous and conflict-inducing process that is capable of undermining a fragile peace. The chapter concludes by considering three possible criticisms of the IBL strategy.

Has the Wilsonian assumption of peacebuilding – that rapid liberalization would foster a stable and lasting peace in countries that are just emerging from civil wars – been borne out in practice? How should we go about answering this question? This chapter sets out the investigative framework for the case studies that follow. Specifically, I shall address three issues: First, what are the specific causal hypotheses that will be evaluated against the record of peacebuilding? Second, how will the case studies of peacebuilding missions be structured in order to evaluate these hypotheses? Third, which particular peacebuilding missions will be studied?

Most studies of peacebuilding outcomes begin by establishing a standard of effectiveness or success and then proceed to evaluate the record of one or more operations against this standard. My aim is slightly different: to examine whether the strategy of peace-through-liberalization, in particular, has enhanced the prospects for stable and lasting peace in countries that have hosted peacebuilding missions. Put differently, the “independent variable” that I am interested in studying is political liberalization (including the establishment of political and civil freedoms, and preparations for and the holding of elections) and economic liberalization (including the movement toward market-oriented economic policies and practices), while the “dependent variable” is the likelihood of stable and lasting peace within the host country.

In the early 1990s, a new threat to global security and human welfare caught the attention of political analysts and policymakers around the world, a threat that few observers had anticipated: pervasive and pernicious internal violence. They were right to be concerned. Civil wars (which take place primarily within the borders of a single state and among belligerents who normally reside in that state) accounted for 94 percent of all armed conflicts fought in the 1990s. From Africa to Central Asia, internecine violence and collapsing states became an unfortunate but familiar feature of the post–Cold War political landscape.

The nature of the threat posed by these conflicts was both humanitarian and strategic. From a humanitarian standpoint, this violence inflicted appalling losses on civilian noncombatants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately 90 percent of war victims were soldiers; during the 1990s, by contrast, an estimated 90 percent of those killed in armed conflicts were civilians. Attacks and atrocities against noncombatants became widely employed as deliberate strategies of warfare – including such tactics as systematic rape, mass executions, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide – prompting some commentators to lament the revival of “premodern” forms of fighting that dispensed with customary constraints on the waging of war. Internal conflicts were also the principal source of mass refugee movements in the 1990s, which often gave rise to further humanitarian emergencies.

In the wake of peacebuilding missions in Namibia and Mozambique, the danger of resurgent conflict in both countries appears remote. Namibia has enjoyed more than a decade of domestic peace with little internal unrest, and at the time of this writing, there are no signs of renewed insurgency or intergroup violence. Although the durability of peace in Mozambique seems less secure than in Namibia, Mozambique has enjoyed the longest period of peace and stability in its history since its conflict came to an end in 1994. Yet the apparent success of Wilsonian peacebuilding policies in these two countries is not without qualification: Like Croatia, both countries offered unusually propitious conditions for postconflict liberalization, not least because major parties to their conflicts were external parties who effectively withdrew from the countries when the wars ended, thereby reducing the risks of rapid liberalization exacerbating tensions among formerly warring parties within these states. Indeed, neither the conflict in Mozambique nor that in Namibia was primarily indigenous or “homegrown” because both wars were instigated and sustained by external actors, and when outsiders abandoned the conflicts, there was little “demand” for continued fighting.

Namibia

South West Africa, as Namibia was previously known, was colonized by Germany in 1884, and it remained a German possession until World War I, when South African troops seized control of the territory and imposed military rule for the duration of the war.

This book examines every major peacebuilding mission launched between 1989 and 1999. There were fourteen in total; all were deployed to countries in which a civil war had just ended. Despite many differences, these missions shared a common strategy for consolidating peace after internal conflicts: immediate democratization and marketization. What can we learn from the peacebuilding record about the effectiveness of this strategy as a means of preventing the recurrence of fighting in postconflict situations? This volume argues that the idea of transforming war-shattered states into stable market democracies is basically sound, but that pushing this process too quickly can have damaging and destabilizing effects. Market democracy is not the miracle cure for internal conflict. On the contrary, the process of political and economic liberalization is inherently tumultuous: It can exacerbate social tensions and undermine the prospects for stable peace in the fragile conditions that typically exist in countries just emerging from civil war.

A more sensible approach to postconflict peacebuilding would seek, first, to establish a system of domestic institutions that are capable of managing the destabilizing effects of democratization and marketization within peaceful bounds and, second, to phase in political and economic reforms slowly over time, as conditions warrant. To do this effectively, international peacebuilders will have to abandon the notion that war-shattered states can be hurriedly rehabilitated. One set of elections, without creating stable political and economic institutions, does not produce durable peace in most cases.

As the Cold War was coming to a close in 1989, the United Nations launched its first major peacebuilding mission in Namibia, following the negotiation of a peace settlement in that country's decades-long civil war. At that time, few observers predicted that postconflict peacebuilding would become an international growth industry, but over the next decade, operations were deployed to no fewer than thirteen other territories that were just emerging from internal conflicts.

Ostensibly, these missions provided “technical assistance” to local actors in war-torn countries – assistance aimed at preventing the recurrence of violence and establishing a stable and lasting peace. In practice, however, these operations were more than merely technical (or ideologically neutral) exercises in conflict management. As we shall see, they all promoted a particular model of political and economic organization: liberal market democracy. Why did peacebuilders embrace democratization and marketization as strategies for preventing renewed violence? And why did this brand of peacebuilding proliferate so rapidly in the 1990s? Answers to both of these questions can be found in the peculiar political and ideological conditions that prevailed at the end of the Cold War, when peacebuilding came into being.

The Cold War's End and the Rise of Peacebuilding

During the Cold War, the UN's main security activity was “peacekeeping,” which typically involved the deployment of a lightly armed military force to monitor a cease-fire or patrol neutral buffer zones between former combatants.