First published September 2007

The views expressed in this report are those of the author alone. They do not necessarily reflect views of 

the United States Institute of Peace.

United States Institute of Peace

1200 17th Street NW, Suite 200

Washington, DC 20036-3011

Phone: 202-457-1700

Fax: 202-429-6063

E-mail: usip_requests@usip.org

Web: www.usip.org
3

Contents

Foreword by Judy Barsalou 5

Introduction 7

1. Authority and Legitimacy in the International System 9

2. The Use of Force 20

3. Democracy amid Diversity 27

4. International Negotiation 33

5. Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation 36

6. Faith in Conflict and Peace 46

7. Africa 51

8. Asia 54

9. Europe 58

10. Latin America 60

11. The Middle East 62

Bibliography and Filmography 65

About the Author 71

5

Foreword

The work supported by the Grant program of the United States Institute of Peace has 

always been notable for its breadth of subject matter and depth of analysis. Within 

the expansive intellectual territory covered by the fields of conflict resolution, 

international security, comparative politics, and international law, the Grant program has 

earned an enduring reputation as an important source of funding for original, timely, and 

insightful work. Since its inception in 1986, the Grant program has awarded more than 

1,700 grants to grantees located in forty-five U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and 

in seventy-four foreign countries. Grant funding has helped build a diverse community of 

institutions focusing on international conflict, including a wide array of universities, thinks 

tanks, nonprofit organizations, schools, and church organizations in the United States and 

abroad. Grants have produced groundbreaking work in a wide variety of fields, ranging 

from policy-oriented research, educational curricula, and training programs to radio and TV 

documentary programs.

As this, the third volume of Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking testifies, 

the Grant program’s tradition of supporting both variety and quality has been ably upheld 

in the early years of the twenty-first century. This publication spotlights no fewer than 117 

books, articles, and films supported by the program and completed between 2000 and 2005. 

For reasons of space, the description of each project provides just a snapshot of that project’s 

aims, arguments, and findings, but collectively these snapshots form a sweeping panorama 

of the international scene over the period.

The range of topics can be gauged from the titles of the chapters in the first part of the 

publication, which present thematically focused essays on authority and legitimacy in the 

international system; the use of force; democracy amid diversity; international negotiation; 

truth, justice, and reconciliation; and faith in conflict and peace. This thematic breadth is 

complemented by a geographic diversity, with the second part of Advances in Understanding

International Peacemaking traveling from Africa to Asia, Europe to Latin America and the 

Middle East.

The structure of this volume allows readers to turn to chapters covering general themes 

and geographic regions in which they have an interest. Within the individual chapters, works 

are grouped together according to their specific subject matter, thereby allowing readers who 

may be familiar with some of the works featured here to discover other studies on related 

topics. Scholars will find in Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking an invitation 

to explore many new avenues of research and analysis. The volume will be equally valuable 

for busy practitioners who normally do not have the time to read a wide range of scholarly 

works.

All readers whose work covers some of the fertile territory surveyed in Advances in 

Understanding International Peacemaking may be interested to learn that each year the Grant 

program invites applications for funding for research, educational, training, and related 

projects. Those projects may be implemented either in the United States or abroad and should 

seek to expand useful knowledge about preventing, managing, and resolving violent conflict 

and promoting post-conflict peacebuilding outside the borders of the United States. Further 

information on the Solicited and Unsolicited Grant Initiatives can be found online at 

http://www.usip.org/grants/index.html. 

The views expressed in this report are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of 

the United States Institute of Peace. We are very grateful to Amy L. Smith for her perceptive 

reading of the works analyzed herein.

Judy Barsalou

Vice President, Grant and Fellowship Program

United States Institute of Peace

Introduction

The Grant program of the United States Institute of Peace provides support to a wide 

range of individuals and nonprofit organizations from around the world, including 

scholars, diplomats, negotiators, and documentary filmmakers. This volume of 

Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking presents some of the insights, analyses, 

and conclusions that have resulted from their work. Grantees have studied conflicts and 

peace processes in all regions of the globe, reflected on their involvement in international 

negotiations or as members of truth commissions, conducted comparative scholarly research, 

filmed documentaries on several post-conflict situations, and developed a range of policy 

suggestions dealing with conflict management and peacemaking.

All the materials summarized here come from grants whose products were completed 

between 2000 and 2005. They include 117 books, edited volumes, articles, monographs, and 

films.

This volume is divided into two parts. The first part consists of essays on six themes 

around which many of the grant products cluster. The first of these essays addresses the 

international system, including the norms that govern international intervention, as well as 

critiques and suggestions for improving the operations of international organizations. Collec-

tively the grantees present a sobering picture, one in which the mistakes of the past present 

clear challenges to constructing a brighter future. International organizations need to focus 

less on acquiring authority and more on exercising it in an accountable and effective fashion. 

The second essay focuses on the use of force in international interventions and on efforts 

to avoid using force through methods such as sanctions and embargoes. Many grantees see 

little reason to applaud the international community’s performance over the past decades, 

and instead underscore conceptual and practical shortcomings in the use of force. However, 

grantees have by no means abandoned faith in the potential of forcible intervention, and they 

offer a range of bold proposals for creating larger, better-trained, or more-responsive forces 

able to step decisively into international hotspots.

 The third essay examines the relationship between democracy and conflict, especially 

within divided societies. Grantees caution against an uncritical faith in the ability of demo-

cratic institutions to swiftly reverse the tide of intrastate conflict and emphasize the need to 

tailor democratic prescriptions to fit local conditions and to adjust democratic expectations to 

match the imperfect realities of complex societies. Even so, the overall tenor is upbeat, with 

grantees eager to discover not if democratic institutions defuse conflict, but how they do so.

Different types, styles, and stages of formal negotiations are the subject of the fourth 

essay. Every negotiation, whether over climate change or orange imports, has its own 

dynamics, but grantees uncover fundamental commonalities in terms of structure and 

strategy that characterize particular kinds of negotiations. Each nation, too, tends to conduct 

negotiations in its own distinctive style—a style, grantees contend, that owes much to each 

country’s political and institutional culture.

Numerous aspects of justice and reconciliation in post-conflict societies are discussed 

in the fifth essay. The past dozen or so years have witnessed a remarkable growth in the 

use of a variety of mechanisms designed to help a divided society establish a shared truth, 

achieve justice, and foster reconciliation. In a series of powerful and compelling case studies, 

grantees examine how many of these mechanisms—such as truth commissions, interna-

tional tribunals, and amnesties—have fared in practice in many different parts of the world. 

Grantees also explore the processes of forgiveness and reconciliation and discover both key 

ingredients and disturbing dilemmas.

It is not so much dilemmas as dichotomies that feature prominently in the sixth essay, 

which focuses on the relationship between religion and conflict. As grantees show, religion 

7
can spark and fuel violent conflict, but it can also inspire a determination to extinguish the 

flames of sectarian hatred and build a peaceful future. Equally, faith can shape not 

only broad philosophical perspectives on the nature of conflict, but also specific, prac-

tical approaches to achieving and sustaining peace. Unsurprisingly given the events 

of recent years, Islam attracts the attention of grantees, who investigate the association 

between its radical wing and contemporary terrorism and also reveal Islam’s practice 

of and potential for peacebuilding.

The second part of this volume consists of briefer essays, each examining the work 

of grantees on a particular region. Chapters 7 though 11 look in turn at Africa, Asia, 

Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, in each case exploring both local and 

regionwide causes of and responses to conflict.

Readers may be surprised to discover that the events of 9/11, the “global war on 

terrorism,” and the conflict in Iraq do not dominate the discussion in this volume. 

Part of the reason for this is simply that many of the grantees featured in the follow-

ing chapters planned or even began their research before the attacks on New York and 

Washington and before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. (No doubt, the next vol-

ume in the Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking series will feature many 

more projects that focus on subjects such as radical Islam, terrorism and counterterrorism, and the future of the Middle East.) Part of the reason, too, is that scholars 

of conflict and conflict resolution wisely prefer to dissect evolving patterns of events, 

rather than specific, isolated events, and it usually takes at least five or ten years for 

such patterns to become evident. Many of the studies described in this volume ex-

amine topics such as the use of force in humanitarian interventions, democratization, 

and the record of truth commissions and international tribunals—topics that played 

prominent roles on the international stage in the 1990s.

Probably the chief reason, however, for the limited coverage of the aftermath of 

9/11 is that the fields of international relations and conflict resolution are wonderfully 

rich, offering a remarkable array not only of subjects but also of perspectives on those 

subjects. This volume provides impressive testimony to this wealth. Indeed, because 

of the scope of coverage, most of the summaries provided in this volume are neces-

sarily brief. They are meant to alert the reader to the quality of material generated by 

grantees and encourage the reader to explore the full versions of studies that seem of 

particular interest. To this end, the volume concludes with a detailed bibliography so 

that readers can locate complete versions of all grant products. 

8
Michael Barnett and Martha 

Finnemore 

Rules for the World: International 

Organizations in Global Politics

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 

2004

9

Authority and Legitimacy O1ne

in the International System

I

nternational organizations are capturing the attention of many United States 

Institute of Peace grantees. When they examine the international system, grantees 

ask precise questions about how to improve the performance of particular organizations or hone skills for tackling specific problems. But they also step back to reflect on 

normative concerns. By what authority do international organizations wield as much 

power as they do? What is the basis of legitimacy of international action by formal 

organizations or coalitions? How can international actors be held accountable? Can we 

devise international initiatives that are not only effective and efficient, but also legitimate, accountable, and fair? 

In wrestling with these normative questions, grantees look both forward and 

backward. Some trace the evolution of specific organizations and issues (such as the 

doctrine and practice of refugee repatriation); some examine contemporary cases (such 

as the role of the United Nations during the Rwandan genocide); others consider the 

immediate future (how to improve peacekeeping or interim international administration); and yet others use the broadest sweep of history in search of potential patterns 

(the maintenance of peace and stability in the midst of system transformation). In many 

instances, grantees find little reason to celebrate the past or to greet the future optimistically; too often, they discover, international organizations have acquired and exercised authority but they have not done so with the consent or even for the benefit of the 

people they are supposed to serve.

Pathological Bureaucracies?

Engage virtually any topic of global concern—violent conflict, economic development, 

humanitarian assistance, refugee flows, trade, climate change, public health, food 

safety, transportation—and one encounters some of the 238 international organizations 

(IOs) that states have created. In Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global 

Politics, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore diagnose and critique IOs’ often 

inefficient, dysfunctional, and even pathological behavior. They particularly address 

IOs’ action beyond mandates, evolution beyond expertise, and self-defeating insistence 

on following rules.

