(excerpt)

Crocker, Chester A., Fen Olser Hampson, and Pamela Aall. eds. Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflicts. United States Institute of Peace: Washington D.C., 2001, pg. 737-9.

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When antagonists in civil war sign a peace agreement, what can international actors do to prevent a recurrence of that war? This is a life-or-death question for millions of people. The two worst outbreaks of massive violence in the 1990s--Angola in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994--followed the failure of peace agreements to end those wars. In both cases the death and destruction wer were staggering: an estimated 350,000 dead in Angola and 800,000 dead in Rwanda. War went on for eight years in Liberia and took 150,000 lives because multiple peace agreements failed to end the civil war there. In 2001 two mor more countr countries ies find themselves back in war after the failure of peace accords --Angola and Sierra Leone.

In all of these cases international actors mediated the agreements and were given prominent roles oles in implementation. Why did they fail? What could they have done differently? Was implementation in these cases doomed by unworable peace agreements? Was failure a question of unfulfilled mandates or mandates inappropriate to the task at hand? Or was failure caused by the lack of an appropriate strategy and/or the unwillingness to anticipate violent challenges and craft an effective response? How did these cases differ from successes such as Namibia, El Salvador, and Mozambique? Were these successes the result of less challenging environments or did international actors do things differently?

Between late 1997 and early 2000, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooper Cooperation ation (CISAC) and the International Peace Academy (IPA) conducted research to better understand the determinants of successful peace implementation. The CISAC- IPA project on peace implementation focused on three primary issues:

• the evaluation valuation of international actors and their strategies of peace implementation;
• the evaluation of various subgoals of peace implementation (e.g., demobilization, disarmament, refugee repatriation, human rights, reconciliation, econciliation, etc.) and their relationship elationship to overall implementation success; and
• the search for low-cost, possible high-payoff opportunities for linking short-term implementation success to longer-term peacebuilding.

The project found that cases of peace implementation differ dramatically in terms of the difficulty of the implementation environment and in the willingness of international actors to provide resources and risk troops, and that these differences are predictable before a peace operation begins. These two findings mark a dramatic advance in our understanding of peace implementation in three fundamental ways. First, the CISAC-IPA results put to rest glib generalizations about peace operations based on one or few cases. To put it bluntly, the results suggest that there is no reason to assume that what actions and strategies work in a more benign conflict environment such as Guatemala or Namibia will work in a much more demanding implementation environment such as Bosnia or Sierra Leone. Second, the results imply that implementation strategies must be designed based on the level of difficulty of the case. In certain limited situations strategies that derive from traditional peacekeeping (with its underlying emphasis on confidence building) can be effective. In more challenging situations, however, when predation coexists with fear, confidence building will prove inadequate, and implementers will need to compel and deter to ensure compliance with a peace agreement. Third, the results raise the fundamental issue of incentive incompatibility. Tough cases require more resources, greater international involvement, and more coercive strategies, but in many of those cases such resources, involvement, and strategies will not be forthcoming because no major or regional power believes the case affects its security interest. Such incentive incompatibility usually is subsumed under arguments that lack of political will is the problem--that if only more were found, then tougher cases would receive the needed care. But ut the emphasis on political will misleads: it takes a relatively fixed variable--perception of vital national interest of regional and major powers--and treats it as if it were easily manipulated. The CISAC- CIPA study argues that this is a vexing analytical error that overstates the commitment of international actors to making peace in civil wars in countries of peripheral security importance.

The project also scrutinized claims that are made about the importance of various implementation subgoals and their role in overall success and failure. Such claims grew in prominence in the 1990s as various international nongovernmental organizations lobbied publics and governments and insisted that their single issue of concern--whether it be disarmament, elections, human rights, or refugee repatriation --was crucial to implementation success. Two major findings emerge from an examination of subgoals and overall implementation success. First, in terms of what can be achieved in any subgoal, desires must be commensurate with resources and permitted strategies. On any dimension we can speculate about the perfect conditions under which elections should be held, or the need for peace with full accountability and prosecution for past atrocities and war crimes, or the need for all refugees to repatriate to their original homes. In the absence of commitment of resources and troops, however, ambitious standards for subgoals are symbolic statements of virtue, not practical means of terminating wars. Second, in terms of investment in subgoals, priority should be given to demobilization of soldiers and demilitarization of politics, that is, the transformation of warring armies into political parties. Without achieving these two subgoals, civil wars cannot be brought to an end, and important normative goals such as the creation and consolidation of democracy and the protection of human rights have little chance of success.

The project also identified two low-cost opportunities tunities that should be pursued during implementation: civilian security through police and judicial reform, and local capacity building for human rights and reconciliation. Although the study cannot point to a single case of failed implementation that resulted from failure to pursue these opportunities, we found that the potential long-term benefits of security reform and local capacity building for peacebuilding warrant the relatively inexpensive investments that such measures require.