During the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, preventing armed violence around the world became an important preoccupation of Western policy-makers. Many hoped that the sole remaining superpower, no longer preoccupied with containing communist insurgencies across continents, could now afford to lead “the international community” into a peaceful future. The September 11 attacks shifted the attention away from preventing civil war and toward fighting and dismantling terrorist networks around the world.

Two recent developments have helped to bring the idea of civil war prevention back onto the agenda of Western policy-makers, however. First, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to a military and political overstretch of the United States and its allies. Preventing additional civil wars that would demand Western intervention has very much become a matter of necessity. Second and more importantly, the discussion on how to prevent terrorism focuses increasingly on the role of failed states that provide the environment within which radical groups can flourish. Most of these states “failed” in the wake of civil war.