Barnet and Finnemore are dissatisfied with a state-centered approach that 

views IOs as passive tools of states. They argue that analysts should consider these 

organizations above all as bureaucracies. The core and compelling issue for Barnett 

and Finnemore is the multiple bases of IOs’ authority and consequent autonomy. As 

bureaucracies, IOs exercise rational authority through standardized impersonal rules 

and procedures. Delegated authority is conferred on IOs by the states they serve. IOs 

also command authority due to their technical expertise in such areas as finance, public 

health, engineering, or the logistics of aid delivery. The moral authority of IOs comes 

from the social utility of their expertise as well as their embodiment of values shared 

by the entire international community. 

To Barnet and Finnemore, these different forms of authority—rational, delegated, 

expert, and moral—both put IOs “in authority” and make them “an authority.” Their 

multifaceted authority gives IOs the autonomy to act on the world and shape social 

reality by using information to encourage or prevent coordinated action, interpreting 

problems and defining solutions, and identifying social tasks to be shared and categories of actors to be recognized. 
Paradoxically, IOs’ authority often lies in their ability to appear powerless: 

following impersonal and neutral rules, merely serving others, letting the data speak 

for themselves, and always working for the good of all. “Although bureaucrats present 

the rules in a value-neutral way,” observe Barnett and Finnemore, “and portray them-

selves as having no power, bureaucratic power includes the ability to use rules, regula-

tions, information, and decrees in ways that compel others to act” (165).

However, the very aspects of IOs that make them authoritative and powerful can 

also produce inefficiencies and self-defeating outcomes. Barnett and Finnemore analyze 

pathological behavior in three very different international organizations: the Interna-

tional Monetary Fund (IMF), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and 

the UN Secretariat. These disparate case studies permit the authors to wrestle with 

instances of IO dysfunction generally attributed to state power rather than the organi-

zations’ bureaucratic nature. For example, the view persists that powerful states require 

the IMF to extend capitalism, insist that UNHCR repatriate refugees, and opposed UN 

intervention in Rwanda. 

The range of cases permits an assessment of IOs dealing with different issues: 

finance, humanitarian protection, security. This assessment includes organizations with 

a diversity of internal structure, governance, and budgetary resources: the IMF finances 

itself with money returned on the funds it manages, UNHCR depends on voluntary 

contributions, and the United Nations levies dues but has no means to ensure payment. 

The bases of authority of these organizations are also varied, mixing the full range of 

rational, delegated, expert, and moral authority.

The IMF was established to monitor exchange rates and provide currency to help 

states through balance-of-payment difficulties. It has vastly expanded its involvement 

in the management of domestic economies by requiring adjustments in all aspects 

of budgets, tax collection systems, subsidies and price controls, trade policy, wage 

restraint, and the like. Barnett and Finnemore trace this astounding expansion to the 

IMF’s evolving technical expertise, which shapes its understanding of what constitutes a 

problem and appropriate solutions. That apparently neutral expertise also incorporates 

normative judgments, as the IMF sees imbalances as the fault of the individual deficit 

state, which must therefore adjust. “This monetary approach isn’t wrong,” Barnett and 

Finnemore note, “but it isn’t the only way to conceptualize the problem” (55). 

A systemic model, by contrast, might call for compulsory adjustments from states 

with balance-of-payments surplus. The IMF staff’s failure to follow this route results 

not from the surplus states’ exercise of power, but rather from the staff’s own ana-

lytical framework. Furthermore, Barnett and Finnemore argue, the IMF’s expanding 

mandate has derived not from the organization’s success, but indeed from failure. 

Because previous policy interventions did not rebalance a nation’s economy, the IMF 

steadily widened its area of concern. The further the IMF extends beyond its core 

expertise, however, the more frequent its policy failures and the greater its loss of 

credibility. 

UNHCR has also evolved from its original mandate. The organization’s initial focus 

on refugee protection has been displaced by an emphasis on material assistance and 

repatriation. 

Barnett and Finnemore focus on changes in how UNHCR determines when repa-

triation should occur. An earlier imperative that refugee repatriation be voluntary has 

gradually become equat-ed with objective improvement in conditions in the country 

of origin. The determination of such improvement is in the hands of UNHCR’s ex-

perts. That shift transfers the decision-making authority away from those taking the 

risks—the refugees themselves—and delivers it to the bureaucracy. “UNHCR might 

well be correct in its assessments,” Barnett and Finnemore argue, “but the issue at 

hand is who gets to make that decision” (114). With reference to the controversial 

repatriation of the Rohingyas from Bangladesh to Burma in the 1990s, Barnett and 

10
11

Richard Caplan 

International Governance of 

War-Torn Territories: Rules and 

Reconstruction

New York: Oxford University Press, 

2005 

Finnemore observe, “This discourse of repatriation not only created the possibility of 

pathological behavior but also underscored the sense in which UNHCR’s power is one 

of domination” (120).

In the UN Secretariat’s response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Barnet and 

Finnemore (and Barnett in much greater detail; see below) see a pathological adherence 

to bureaucratic rules. The United Nations’ standard analysis led it to see the violence 

in Rwanda as the result of civil war. Particularly following its peacekeeping failures 

in Somalia and Bosnia, the United Nations had affirmed that it would not intervene in 

civil wars and would become involved only under certain conditions: where a ceasefire was in place, the mandate was clear, the safety of UN personnel was reasonably 

assured, and the parties were committed to a peace process. The categories and 

rules developed within the UN bureaucracy shaped its misreading of the violence 

in Rwanda and “led it to reject intervention as inappropriate and undesirable, even 

in the face of mass killings.” Thus, Barnett and Finnemore assert, “a Secretariat that 

professed humanitarian goals used peacekeeping rules to conclude that a humanitarian 

intervention was not warranted to stop crimes against humanity” (122). 

Reflecting on these case studies, Barnett and Finnemore observe that IOs were created to achieve laudable goals and have developed the power and authority to achieve 

them. Yet they have distorted economies, repatriated refugees to unsafe conditions, and 

permitted genocide to continue. These bureaucracies continue to expand and extend 

their mandates; can such expansion be good?

Questionable Legitimacy, Limited Accountability

Historically, IOs have been associated with liberal political ideas (the sanctity and autonomy 

of the individual, democracy as the most desirable and just form of government) and liberal 

economic perspectives (the value of markets). However, Barnett and Finnemore point out, 

“the liberal norms embodied and promoted by these organizations are generally not matched 

with the accountability or participation procedures that liberalism favors. These are emphatically not democratic organizations” (15). 

Some scholars have expressed concern about “illiberal democracies” in which proper 

electoral procedures are not matched by genuine liberal values. Barnett and Finnemore 

raise a similar concern about “undemocratic liberalism” at the global level. Their analysis of 

a range of IOs leads them to conclude: “The bureaucratization of world politics means that 

global bureaucrats have the authority to act in powerful ways. Sometimes this can mean 

emancipation, at other times domination” (166).

Richard Caplan is equally concerned about the legitimacy of international authorities. International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rules and Reconstruction examines 

operational challenges of international administration in post-conflict settings, but also 

addresses deep normative questions. Under what circumstances, he asks, 

is it legitimate—and for whom—to administer war-torn territories? How much 

authority should be entrusted to transitional administrators? To whom should 

international administrations be accountable? How are the aims of the international community and those of the local parties to be reconciled when 

they come into conflict? To what extent should transitional authorities seek 

to transform the societies over which they exercise authority, and towards 

what ends? When does “benign administration” become “neo-colonialism” and how 

is that to be avoided? (4)

Caplan addresses the mandates, structures, functions, and effectiveness of international administration, drawing on the conduct of complex multilateral operations in Eastern 

Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor. Such operations, he observes, 
12

must pursue two, not necessarily compatible imperatives: meeting the immediate needs of 

the population (a secure environment, delivery of humanitarian aid) and establishing a basis 

for sustainable economic reconstruction and political institution building. The balance between 

the two can be very difficult to achieve.

Caplan identifies five tasks of international administrations and their related dilemmas: 

Providing public order and internal security, which requires vetting previously 

politicized or corrupt police forces while maintaining some locally relevant 

knowledge and experience; 

Repatriating and reintegrating refugees and internally displaced persons, while 

determining whether reestablishing multiethnic communities is a proper and fit-

ting objective in situations of ethnic cleansing;

Performing basic civil administrative functions efficiently, while also building lo-

cal capacity that will be sustainable after international actors withdraw;

Developing local political institutions and building civil society with attention 

to local bases of legitimacy, which might be far different from the secular liberal 

values held by many international actors;

Reconstructing and developing the economy, which often involves transforming 

and privatizing the economy, rather than restoring the preexisting statist system.

In his discussion of planning, management, and transitions of international administra-

tions, Caplan maintains attention to issues of authority and legitimacy. Should there be limits 

on the exercise of international authority? When should power be transferred, how, and to 

whom? How should a lack of cooperation, even obstruction, by the preexisting power holders 

be handled? How can accountability to the governed be arranged without jeopardizing the 

integrity of the operation? How can the exercise of international authority contribute to state 

building? And how can the exercise of such authority merit legitimacy? As Caplan makes 

abundantly clear, these are by no means theoretical questions, suitable only for scholarly 

debate. They are very much on the minds of those in the field and of concern to the local 

population. 

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the gap between the aims of local and international 

elites has at times been very wide. The United Nations’ high representative has promoted par-

ticular electoral outcomes, overridden court judgments, and dismissed more than a hundred 

elected and appointed officials (including mayors, presidents of municipal assemblies, can-

tonal ministers, judges, directors of companies, and a member of the Bosnian presidency). The 

high representative may order such dismissals on the grounds that the official is—in the high 

representative’s estimate—obstructing implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, broadly 

interpreted. No evidence is formally required to support the action, nor is there any court of 

appeal. Such lack of due process, notes Caplan, has not been lost on the local political elite. As 

he quotes one Bosnian politician, “They remove a man, label him dishonest, do not present any 

proof, and then talk to us about human rights” (188).

Caplan is concerned with the effectiveness of international administration and 

understands that to be effective, such authority must also be legitimate. Legitimacy is 

generated partly by conformity to recognized principles and rules of behavior. It also 

rests on consent, which may be particularly problematic in war-torn settings under an 

externally imposed administration. Legitimacy, Caplan argues, is further built on trust, 

the assurance that international authority is exercised on behalf of the local population. 

“Trust, in turn, is ensured in part through the principle of accountability: the idea that the 

administering authority can and should be held responsible for its actions” (195). But to 

whom is a transitional international administrator accountable? Strictly speaking, transitional 

administrators are answerable to the body that appointed them—the UN Security Council, for 

example, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—and not directly to the 

local population. Caplan concludes, 

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.
13

As we have observed with respect to other aspects of international administration, 

there is, then, a fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of these initiatives: 

while international administrations seek to promote democracy, among other objectives, they are in many ways undemocratic in the manner in which they function. 

