Reviews UN efforts to transform eight unstable countries into democratic, peaceful, and prosperous partners, and compares those missions with U.S. nation-building operations. The UN provides the most suitable institutional framework for nation-building missions that require fewer than 20,000 men-one with a comparatively low cost structure, a comparatively high success rate, and the greatest degree of international legitimacy.
Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.
Reviews UN efforts to transform eight unstable countries into democratic, peaceful, and prosperous partners, and compares those missions with U.S. nation-building operations. The UN provides the most suitable institutional framework for nation-building missions that require fewer than 20,000 men-one with a comparatively low cost structure, a comparatively high success rate, and the greatest degree of international legitimacy.
Preventing humanitarian atrocities is becoming as important for the United Nations as dealing with inter-state war. In this book, Ramesh Thakur examines the transformation in UN operations, analysing its changing role and structure. He asks why, when and how force may be used and argues that the growing gulf between legality and legitimacy is evidence of an eroded sense of international community. He considers the tension between the US, with its capacity to use force and project power, and the UN, as the centre of the international law enforcement system. He asserts the central importance of the rule of law and of a rules-based order focused on the UN as the foundation of a civilised system of international relations. This book will be of interest to students of the UN and international organisations in politics, law and international relations departments, as well as policymakers in the UN and other NGOs.
The first edition of The Morality of War was one of the most widely-read and successful books ever written on the topic. In this second edition, Brian Orend builds on the substantial strengths of the first, adding important new material on: cyber-warfare; drone attacks; the wrap-up of Iraq and Afghanistan; conflicts in Libya and Syria; and protracted struggles (like the Arab-Israeli conflict). Updated and streamlined throughout, the book offers new research tools and case studies, while keeping the winning blend of theory and history featured in the first edition. This book remains an engaging and comprehensive examination of the ethics, and practice, of war and peace in today’s world.
Whilst classical approaches linked development with peace, security has become central to understandings of both war and peacetime. This book uniquely reflects on how to deal with the convergence of war and peace in the context of global economic and geo-political development. It addresses methodological challenges in contemporary approaches to conflict, violence, security peace and development. Two dominant contemporary approaches are selected for debate on methodologies and ethical choices: rational choice and identity-based theorizing. The chapters are arranged as dialogues around contending approaches, to better understand how the inter-locking fields of violent conflict, peace, development and security can be researched and understood. The book considers how theoretical and methodological approaches relate to different ethical and political choices, including around engagement and intervention in the four interwoven fields. Theoretical, methodological and ethical issues emerge from the critical reviews of academic discourses and case-study based chapters from across the world, including Sri Lanka, Ghana, Colombia and Rwanda. This book is an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in Development Studies, Conflict Studies, Peace Studies and Security Studies.
Since 1898, the United States and the United Nations have deployed military force more than three dozen times in attempts to rebuild failed states. Currently there are more state-building campaigns in progress than at any time in the past century—including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Lebanon—and the number of candidate nations for such campaigns in the future is substantial. Even with a broad definition of success, earlier campaigns failed more than half the time. In this book, Paul D. Miller brings his decade in the U.S. military, intelligence community, and policy worlds to bear on the question of what causes armed, international state-building campaigns by liberal powers to succeed or fail. The United States successfully rebuilt the West German and Japanese states after World War II but failed to build a functioning state in South Vietnam. After the Cold War the United Nations oversaw relatively successful campaigns to restore order, hold elections, and organize post-conflict reconstruction in Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, but those successes were overshadowed by catastrophes in Angola, Liberia, and Somalia. The recent effort in Iraq and the ongoing one in Afghanistan—where Miller had firsthand military, intelligence, and policymaking experience—are yielding mixed results, despite the high levels of resources dedicated and the long duration of the missions there. Miller outlines different types of state failure, analyzes various levels of intervention that liberal states have tried in the state-building process, and distinguishes among the various failures and successes those efforts have provoked.
This publication constitutes the first scholarly periodical to focus on activities of the United Nations in the field of international law. It recognizes the recent increased impact of the development of the World Organization, its Specialized Agencies and other aspects of the United Nations System, as well as their effect on the shaping of international relations.
This book examines the effectiveness of multilateralism in ensuring collective security and, in particular, the EU's role in this process. In 1992, shortly after the end of the Cold War, a Security Council Summit in New York reaffirmed the salience of the system of collective security and stated the determination of the Heads of State to maintain it as the prime international instrument for preserving peace. Twenty years later, however, the record of collective security as well as of multilateralism has not been very encouraging. The system of collective security, as enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter, failed repeatedly to accomplish its mandate in the 1990s and has led to controversial debates in the United States and Europe that reached a climax during the Iraq crisis in 2002/03. The volume draws upon both theoretical and empirical research to answer the following core questions: What are the reasons that have made multilateralism either effective or ineffective in the field of peacekeeping, peace preservation and peacebuilding? How can multilateralism be made more effective? How can attempts made by Europe to render UN multilateralism in the security area more efficient be assessed? This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding/peacekeeping, EU policy, the UN, security studies and IR in general.
