UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars

Lise Morjé Howard

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780511368103
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Civil wars pose some of the most difficult problems in the world today and the United Nations is the organization generally called upon to bring and sustain peace. Lise Morjé Howard studies the sources of success and failure in UN peacekeeping. Her in-depth 2007 analysis of some of the most complex UN peacekeeping missions debunks the conventional wisdom that they habitually fail, showing that the UN record actually includes a number of important, though understudied, success stories. Using systematic comparative analysis, Howard argues that UN peacekeeping succeeds when field missions establish significant autonomy from UN headquarters, allowing civilian and military staff to adjust to the post-civil war environment. In contrast, failure frequently results from operational directives originating in UN headquarters, often devised in relation to higher-level political disputes with little relevance to the civil war in question. Howard recommends future reforms be oriented toward devolving decision-making power to the field missions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Appendices
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: success, failure, and organizational learning in UN peacekeeping
• 2 The failures: Somalia, Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia
• 3 Namibia: the first major success
• 4 El Salvador: centrally propelled learning
• 5 Cambodia: organizational dysfunction, partial learning, and mixed success
• 6 Mozambique: learning to create consent
• 7 Eastern Slavonia: institution-building and the limited use of force
• 8 East Timor: the UN as state
• 9 The ongoing multidimensional peacekeeping operations
• 10 Conclusion: two levels of organizational learning
• Appendix I Multidimensionality of mandates of all post-Cold War UN peacekeeping operations in civil wars
• Appendix II Questions for structured-focused comparisons
• Appendix III Situational difficulty before the start of the UN peacekeeping operation
• Bibliography
• Index