There is no separation of powers: executive, legislative and judicial authority are vested in a single individual (the transitional administrator) whose decision cannot be 

challenged by the local population, whose actions are not always transparent, and 

who cannot be removed from power by the community in whose interests he or she 

exercises authority ostensibly. (196) 

Caplan’s recommendations include not only devoting more resources to better planning and management and more rapid deployment of assets, but also greater attention to 

the politics and legitimation of international administration. 

Legitimation and public ownership of peace processes are the themes of the aptly 

titled Owning the Process: Public Participation in Peacemaking, edited by Catherine Barnes.

This collection of essays includes reflections on public participation in peace processes in 

South Africa, Northern Ireland, Mali, Guatemala, and the Philippines. 

Contributor Marrack Goulding, who has been involved in negotiating and 

implementing numerous peace settlements, reflects in “Public Participation and 

International Peacemaking” on why mediators from IOs and foreign governments 

often hesitate to involve the public, despite the relevance of such inclusion to the 

legitimacy, acceptance, and effective implementation of peace agreements. He offers 

three possibilities. First, IOs and their member states tend to see peacemaking as “a 

quintessentially governmental activity,” most properly and efficiently conducted by 

officials (87). Another possibility, in Goulding’s experience, is that mediators from IOs 

and foreign governments are often ill informed about the country where they aspire 

to make peace. It is thus difficult for them to conceive of ways to include the public 

or to appreciate the value of such inclusion. A third possibility is that international 

mediators tend to arrive only once national efforts have failed. In such situations, 

civil society may be so polarized or disintegrated that its inclusion in a peace process 

would be very difficult to manage. External support for civil society, particularly at the 

implementation and peacebuilding phases, then becomes important. Goulding suggests 

that non-governmental organizations, rather than IOs or foreign governments, could 

best accomplish this task. “Though they may be foreigners,” he writes, “they too are 

representatives of civil society” (89).

Failing Their Target Populations

Several grantees address failures by international organizations to serve the interests of their 

respective target populations. These failures can bring dreadful, indeed horrific, consequences. 

One of the worst such examples in recent decades is explored by Michael Barnett in Eyewitness 

to Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda. Barnett was an eyewitness not in Rwanda but at 

the United Nations. An academic on leave from his university in 1994, Barnett was at UN 

headquarters in New York working on African issues when the genocide was perpetrated. 

He recalls seeing the reports and being horrified but not advocating intervention. Rather, he 

endorsed the view held within the United Nations that given the situation on the ground (civil 

war) and UN limitations (recently demonstrated in Bosnia and Somalia), nonintervention was 

the only choice.

Writing and lecturing over the subsequent year, Barnett continued to endorse that position until, listening to yet another defense of UN inaction, he was suddenly “unnerved by the 

recognition that almost all the United Nations’ anxious concern was self-absorbed. There was 

remarkably little space for the Rwandans. How could it have been even faintly principled to ignore such crimes against humanity?” (preface, xi). Fully aware that “the UN staff and diplomats 

Michael Barnett 

Eyewitness to Genocide: The 

United Nations and Rwanda

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University 

Press, 2002

Catherine Barnes, editor, and 

Marrack Goulding, contributor

Owning the Process: Public 

Participation in Peacemaking

London: Conciliation Resources, 2002
14

in New York, in the main, were highly decent, hard-working, and honorable individuals who 

believed that they were acting properly when they decided not to try to put an end to genocide,” 

Barnett sets out to unravel how this occurred and to assign some moral responsibility for the 

failure (20).

Barnett is sympathetic to the constraints faced by UN staff. “Attempting to recreate the 

view from New York,” he writes, 

means that we have to take seriously the fact that heavily overworked individuals 

were overseeing an operation of marginal importance, were highly economical and 

instrumental in the knowledge they sought to understand Rwanda and ultimately 

create policy toward it, and were using categories available from the organizational 

culture in which they were embedded to do so. (60)

These factors contributed to the initial erroneous assessment that what was occurring 

in Rwanda was a civil war. Barnett also differs from those who see the now-famous 

telegram from Romeo Dallaire warning of an arms cache and impending violence as a 

clear but ignored warning. Such an interpretation, in Barnett’s view, is “historically 

promiscuous” (80). Seen in proper historical and organizational context, the cable was 

troubling and did indeed inspire alarm, hastily convened meetings, and a further 

flurry of cables. But it could not have served as an accurate indication of what was to 

come.

Following the events of April 1994, of which the UN Secretariat was fully informed, 

the misinterpretations and inaction became, in Barnett’s view, inexcusable. 

At this point, the UN Secretariat “rank-ordered its responsibilities and calculated 

the risks associated with different types of actions. There were peacekeepers to protect. 

Also to consider was an organization that might not survive another failure. Protecting the organization from further harm or exploitation was, from the Secretariat’s view, 

ethical, legitimate, and desirable” (124). The Secretariat therefore “selectively presented 

information to the council, opted to avoid the language of ethnic cleansing in favor of 

the morally neutral language of civil war, and refrained from making the strongest case 

available for intervention. At that moment the Secretariat made a choice that violated 

its duties of office” (174). Barnett affirms that “a different presentation by the Secretariat 

would have altered the debate, given muscle to the arguments for intervention, and 

shaken the case for [UN] withdrawal. The entire parameters would have shifted, and 

such a shift would have led to a different outcome. It might have changed the outcome”

(126, emphasis in original).

Where did the United Nations’ behavior come from? Barnett returns to the “totemic 

importance of rules.” UN rules regarding peacekeeping deployment (under conditions 

of stability, with a clear mandate and a working cease-fire) 

were connected to the survival of the organization, an organization that is not simply an 

instrument but also an expression of the international community. These rules created 

a localized, historicized, and uneven moral landscape that made indifference 

possible. . . . These rules, in effect, differentiated subjects of concern from subjects 

of neglect, those whom the United Nations felt obligated to protect from those it did 

not. . . . Acting responsibly, the United Nations concluded, also included a duty to 

safeguard the organization’s health. It was Rwanda’s misfortune to be the site of one 

of the first explicit applications of these rules. (175–76)

Thus, in Barnett’s assessment, “the Secretariat bears some moral responsibility for 

the genocide. If I seem more critical of the Secretariat that I am of member states or the 

council . . . it is because the Secretariat made a choice that thoroughly violated its professional obligations and ethical duties” (174).
15

The scale of the consequences of the United Nations’ shortcomings in the case of 

Rwanda is, fortunately, unparalleled, but as other United States Institute of Peace grantees make clear, there are many other instances in which the interests of international 

organizations and their supposed constituents have clashed. 

In The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path, Gil Loescher recounts 

UNHCR’s history from its inception in 1951 through the successive tenures of its 

high commissioners and then looks to the future. The historical perspective permits 

Loescher to observe that “the autonomy and authority of UNHCR in world politics 

has grown over time and the Office has become a purposeful actor in its own right 

with independent interests and capabilities” (6). Over the course of its evolution, in 

Loescher’s view, “the agency has at times pursued policies that have been at odds with 

the interests of its major constituency” (362).

Tracing trends in the broader political context, specific refugee crises, and shifts in 

UNHCR’s doctrine, leadership, and organization, Loescher identifies the two most significant changes in UNHCR’s treatment of refugees in the past fifty years: a shift from 

protection to material aid and a much greater (and riskier) emphasis on repatriation.

“Perhaps the most significant change in UNHCR’s organizational culture in recent 

years,” Loescher writes, “has been the shift in the agency’s focus from legal protection 

to material assistance” (363). With that shift, attention to rights and legal issues has declined and the logistics of delivering food, shelter, and medicine have taken precedence. 

Thus, “for the UNHCR staff, the general tendency is to perceive emergencies in terms 

of logistics and not as failures of politics, the development process, or ethnic relations. 

The UNHCR’s objectives are increasingly pragmatic—to do the best in difficult circumstances and to implement options with the least negative impact—and not chiefly to 

uphold universal principles” (363). In Loescher’s assessment, this shift led UNHCR to 

“spread its capacities too thinly . . . [and] the place of protection within the UNHCR’s 

decision-making hierarchy was downgraded” (338.)

The emphasis on repatriation is equally problematic. Like Barnett and Finnemore, 

Loescher is concerned about refugees’ diminished role in making decisions about their 

repatriation. He notes that by the 1990s, the UNHCR had

developed terminology and concepts like “safe return” which stipulated that conditions in the home country did not have to improve “substantially” but only 

“appreciably” so that there could be a “safe” return. The UNHCR had come a long way 

from its traditional position that repatriation had to be a strictly voluntary decision by 

refugees. Rather, it would now be the UNHCR who would make the assessment as to 

whether conditions presented a threat to their safety. Moreover, there was a growing 

view that refugee safety did not necessarily always out-weigh the security interests of 

states or broader peace-building and conflict resolution goals. (284)

This orientation has led UNHCR to “occasionally act in expedient but irresponsible 

ways, such as when it coerces refugees by closing down camps or reducing food rations 

and services in an effort to get refugees to repatriate” (18). By repatriating refugees 

prematurely to locales of violence and famine, the UNHCR “became complicit in many 

of the refugee protection failures [of the 1990s]” (39).

Observing that “there is an acute need to reverse the worldwide erosion of refugee protection,” Loescher offers several suggestions to address the inadequacies of 

UNHCR (365). He advocates stronger policy research and strategic thinking capacities 

in the agency and far greater cooperation with other UN agencies, non-governmental 

organizations, and external researchers. Loescher urges UNHCR to become much more 

accountable through such measures as annual audits conducted by an external ombudsman to assess the protection provided by the agency and the management of its 

operations, “so that the Office will have to account publicly for policy failures resulting 

Gil Loescher

The UNHCR and World Politics: A 

Perilous Path

New York: Oxford University Press, 

2001
in risks to refugees” (375). Loescher also calls for the inclusion of refugees themselves in 

external review as a valuable means of restoring UNHCR’s legitimacy.

Patricia Weiss Fagen faults the UNHCR and other international agencies for 

their too-swift engagement in reintegrating refugees. In two chapters, “Post-Conflict 

Reintegration and Reconstruction: Doing it Right Takes a While” (in Refugee Protection: 

Ethical, Legal, and Political Problems and the Role of the UNHCR) and “Conflict Resolution 

and Reintegration: The Long-Term Challenges. Case Studies of Haiti and Bosnia 

and Herzegovina” (in Refugees and Human Displacement in Contemporary International 

Relations), Fagen addresses the limitations of international actors who try to achieve a 

major impact in a very short time and therefore fail to build sustainable solutions or 

enhance local capacity.

With reference to refugee reintegration projects in a number of settings, including 

Central America, Cambodia, Mozambique, Tajikistan, Bosnia, and Haiti, Fagen faults 

programs such as the UNHCR’s quick impact projects that ostensibly aim to establish 

the foundations of further development. Too often, these projects produce quick 

achievements by bringing materials and staff from outside the country, failing to 

establish local capacity or incorporate local input in such decisions as the location of 

schools, clinics, wells, or access roads. Long-term goals are frustrated by the generation 

of unrealistic expectations and funding patterns that promote fragmentation and 

dependence. “Every country that has received international assistance,” comments 

Fagen, “has experienced setbacks, distortions and outright failures when major 

humanitarian entities have scaled down programs prematurely and left behind halfcompleted projects” (“Post-Conflict Reintegration and Reconstruction,” 6).

What Hopes for Greater Accountability?

The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century, edited by David M. 

Malone, is an impressively large volume that covers major UN operations on four 

continents and pays attention to the institutional shape and decision-making 

processes of the UN Security Council as well as emerging concerns (human rights, 

armed nonstate actors, democratization, and so forth). Despite this great breadth of 

coverage, accountability and legitimacy are recurring themes among the volume’s 

contributors.

Some contributors address the lack of accountability of the UN overall. In their 

article “The Security Council and the Rwanda Genocide,” Howard Adelman and Astri 

Suhrke consider the UN commission of inquiry into UN failings in Rwanda to have 

been thoroughly inadequate.

The selective version of the history of the mission presented in the official UN “blue 

book” functions effectively as a cover-up rather than a full disclosure of relevant documentation. And despite the apologies and inquiries and efforts to describe, explain, 

recommend, and allocate blame, no one was in the end held accountable for possibly 

the greatest failure of the UN in its history. Heads did not roll among the diplomats or 

in the Secretariat. Kofi Annan, who was head of the DPKO [Department of Peacekeeping Operations] at the time, went on to become Secretary General, taking with him his 

closest staff, who had been central in the decisionmaking process in Rwanda. Overall, 

the weak accountability mechanisms in relation to disasters like Rwanda constitute a 

fundamental structural weakness of the UN system. (495)

Several other contributors to the volume address issues of accountability, 

transparency, and legitimacy within the organization. For example, in “The Permanent 

and Elected Council Members,” Kishore Mahbubani examines the relative power 

of the five permanent and ten elected members of the Security Council. As currently 

David M. Malone, editor; 

Howard Adelman, Astri Suhrke, 

Kishore Mahbubani, Theresa 

Whitfield, and Simon Chesterman, 

contributors

The UN Security Council: From the 

Cold War to the 21st Century 

Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004

Patricia Weiss Fagen, contributor

n Refugee Protection: Ethical, 

Legal, and Political Problems 

and the Role of the UNHCR

New York: Routledge Press, 2003

n Refugees and Human 

Displacement in Contemporary 

International Relations

New York: United Nations University 

Press, 2003

16
17

structured, only the five permanent members (P-5) have a continuous record and 

institutional memory of the council’s work over the years, leaving the ten elected 

members (E-10) at a clear disadvantage. Furthermore, the five permanent members 

conduct many debates and decisions behind closed doors, excluding the ten elected 

members from the decision-making process. In practice, Mahbubani writes, “the P-5 

have been given power without responsibility; E-10 have been given responsibility 

without power” (256). 

Theresa Whitfield is similarly concerned about the United Nations’ internal 

practices, particularly the role played by Groups of Friends that form around particular 

issues and rarely include developing countries. Their deliberations and actions lack 

transparency and arguably usurp the authority of states elected to the Security Council. 

In her chapter “Groups of Friends,” Whitfield observes, “It can be galling to elected 

members to see colleagues outside the Council have access to privileged information 

and influence that they themselves do not enjoy” (320). 

What are the chances for reform, learning, and change within the United Nations? 

Discussing the challenges of international administration, Simon Chesterman is well 

aware of the difficulties. In “Virtual Trusteeship,” he writes, 

The accepted wisdom within the UN community . . . is that a successful UN peace 

operation should ideally consist of three sequential stages. First, the political basis 

for peace must be determined. Then a suitable mandate for a UN mission should 

be formulated. Finally, that mission should be given all the resources necessary to 

complete the mandate. The accepted reality is that this usually happens in the reverse 

order: member states determine what resources they are prepared to commit to a 

problem and a mandate is cobbled together around those resources—often in the 

hope that a political solution will be forthcoming at some later date. This reality means 

that the Council learns, if it learns at all, largely by doing. (231–32)

Other United States Institute of Peace grantees are also concerned about the prospects for UN reform. In Reforming the United Nations: Lessons from a History in Progress,

Edward C. Luck takes a long view, mindful of the many attempts at reform that have 

already occurred. Luck observes that UN reform is a very difficult undertaking, partly 

because the system is diffuse and members rarely unite behind specific reform goals. 

Nonetheless, he notes, the process of reform is virtually constant. Unfortunately, many 

of those involved are unaware of the history of reform efforts, and so repeat efforts that 

have proved unworkable in the past. “The key to UN reform, in that sense,” suggests 

Luck, “may lie less in trying to be innovative than in understanding why past initiatives have failed and how the strategies and tactics for achieving them could be 

improved” (47).

Luck also notes that “change happens even if reform doesn’t” (48). As international 

conditions change and formal reform efforts fail to keep pace, the organization adapts 

one way or another: “Entrepreneurial UN officials, Member States, and civil society 

representatives are all adept at circumventing the rules and procedures to get things 

done” (48). Furthermore, the path of reform tends to be unpredictable. Luck notes, 

“Rarely does a reform wave end up where its initiators expected” (49). He concludes by 

underscoring the dilemma facing the various advocates of UN reform, “Should the goal 

of UN reform be to make its decision-making processes more reflective of the membership as a whole or more in line with the prevailing balance of power and capacity 

outside of its halls?” (51). 

The challenge facing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was coupling 

adaptation with enlargement. In Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself 

for a New Era, Ronald D. Asmus chronicles NATO’s efforts to respond to the changed 

environment in the late 1990s by expanding its membership and redefining its purEdward C. Luck

Reforming the United Nations: 

Lessons from a History in Progress 

International Relations Studies and the 

United Nations Occasional Paper, 

no. 1 (2003)

Ronald D. Asmus

Opening NATO’s Door: How 

the Alliance Remade Itself for a 

New Era

New York: Columbia University Press, 

2002
pose. Asmus’s diplomatic history covers the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic, 

and Hungary into NATO. It also addresses the redefinition of NATO’s mission from a 

security organization deterring a Soviet threat to Western Europe into an organization 

dedicated to “building an undivided, democratic, and secure Europe and protecting its 

members from the new threats of the post–Cold War era” (19). 

Asmus recounts debates, disputes, and turning points in the lengthy process 

of expansion and adaptation, arguing that “the enlargement of NATO was neither 

inevitable nor preordained. It took place because the United States, as the lead ally in 

the Alliance, made it a top strategic priority that it pursued in the face of strong 

Russian opposition, at times tepid European support, as well as significant criticism 

at home” (290). The result, in Asmus’s assessment, is “a new NATO for a new era . . . 

[recast as] a tool to promote Europe’s unification, manage security across the 

continent, and defend common trans-Atlantic values and interests beyond its borders” 

(291, 290). 

Zoltán László Kiss also addresses changes in NATO. His “Lessons of the Kosovo 

War: Dilemmas Regarding Abilities of NATO and the EU to Manage National and Ethnic Conflicts in Central and South-Eastern Europe” looks at the performance of NATO 

in Kosovo and concludes that this instance of humanitarian intervention had a positive 

impact on the organization’s long-term viability. Kiss also draws attention to the importance of NATO’s further adaptation to carry out the tasks of humanitarian intervention. 

Such tasks might include protecting refugees, defending demilitarized zones, protecting sanctuaries, delivering humanitarian aid, supervising demobilization and disarmament, and training police. Continued adaptation, argues Kiss, will help NATO maintain 

itself as a suitable tool for crisis management.

And what if the entire international system, not merely organizations within it, 

must change? In Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order, Charles A. 

Kupchan, Emanuel Adler, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Yuen Foong Khong confront this 

possibility. Issues of legitimacy and norms are again paramount concerns. The authors 

begin by noting that although “American preponderance provides a remarkable geopolitical stability at the start of the twenty-first century . . . as the century progresses, 

America will not be able to sustain the global preponderance that it enjoys today” (1). 

As the current unipolar system gives way over time to a multiple centers of power, the 

system will be far less stable. The authors therefore ask under what conditions the coming transition to multipolarity can be managed peacefully. 

In framing their question, the authors begin by noting that power transitions are 

not only contestations over power. They are also contestations of ideas, identities, and 

values. Indeed, 

peaceful transition results from implicit and explicit negotiation over ideas and identity much more than from adjustments to or negotiation of the material balance of 

power. Potential rivals must first engage in a process of ideational convergence, which 

then enables them to resolve, or in some cases renders irrelevant, their contest over 

material power. A shared ideational framework moderates, if not eliminates, the sense 

of threat posed by countervailing power. (8)

Specifically, the authors identify three related mechanisms as key to peaceful 

transitions in the international order. First is that the dominant power and the rising 

challenger engage in reciprocal construction of benign images, so that both may view 

the other’s material power as nonthreatening. This involves new rules for trade, use of 

force, and territorial change. Second, both must fashion an agreement to their mutual 

satisfaction on the overall outline of a new international order. Third, both must manage to legitimate that order through behavioral conventions, institutions of governance, 

and a normative framework. 

Zoltán László Kiss

“Lessons of the Kosovo War: 

Dilemmas Regarding Abilities of 

NATO and the EU to Manage 

National and Ethnic Conflicts in 

Central and South-Eastern Europe.” 

Budapest: Slovak Sociological Review, 

no. 5 (2003)

Charles A. Kupchan, Emanuel 

Adler, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and

Yuen Foong Khong

Power in Transition: The Peaceful 

Change of International Order

New York: United Nations University 

Press, 2001

18
19

As the authors explain, “The parties must forge a consensus not just on rules but 

on the values that underlie those rules” (9). The legitimacy thus attained “deepens 

the durability of peaceful change by protecting it against elite turnover and, during the democratic age, eliciting popular consent in and support for the prevailing 

international order” (9). All three elements—benign assessments, order, and legitimacy—are essential to the peaceful transitions. Further, these three elements work 

sequentially: 

The mutual attribution of benign character is the starting point: it enables contenders 

for primacy to pursue rapprochement and to replace mutual threat with mutual trust. 

Agreement on order is the next step: it produces a new hierarchy and a new set of rules 

of the road. Legitimacy is the capstone of the process: it helps create a new political 

space that transcends the boundaries of the original parties and locks in a stable zone 

of peace. (170)

To assess this framework the authors examine three cases. The United States’ overtaking of Great Britain in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a power transition in the 

most formal sense. Mutual attribution of benign character was perhaps the strongest 

factor enabling the peacefulness of this transition. 

The second case, the Concert of Europe (1815–54), was a regulatory convention for 

managing ongoing power shifts. Member willingness to forgo immediate goals and 

exercise restraint in the interest of mutual accommodation was key to the Concert’s 

success. Agreement on order among the Concert’s members was highly salient, 

particularly the acceptance of spheres of influence. Shared commitment to monarchy 

and Christianity as the foundations of legitimacy also supported the Concert. 

The third case, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), in existence 

since 1967, broadens the historic and geographic range of the study. Although not as 

ordered and legitimate as a formal security community might be, ASEAN is notable for 

“[preserving] peace in an unstable neighborhood” (15). Now in its fourth decade and 

having admitted all the states of its region, ASEAN exemplifies 

sovereign states agreeing to pursue multilateral aims for the ultimate goal of managing 

power differential among members. The exercise of strategic restraint facilitates the 

mutual perception of benignity, resulting in a more durable dynamic of cooperation. 

The institutionalized mechanisms within the organization, agreement on hierarchy 

within the region, as well as a shared anti-colonialist legacy have helped to further 

agreement on order and legitimacy. (102)

The authors utilize these three cases to reassess their initial framework of the 

key elements of peaceful transition. They suggest that “benignity is perhaps the most 

powerful of the three variables, but the addition of legitimacy and order makes the 

framework not only a necessary cause of peaceful power management, but a sufficient 

one as well” (130). They further conclude, “As benignity, order, and legitimacy have 

supported peaceful power management across two centuries and three regions, and 

among states on either side of the colonial divide, it appears that this formula will serve 

us well for the power transition that may arise as American preponderance wanes” (131).
The Use of Force

When and how should the international community use force in pursuit of 

peacemaking or humanitarian objectives? This question has elicited significant 

interest from grantees but little agreement beyond the need to do things differently. 

Some grantees contend that the current UN system for deciding whether to intervene forcibly 

in a conflict works reasonably well, despite its flaws. Most, however, focus on the conceptual 

and especially the practical shortcomings of the deployment of force over decades of 

peacekeeping and in current operations.

Seeking more effective alternatives, grantees examine the record of inspections, sanctions, 

and embargoes as alternatives to direct military intervention and consider the possibilities for 

improving such strategies. Other grantees favor bolder options, among them the creation of 

a “cosmopolitan military,” a UN rapid-reaction force, and a large pool of rapidly deployable 

national forces. 

Muddling Along: The Best Option Available

In Recourse to Force: State Action against Threats and Armed Attacks, Thomas M. Franck compares historical practice with the formal UN Charter and is not disturbed by the discrepancies 

between them. Franck’s premise is that if we pursue only peace, we risk perpetuating injustice. 

Yet injustice threatens peace, and peace without justice is hollow. Likewise, if we strictly follow the letter of the law and adhere to every rule, we risk permitting atrocity and committing 

injustice. Yet legality without justice lacks legitimacy. In trying to close the gaps between peace 

and justice and between law and legitimacy, Frank urges us to look to historical precedent and 

the adaptations and adjustments that have been made in practice, rather than trying to devise 

a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention. Muddling along, with attention to circumstance 

and context, has in his view worked thus far.

Franck explains that the UN Charter aimed to do away with recourse to force except in 

response to clear international aggression. Nonetheless, some historical cases of the use of force 

in other circumstances have been accepted as legitimate by the international community. Three 

contrasting cases, among the many Franck discusses, illustrate the pattern. 

In 1971 India invaded East Pakistan, thereby facilitating its secession as Bangladesh. The 

United Nations called for India to withdraw but did not label the invasion an act of aggression. 

On the one hand, Franck writes, “democratic India had put a welcome stop to a terrible carnage 

in East Pakistan being perpetrated by Pakistan’s junta,” including military suppression of a 

civilian insurrection, violations of human rights, and immense refugee flows (142). On the 

other hand, India’s motives were questionable. The dismemberment of Pakistan and the 

creation of a new state dependent on India clearly served India’s national interests. In light 

of the humanitarian disaster, India’s action had some legitimacy, although the remedy was 

not entirely acceptable. In this instance, Franck observes, international unease over India’s 

intervention competed with relief.

Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1978 was easier for the international community to 

endorse. When Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda made border incursions into Tanzania, the latter 

seized this provocation as a pretext to end Amin’s brutal rule and egregious human rights 

violations. In a context of widespread international contempt for the Amin regime, the border 

incursions were accepted as sufficient legal cover for a full-scale invasion that toppled Uganda’s 

government, despite being a disproportionate reaction to a relatively minor border provocation. 

The United Nations, writes Frank, “expressed its assent in silence.” Significantly, Tanzania was 

nonaligned and had no territorial ambitions, withdrawing in 1981 once a new government 

was established in Uganda. In Franck’s analysis, “If recourse to a legal fiction—that Tanzania 

20

T2wo

Thomas M. Franck

In Recourse to Force: State Action 

against Threats and Armed Attacks

Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2002
21

was acting in self-defense—made more palatable what was in all but name recognized as 

a necessary humanitarian intervention, then the system was quite willing to use that timehonored device to disguise under a thin veil of superficial consistency the significance of a 

gradually evolving pragmatic change in the way its rules were being applied” (145).

In contrast, when Vietnam invaded Kampuchea in 1978–79, the international community’s 

perceptions and judgments were unfavorable. The Khmer Rouge’s horrendous record on human 

rights was well-known, but the reaction to Vietnam’s invasion, especially among developing 

countries, was “almost uniformly negative.” The Vietnam invasion was seen to serve geopolitical 

rather than humanitarian purposes. Furthermore, Vietnam’s own human rights record was tarnished and it had stood by during the worst Khmer Rouge atrocities. While in no haste to withdraw its forces, Vietnam also made no pretense of installing governance by consent. “Observing 

this sorry spectacle,” writes Franck, “most governments could identify with neither protagonist, 

but only with the still widely valued principle prohibiting resort to force, no matter what” (151).

Looking over these and many other cases, Frank concludes:

The institutional history of the UN—as distinct from the Charter’s text—and record of 

state practice neither categorically precludes nor endorses humanitarian intervention. 

Rather, the history and practice support a more nuanced reconciling of the pursuit of 

peace . . . and of justice through the protection of human and humanitarian rights. . . . 

In this practical reconciliation we can detect a pragmatic range of systemic responses 

to unauthorized use of force, depending more on the circumstances than on strictly 

construed text. (38–39)

Is this practical reconciliation sufficient, or should a new formal doctrine of humanitarian 

intervention be developed? Franck argues in favor of a case-by-case adaptation and attention 

to relevant circumstances. “The essence of mitigation,” he writes, “is that the law recognizes 

the continuing force of the rule in general, while also accepting that, in extraordinary 

circumstances, condoning a carefully calibrated and justifiable violation may do more to rescue 

the law’s legitimacy than would its rigorous implementation” (185). Thus, with respect to 

humanitarian intervention, “the reconciling of law and justice” is better pursued via mitigation 

and careful attention to context “rather than by torturing the facts of crisis or the text of the 

law” (188). With such practice, Franck acknowledges that humanitarian interventions will 

occur selectively. He argues that this “is entirely inevitable and beside the point.” Rather, “the 

ultimate test of a humanitarian intervention’s legitimacy is whether it results in significantly 

more good than harm, not whether there has been a consistent pattern of such interventions 

whenever humanitarian crises have arisen” (189).

Conceptual Confusion and Practical Shortcomings

An agreed doctrine of humanitarian intervention may well be unnecessary, but as Trevor 

Findlay argues in The Use of Force in UN Peace Operations, improved conduct of such interventions is imperative. His study examines use-of-force dilemmas in a wide range of international 

operations (such as humanitarian interventions, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement) in 

Congo, Cyprus, Lebanon, Somalia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and elsewhere. He traces the 

evolution of the use of force and the inadequacy of current doctrine to guide such use, whether 

for defense of mission or for the far more complex issues of deployment in situations of anarchy 

or protection of nonuniformed UN personnel or civilians. Overall, Findlay finds that “the use 

of force by UN peacekeepers has been marked by political controversy, doctrinal vacuousness, 

conceptual confusion and failure in the field” (351).

Findlay is dismayed that lessons have not been learned and, furthermore, are not being taught. “What is remarkable,” he writes, “is how unsophisticated, incomplete and often 

incoherent with regard to the use of force issue the [peacekeeping training] manuals are, even 

as late as the 1992 editions, despite years of . . . experience in the field” (122). He finds in these 

Trevor Findlay 

The Use of Force in UN Peace 

Operations

New York: Oxford University Press, 

2002
manuals, for example, incomprehensible and confusing usage of terms like “non-armed force” 

and “non-violent use of force.” Challenges that peacekeepers are likely to encounter—such 

as whether and how to prevent civilians from being massacred or what to do when repeated 

violations of an agreement occur—are not addressed. Also lacking is discussion of the risks 

of using force, the difficulties of preemptive self-defense, or the subtleties of interpositional 

techniques. 

Nor does Findlay find much evidence that learning and training will improve. He notes 

that the 1996 report on Rwanda from the United Nations’ Lessons Learned Unit, like the 

Somalia report, “was biased towards improving peacekeeping in the traditional sense rather 

than considering any new peace operations paradigm. It proffered forty-three lessons, most of 

them eminently sensible, which would undoubtedly improve all types of peace operations. Not 

one of them related to the use of force, even in self-defense” (322).

Improving the use of force will require developing better doctrine. In Findlay’s view, this 

process will include confronting “the norms (some would say the shibboleths) of traditional 

peacekeeping: consent, impartiality, and use of force only in self-defense” (384). Reform 

efforts will also have to address the duty of UN troops to protect other UN and international 

personnel and civilians. A major constraint to doctrinal development is opposition from 

states—including China and many developing countries—that fear such development would 

facilitate UN intervention in their own affairs and limit their sovereignty. On this topic, Findlay 

sees more division than consensus.

Thomas R. Mockaitis concurs with many of Findlay’s observations in Civil-Military 

Operations in Peace Operations: The Case of Kosovo, as do the contributors to The Future of Peace 

Operations: Old Challenge for a New Century, edited by Thomas R. Mockaitis and Erwin 

Schmidl. These texts identify some interesting differences between the various national 

contingents participating in recent international operations involving use of force. In Bosnia, 

for example, coalition partners had very different conceptions of the appropriate level of force. 

While British, Canadian, German, and Polish troops “smiled, waved and frequented bistros for 

a tea or coffee in the majority of cases with a reduced protection posture, U.S. troops secured 

a perimeter while one officer wearing body armor and helmet approached people with an 

interpreter and perhaps one or two others” (The Future of Peace Operations, 34). As this behavior 

raised suspicions and increased unease among civilians, the disparity in force-protection 

policy was arguably not merely an irritant to be resolved among partners, but also affected the 

progress of the mission. Similarly, in Kosovo, while other international contingents based their 

headquarters in major towns, the U.S. troops built their own self-contained camp at Bondsteel. 

In addition to wasting resources, Mockaitis argues, U.S. force protection actually impedes 

civil-military cooperation by frightening local people, creating expectations of trouble, and 

increasing tensions rather than reducing them.

Sanctions: A Problem of Enforcement

Given the many shortcomings of the current use of force, some grantees explore the 

possibility of avoiding it altogether while nonetheless achieving the aims of humanitarian 

intervention. Sanctions are one approach to doing so, although they also have drawbacks. 

The strengths and weakness of international sanctions are explored by David Cortright 

and George A. Lopez in The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s and by 

several contributors to Smart Sanctions: Targeting Economic Statecraft, also edited by Cortright 

and Lopez. As a starting premise, they argue that it is essential to recognize that “sanctions 

are extreme measures that can have effects in some cases equal to or more severe than those 

of war. The perception of sanctions as a peaceful, or ‘soft,’ tool or persuasion does not reflect 

the harsh reality of the economic and social devastation that can result” (The Sanctions Decade, 6). 

A range of sanctions, including commodity boycotts, freezing of financial assets, 

withholding of credit and loans, arms embargoes, and travel restrictions, has been applied 

Thomas R. Mockaitis

Civil-Military Operations in Peace 

Operations: The Case of Kosovo

Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 

Strategic Studies Institute, 2004

Thomas R. Mockaitis and Erwin 

Schmidl, editors

The Future of Peace Operations: 

Old Challenge for a New Century

London: Frank Cass, 2004

David Cortright and George A. 

Lopez, editors

n The Sanctions Decade: 

Assessing UN Strategies in the 

1990s

Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000

n Smart Sanctions: Targeting 

Economic Statecraft

Lanham, Md.: Rowman and 

Littlefield, 2002

22
23

in a number of settings in recent years. Some sanctions regimes are comprehensive; others 

are targeted. A smart sanctions policy, these authors suggest, “is one that imposes coercive 

pressure on specific individuals or entities and that restricts selective products or activities, 

while minimizing unintended economic and social consequences for vulnerable populations 

and innocent bystanders” (Smart Sanctions, 2).

The authors review partial successes and significant failures of sanctions in a variety of 

settings, including Iraq, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, and 

Sierra Leone. In the course of this review, they back away from their earlier endorsement of 

targeted sanctions. Cortright and Lopez admit that 

Many sanctions policymakers and analysts, ourselves included, have expressed 

enthusiasm for the potential of targeted sanctions to achieve political impacts without 

causing unintended humanitarian hardships. . . . The evidence from the UN cases of 

the 1990s offers only limited support for the viability of this strategy, however, while 

raising a number of questions and concerns. (The Sanctions Decade, 208)

Instead they conclude that what is essential for the success of any sanctions regime is 

not precise targeting but consistent enforcement. “A sanctions fence is only as strong as 

its weakest link” (Smart Sanctions, 62). Cortright and Lopez advocate establishing a new 

Office of Sanctions Affairs in the UN Secretariat. They also recommend that states pass 

laws criminalizing violations of UN arms embargoes. Harmonizing enforcement capacity 

through enabling legislation and statutory authority is essential, as is shared political 

commitment. 

The film Gunrunners, produced by PBS Frontline/World and the Center for Investigative Reporting, conveys some of the immense difficulties in enforcing arms embargoes. The 

film accompanies a UN expert panel as it investigates the flow of small arms to West Africa. It 

documents links between Eastern European organized crime, particularly Ukranian arms traders dispersing post-Soviet weapons stockpiles that have become an important economic asset; 

international business interests trading timber, diamonds, and other commodities; and West 

African warlords. The film traces a shipment of arms and ammunition from Ukraine through 

Burkina Faso to Liberia and then to a tragic massacre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The entire 

record is pieced together from scattered clues—documents seized in an Italian drug bust, radio 

records of flights, and the careful discernment of patterns in international business and criminal dealings. None of this is straightforward. As a Belgian arms-trade expert observes, the UN 

team has no power of subpoena or search, no rights to interrogate or engage in covert investigation. Rather, he explains, “we basically have to charm our way in.” The team’s power to enforce 

any arms embargo is equally minimal, consisting of revealing their findings, shaming violators, and hoping that states will take action.

One instance of concerted international effort is the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), formed to enforce a ban on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass 

destruction. In The United Nations and Iraq: Defanging the Viper, Jean E. Krasno and

James S. Sutterlin utilize oral histories of UNSCOM staff to examine the commission’s 

successes, obstacles, short-comings, and eventual demise. The 1991 UN Security Council resolution that banned Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction was part of 

a cease-fire agreement drawn up by the victors to disarm an aggressor. UNSCOM was 

given unprecedented powers of on-site inspection. 

Krasno and Sutterlin discuss the politics of cooperation among UNSCOM’s many partners, the differing styles of its successive directors and some key players, controversies over its 

tactics, turning points in its efforts, and Iraq’s concealment strategies. They note, “The strategy 

initially seemed clear: inspect the declared sites, carry out the destruction of the specified 

items, set up the monitoring mechanism, allow sanctions to be lifted, and go home” (47). Iraqi 

noncompliance and concealment, however, required a vast change of strategy. UNSCOM 

eventually became as involved in proving illegal concealment as in disarming Iraq, engenderJean E. Krasno and James S. 

Sutterlin

The United Nations and Iraq: 

Defanging the Viper

Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003

PBS Frontline and the Center for 

Investigative Reporting

Gunrunners

2002
ing some of the political dilemmas that contributed to UNSCOM’s demise, despite its many 

accomplishments. 

Radical Reconceptions

A Cosmopolitan Military

Even with substantial international cooperation, the use of force and enforcement of sanctions are problematic. It is not surprising, then, that several grantees attempt to reconceive the 

basis and practice of the use of force in humanitarian intervention altogether. Contributors to 

Forces for Good: Cosmopolitan Militaries in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lorraine Elliot and 

Graeme Cheeseman, step back and explore cosmopolitanism: the notion that the world is a 

single moral community, individual persons are the ultimate units of concern, and actors have 

the obligation to act on that concern without favoritism. The implication of cosmopolitanism 

for military forces is that they should be used “to defend the moral community of humankind 

as well as to defend territorially bounded political communities” (1). A cosmopolitan military 

would defend “the other” rather than defending against “the other.” Such a prospect raises 

many questions: “Can a traditional military, constituted by the Weberian state as the agent of 

its legitimate monopoly on violence, be restructured materially and normatively in the interests 

of non-statist and universal moral values? Can militaries serve both cosmopolitan and statist 

objectives at same time?” (4)

A cosmopolitan military would entail transformation of means as well as ends, and rules 

of engagement and conduct of personnel would require adjustment. NATO’s aerial bombing 

of Kosovo, for example, had a humanitarian goal but did not pursue cosmopolitan means, 

because the nations involved were unwilling to sacrifice the lives of their own soldiers to 

protect strangers. 

In grappling with the construction of a cosmopolitan military force, contributors to this 

volume return to the “the vexed question of whether the United Nations should have its own 

military capability” (101). Although many good arguments support the idea of a UN standing force, thus far most governments have remained adamantly opposed. “The principle is 

firmly entrenched: armies belong to states, not to the heads of inter-governmental organizations” (113). An alternative proposal is the appointment of a UN general staff. In this scenario, 

officers would choose to leave their national armies in mid-career and work until retirement 

as UN staff members, forming a military cohort in UN uniform, prepared to deploy to the 

field immediately. Some opposition to this proposal is political, as it is argued that international organizations simply should not have militaries. Financial and administrative concerns 

are also raised, since there are no provisions for rank, uniform, and the like within the UN 

structure. Operationally, some critics doubt that hypothetical UN officers could keep up with 

changes in doctrine, strategy, and practice once separated from their regular armies. The 

idea remains part of the debate; however, “it is very unlikely that the United Nations will be 

enriched with a cosmopolitan military force in the twenty-first century” (114).

UN Legionnaires

A full commitment to cosmopolitanism is not necessary in order to advocate some form of 

rapid reaction force under UN auspices. In How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, 

Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen, John G. Heidenrich entertains that possibility, along with 

many other means to prevent genocide. He reviews the many forms of nonviolent pressure that 

might be brought to bear against an impending genocide, including diplomacy, publicity, economic pressure, sanctions, and nonviolent resistance. He further considers the value of covert 

action, secretly arming the imperiled, physical sabotage, assassination, secret nonlethal material support, psychological operations, and rescues. Military action—using airpower alone, 

interposition, partitioning, creating safe havens—also has a part to play. Too often, however, 

military expeditions are expedient and hastily improvised. “Their limitations,” Heidenrich 

John G. Heidenrich

How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide 

for Policymakers, Scholars, and the 

Concerned Citizen

Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002

Lorraine Elliot and Graeme 

Cheeseman, editors

Forces for Good: Cosmopolitan 

Militaries in the Twenty-First 

Century

Manchester, U.K.: Manchester 

University Press, 2004

24
25

argues, “reflect the consequences of waiting too long, and doing too little, as a brewing crisis 

becomes a genocide” (164). 

Multinational forces can have particular shortcomings, resulting from the different 

operating procedures, training styles, equipment, and combat and peacekeeping doctrines of 

contributing nations. Evaluating the construction and performance of international military 

operations, Heidenrich concludes that “over the years, this haphazard process has produced 

some very haphazard multinational forces” (196).

What would be a better alternative? Heidenrich calls for an international legion of volunteers employed in the service of the United Nations. Such a legion would be available to the 

UN Security Council for early rapid deployment in a crisis, particularly for “relatively small 

scale but still risky missions of importance” (234). In Heidenrich’s vision, the UN legionnaires 

would be proficient not only in combat skills but also in “local negotiation skills, foreign 

cultural awareness, patience in the face of repeated foreign insults, and able to work well 

with both the UN bureaucracy and with countless non-governmental organizations” (238). 

Labeling such a force “UN military police” would help remind the UN Security Council, concerned governments, and the general public that such a force could not wage war, but instead 

would engage in military police duties.

A Rapidly Deployable Force

Michael E. O’Hanlon also explores the possibilities of a rapidly deployable military force, but 

not one organized as a standing force under UN auspices. In Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention, O’Hanlon investigates the prospects of each nation increasing 

its deployable military capacity so that humanitarian interventions could be conducted more 

promptly and effectively when deemed advisable. “Rather than thinking in terms of a 5,000-

person UN force,” O’Hanlon argues, “the international community should develop the capacity 

to deploy and sustain much larger numbers of troops abroad” (9). 

Having surveyed recent and current conflicts around the world, O’Hanlon calculates, “It 

would be desirable for the international community to have the capacity to deploy up to 200,000 

troops at a time. Since some countries will choose not to participate in any given operation, and 

since troops will need to be rotated to avoid exhaustion and burnout, a total pool of perhaps 

600,000 personnel would be desirable” (85). Although the international community already has 

about that number of military personnel who could be rapidly deployed and then sustained 

in overseas theaters, almost two-thirds of the total number now come from the United States. 

O’Hanlon sees a role for other nations to equalize the burden and ensure that humanitarian 

interventions occur when and where needed. 

Overall, O’Hanlon argues that most countries would not need to add troops to their armed 

forces to meet this goal. On the contrary, “they would generally be better advised to reduce 

overall troop numbers to free up funds that could be used to improve the capacities of their 

remaining units for rapid deployment and sustainable operations abroad” (113). Power projection capabilities rather than increased troop size should be the focus.

O’Hanlon argues that given their wealth, military proficiency, and commitment to 

human rights, the major industrialized democracies could contribute much more. “Major 

western countries need not greatly increase defense spending,” he writes, “but they do 

need to change their defense priorities—and Washington needs to support their efforts to 

do so, rather than fear a weakening of its alliances simply because its advanced allies seek 

somewhat greater military autonomy” (133). Developing countries in Africa, Southeast 

Asia, and Latin America need to train and equip their forces better. O’Hanlon acknowledges that international assistance is essential but asserts that the “scale of the American 

contribution need not be especially onerous—resources on the order of one billion dollars 

a year and quite modest numbers of uniformed military personnel to act as trainers would 

be sufficient” (113). 

Without such a global coordinated effort, O’Hanlon argues, humanitarian 

interventions will continue to be uneven and inadequate. Surveying the extent of civil 

Michael E. O’Hanlon

Expanding Global Military Capacity 

for Humanitarian Intervention

Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 

Press, 2003
warfare and internal conflict, he laments the tragic toll in human lives and also raises 

the concern that “failed states can contribute, at least indirectly, to the success of global 

terrorist networks, which can use such states as sanctuaries, for acquiring resources, 

and in some cases for finding willing recruits” (111).

The Merits of Nonprovocative Defense

Failed states and nonstate actors are now a primary threat to international security. But 

this situation does not obviate the need for wise defense policies between traditional states. 

In Concepts of Non-Provocative Defense: Ideas and Practices in International Security, Geoffrey 

Wiseman addresses the so-called security dilemma—the dynamic in which one state’s efforts 

to increase its security are perceived as being achieved at the expense of another’s, promoting 

spirals of competition and arms races that may lead to war. Tracing the development of the idea 

of non-provocative defense in different settings, Wiseman examines Western Europe in the 

1980s and after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1989, the 1990–91 

Gulf War, and developments in the Asia-Pacific region after 1989.

Wiseman is also attentive to the recent “stunning recovery of faith in the doctrine of humanitarian military intervention” (131). Noting that such intervention requires offensive capabilities, Wiseman observes, “defensive proponents were not necessarily against humanitarian 

intervention, but some did demand a high level of respect for the increasingly unfashionable 

counter-norm of sovereignty at a time when an extraordinary reversal of political positions 

had occurred: the progressive left favored intervention while the conservative right was more 

concerned with ‘home’ defense” (134).

Wiseman readily admits that all theorizing about the security dilemma occurred in the 

context of the Cold War. Under changed international conditions, is the concept still useful? 

“The question is whether this focus remains justified when civil wars appear to be more 

prevalent than international conflict, and whether defensive force postures remain relevant 

when war is waged by groups other than organized states” (24). He finds that nonprovocative 

defense is still relevant as one of several security policy options. According to Wiseman, 

“While several key trends that developed in the early post–Cold War era—such as complex 

multipolarity, state fragmentation, broader definitions of security, and the growing number of 

internal wars—were not conducive to non-provocative defense advocacy, they did not spell an 

end to the idea” (226).

Geoffrey Wiseman

Concepts of Non-Provocative 

Defense: Ideas and Practices in 

International Security

New York: Palgrave, 2002

26
Three 3

Andrew Reynolds, editor; 

Steven L. Solnick, David 

Horowitz, and Brij V. Lal, 

contributors

The Architecture of Democracy: 

Constitutional Design, Conflict 

Management, and Democracy

New York: Oxford University Press, 

2002

27

Democracy amid Diversity 

Democracy can influence conflict in many ways, both within and between states. 

Within nations, democracy is often assumed to have the potential to defuse conflict 

in divided societies. Grantees turn the spotlight on these assumptions and discover 

some interesting results. For instance, institutional design is important, but highly polished 

designs do not tend to work as well as untidy, locally modified ones; the kind of first-past-thepost electoral systems popular in the West often encourage extremism in divided societies; 

and elections of any kind often favor extremists in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. 

Like electoral systems, electoral monitoring has significant flaws and limitations, but even so it 

is invaluable to building public confidence in the democratic process and otherwise fostering 

peace. Other institutions, including civil society associations, may also be central to helping 

divided but democratic societies avoid conflict. Shifts toward democracy in divided societies can 

be particularly complex, not only for electoral engineering but for the politics of mobilization.

Between nations, variations on a long-standing theory posit either that democracies rarely 

go to war with each other or that they avoid the resort to aggression toward all other states. 

Grantees test these hypotheses by examining the particular mechanisms by which democracy 

affects foreign policy decision making.

The Impact of Institutions

The contributors to The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, 

and Democracy, edited by Andrew Reynolds, share the premise that political institutions 

significantly shape the logic and outcomes of democratic politics. Contributors thus research 

and debate the merits of presidential versus parliamentary systems, federal versus unitary 

constitutions, and proportional versus winner-take-all elections for their potential to ensure 

peace and stability, particularly in divided societies. The design of political institutions is their 

primary focus, but all the contributors are equally committed to two further positions. First, 

some political conflicts are intractable in the short term. For these, institutional design is no 

panacea. Second, no uniform design should be applied in all divided societies. The best ways of 

achieving power sharing may vary across cases. As Reynolds affirms in the introduction, and as 

is borne out in every chapter, “the purpose of this book is not to proselytize” (3).

Many factors limit the power of design. People involved in creating political institutions, 

for example, are often facing many concurrent challenges, including post-conflict economic 

reconstruction. The particular characteristics of ethnic diversity—such as the size, wealth, 

and goals of the minority—also shape and constrain the most suitable institutions for different circumstances. And the impact of complex electoral rules can be difficult to predict, 

even in stable political systems. Many features of the transitional environment contribute to 

determining what is feasible. As contributor Steven L. Solnick observes in “Federalism and 

State-Building: Post-Communist and Post-Colonial Perspectives,” “the set of desirable institutional models may be quite different from the set of attainable institutional equilibria” (204, 

emphasis in original).

That may be just as well. In the judgment of contributor David Horowitz,

If [theoretical, off-the-shelf] designs were really adopted in an unmodified form, their 

democratic legitimacy might be at risk. The hash that is made of designs in the process 

of adoption may make conflict reduction much more difficult than it might be, but there 

may be some compensating advantages. A messy process of adoption, replete with design-destroying reciprocity, may give rise at least to a sense of local ownership of the 

product, even if the institutions fall short of what is required to mitigate conflict. (36)
Ultimately the success of political institutions in preventing domestic conflict may rest 

less on their polished design than on the populace’s commitment to them. As contributor Brij 

V. Lal affirms in “Constitutional Engineering in Fiji,” the most recent constitution in Fiji “will 

remain a piece of paper unless there is a united will in the citizenry to make it work for the 

common good. In Rousseau’s words, the most important laws are those which are not ‘graven 

on tablets of marble or brass, but on the hearts of its citizens’” (292).

Elections and Divided Societies

Different Electoral Designs, Different Outcomes

Benjamin Reilly continues the attention to political institutions as mechanisms for conflict 

management in divided societies, but he narrows the focus to electoral rules in Democracy 

in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management. In divided societies, Reilly 

explains, politicians often have an incentive to appeal to ethnic identities as a means of 

mobilizing a constituency. In the resulting cycles of “outbidding” among politicians, 

extremists overwhelm moderates. But, Reilly argues, nothing in this pattern is inevitable. 

Changes in institutional rules—to facilitate and encourage cross-communal communication, 

bargaining, cooperation, and interdependence between rival politicians and their respective 

constituencies—would alter this pattern. A different set of incentives would encourage 

rational office-seeking politicians to pursue moderate centrist forms of political competition. 

Reilly aims to identify the electoral rules and practices that will most reliably produce such 

“centripetalism”—that is, political systems in which “the focus of political competition is 

directed at the center, not at the extremes” (6). 

In pursuit of this goal, Reilly documents the effects of proportional representation and 

preferential vote-pooling electoral systems by examining the electoral history of divided societies that have used such institutions—Papua New Guinea from 1964 to 1972, Northern Ireland 

since 1973, Sri Lanka since 1978, Estonia in 1990, and Fiji in 1999, as well as Bosnia and some 

other nondivided cases from Australia, Europe, and North America.

Papua New Guinea provides the strongest case for the centripetal effects of preferential 

voting systems. In elections from 1964 to 1972, voters could rank-order multiple candidates 

beyond their first choice. This preferential voting system, in Reilly’s analysis, “allowed ethnic 

voters to reconcile two divergent aims: the need to vote for their own ‘local’ ethnic candidate 

(who almost invariably received the first preference) and the desire to vote, using secondary 

preferences, for the candidate of their choice (who would often be someone from outside their 

immediate area)” (68). 

In 1975 Papua New Guinea abandoned these electoral methods for a first-past-the-post 

system. In the country’s highly fragmented, clan-based society, this change resulted in a very 

different kind of electoral competition. Incentive for cross-ethnic voting vanished and candidates concentrated on their clan base alone. Parties have degenerated, replaced by tribal 

mobilization. Candidates with less than 30 percent of the vote win a disturbingly high number 

of seats. Electoral violence has risen—rationally, since with a first-past-the-post system, a small 

number of votes can make a large difference, and stealing or stuffing ballot boxes is efficient. 

Reviewing the evidence from Papua New Guinea, Reilly concludes, “It would be hard to find a 

clearer example of the importance of political institutions in general, or the case for centripetal 

strategies of institutional design in particular” (94).

Reilly’s research on Fiji and Sri Lanka permits him to identify some limitations to the 

approach. In contrast to Papua New Guinea, centripetal strategies have played “at best, a 

modest and insufficient role in promoting multiethnic democracy in Fiji, while having little 

discernible impact at all upon ethnic relations in Sri Lanka” (124). Why is this the case? In part, 

Reilly attributes it to the complexity and comprehensibility of electoral reforms. Elites grasped 

the importance of the rules and how best to shape them for their own advantage. In Fiji, for 

example, compulsory expression of a complete set of preferences coupled with the introducBenjamin Reilly 

Democracy in Divided Societies: 

Electoral Engineering for Conflict

Management

New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2001

28
29

Carrie Manning 

n “Armed Opposition Groups into 

Political Parties: Lessons from 

Bosnia, Kosovo, and 

Mozambique”

Studies in Comparative International 

Development 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004)

n “Elections in Bosnia and 

Herzegovina, 1996–2002: 

Democracy in Search of a 

State?” 

Atlanta, Ga.: Georgia State 

University, 2003

n “From Armed Conflict to Civil 

Opposition: Post-conflict Party 

Development in Mozambique, 

Bosnia, and Kosovo”

University of Leipzig Papers on 

Africa—Politics and Economics, 

no. 61 (2002)

tion of a party ticket—in which the party provides a ticket with a prearranged preference 

schedule—placed too much power in the hands of party elites. In Sri Lanka the marking of 

preferences is optional, but lack of voter education means the process is not widely understood. 

Few voters express second or third preferences, so the centripetal potential of such practices is 

not achieved. Thus, the Fijian and the Sri Lankan cases “point not just to the possibilities, but 

also the limitations, of electoral engineering. . . . Both point to the necessity for policymakers to 

think hard about the consequences of even minor technical innovations” (127). 

In addition to technical design issues, Reilly attends to the impact of social context, particularly the level of geographic dispersion of ethnic groups. In a variety of cases, he observes that 

centripetal methods work best to encourage interethnic accommodation “when constituency 

boundaries can be drawn in such a way as to create ethnically heterogeneous districts,” even if 

that means very large districts (165). Reilly concludes that in many regions of the world, where 

ethnic groups are intermixed and ethnic tensions appear to result, “the centripetal approach 

may well be the most fruitful method of encouraging cooperative, inter-ethnic politics” (193).

The Limits of Electoral Engineering

Carrie Manning is well aware of the limits of elections in divided societies, particularly those 

emerging from conflict. She examines elections in three post-conflict settings in a series of 

articles, “Armed Opposition Groups into Political Parties: Lessons from Bosnia, Kosovo, and 

Mozambique,” “Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1996–2002: Democracy in Search of a 

State?” and “From Armed Conflict to Civil Opposition: Post-conflict Party Development in 

Mozambique, Bosnia, and Kosovo.” She points out that in post-conflict settings, 

the first few elections will have little to do with the traditional functions of representation 

and accountability. Instead, elections are first and foremost about the division of power 

between competing elites who have recently been locked in military confrontation or 

who have been outside that confrontation but who have been excluded from political 

activity as a function of it. (“From Armed Conflict to Civil Opposition,” 5)

Particularly in Bosnia, the intent of the international community has been to use elections 

as part of a larger strategy to effect structural political change. As Manning notes, 

Because democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not just an end in itself, but 

a means to an end—namely the establishment and consolidation of a multiethnic 

Bosnian state—progress in Bosnia’s democratization process is measured not only by 

assessing the quality of the democratic procedures, but by assessing the particular 

outcomes they produce. (“Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 4)

Despite the immense involvement of international experts and their explicit use of electoral design to achieve multiethnic results, Bosnian elections continue to produce successes for 

nationalist parties over moderate alternatives. Manning attributes this trend to the continued 

control by nationalist parties of essential economic resources. Voters continue to support them 

not because they wish to return to conflict but because these parties can deliver resources that 

voters need. In Manning’s assessment, Bosnia thus demonstrates “the limits of what can be 

achieved through electoral and constitutional engineering without structural change” (“Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 15).

Monitors: Imperfect but Invaluable

The international monitoring of elections, even if they do not produce outcomes desired by 

the international community, may nonetheless contribute to public confidence in the 

integrity of elections, better campaign processes, and more-informed electorates. So argues 

Eric C. Bjornlund in Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. From 

his study of fifteen years of electoral monitoring in ninety-four newly democratic and semiEric C. Bjornlund

Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring 

Elections and Building Democracy

Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson 

Center Press, 2004
authoritarian countries, Bjornland also recognizes the shortcomings of this practice. Too often, 

he suggests, far too much is expected of transitional or post-conflict elections, which may 

contribute to but do not constitute nation building. Even so, many unrelated actions, such as 

the restoration of aid, membership in international organizations, or improvement of bilateral 

relations, frequently depend on the holding of successful elections.

Although it has improved, electoral monitoring remains marred by methodological 

flaws, especially an overemphasis on election day itself rather than the broader process. 

Furthermore, monitoring organizations and missions can reflect interests and objectives other 

than democratization (including security, trade, and other foreign policy goals). High-profile 

international monitoring teams can usurp resources that might have gone to domestic teams, 

which often have a significant potential to strengthen democracy. Finally Bjornland notes 

that the international community has yet to develop a definitive approach for dealing with 

governments that claim or maintain power based on fraudulent or manipulated elections. In 

short, Bjornlund recognizes, election monitoring “can contribute to democratization but can 

also be counterproductive” (14).

International electoral monitoring aims to assess elections against universal standards. 

Bjornlund notes that an international consensus has gradually emerged on what constitutes a 

democratic election, which includes fair conduct of the balloting and counting, opportunities 

for political parties to compete, reasonably equitable access to media, impartial election 

administrators, fair rules, a political environment free of intimidation, and prompt and just

resolution of election-related disputes and grievances. “Free and fair” has become “the rhetorical 

touchstone” of this consensus. Nonetheless, Bjornlund laments, the phrase “has tended to 

obscure rather than clarify” (95). The development of clear standards of what constitutes free 

and fair has lagged. Judgments are often subjective and vague, while “existing criteria are 

impractical and inconsistent with actual practice” (96). Furthermore, the emphasis suggests a 

dichotomy, that any particular election is or is not free and fair, diminishing the understanding 

that “elections are actually political processes more realistically judged along a continuum and 

placed in context” (97).

Domestic electoral monitoring may have a great deal to contribute to democratization. In 

Bjornlund’s assessment, “the dramatic development of the past two decades is the emergence 

of nonpartisan election monitoring conducted by organizations from civil society rather 

than from the formal political sector, electoral authorities, or political parties” (210). Starting 

with the National Citizen’s Movement for Free Elections in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, 

Bjornlund credits domestic election monitoring with encouraging citizen involvement in 

politics, empowering civic organizations in public affairs, and building new political networks 

committed to democratic politics.

Perhaps the best approach would be to blend both approaches, with international sup-

port for domestic monitoring. Thus far, attempts have resulted in missed opportunities and 

unintended consequences. In Indonesia, for example, civic organizations and university-based 

networks with international support mobilized more than half-a-million poll watchers on 

election day in 1999. But in this flawed effort, many inadequately prepared groups joined the 

process at the last minute, local organizations devoted energy to competing for international 

funds rather than working on substantive issues and strategies, and an opportunity to build a 

foundation for democratic reform was lost, according to Bjornlund. In many ways, he writes, 

“the considerable [international] funds actually hampered the development of politically active 

citizens” (269). 

Despite current shortcomings, Bjornlund affirms, 

if properly conceived and implemented, comprehensive international and domestic 

election monitoring not only provides an objective assessment of a given country’s 

electoral process but can also promote the integrity of the elections and related institu-

tions, build public confidence and participation in the electoral process, and comple-

ment and encourage domestic engagement in democratic politics. (9)

30
31

Civic Networks and Intercommunal Peace

Elections, however engineered and monitored, are not the only mechanism for fostering peace 

and democracy in divided societies. In Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in 

India, Ashutosh Varshney analyzes intercommunal networks within civil society. Varshney 

distinguishes between two kinds of networks: associational (composed of organized groups 

such as sports clubs, reading groups, film clubs, business associations, trade unions, festival 

organizations) and quotidian (consisting of routine interaction in streets, buses, parks, markets, 

and other public places). Although both promote peace, Varshney finds that associational 

networks are far sturdier in urban settings, particularly in deflecting attempts by politicians to 

foment division and polarization.

Varshney’s methodology is to compare three pairs of cities, each with a roughly 

similar proportion of Hindus and Muslims, one city prone to violence and the other city 

predominantly peaceful. The comparisons give Varshney the opportunity to thoroughly 

examine the causal connection between associational civic engagement and ethnic peace. With 

attention to the roots of associational networks in the transformative mass politics of the 1920s 

and 1930s, Varshney traces the evolution of civic groups in the six cities, looking at the strength 

of intracommunal as well as intercommunal links, networks operating at the mass as compared 

to the elite level, and the decline or strengthening of different groups over time. He concludes 

not only that rich civic engagement ensures intercommunal peace better than mere quotidian 

contact, but that vibrant nonstate civic networks—rather than state action such as stronger 

policing—have and will continue to enable peace between different communities. 

Undermining Democracy by “Demobilizing” Citizens

Violence between communities is subject to many interpretations. Intercommunal violence in 

the former Yugoslavia has been attributed to “ancient hatreds” and alternatively to manipulative leaders “playing the ethnic card” to rally ethnic groups against each other. In The Myth of 

Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, V. P. Gagnon Jr. rejects both interpretations. Rather, 

he argues that in the context of the end of communism and rising popular interest in democratization and significant reform, threatened conservative leaders actively “demobilized” the 

citizenry (discouraged civic participation and political engagement).

Because they sought to maintain their control of existing structures of power or position to 

convert state-owned property to privately held wealth, elites wanted to silence and marginalize 

challengers and demobilize their potential supporters. Faced with the prospect of being ousted 

from power through either elections or street protests, they strove to create fear of an existential threat, emphasize a terrible enemy, and thus encourage the population to view those who 

spoke of reform as “dupes or tools of the evil forces . . . as traitors” (182). Their immediate tactics 

were to deploy paramilitaries, using violence to destroy heterogeneous communities and statecontrolled media to instill a sense of threat. Citing preexisting intercommunal peace, high rates 

of intermarriage, multiethnic veterans’ organizations, draft resistance, and desertion, Gagnon 

argues that “violence and threats were necessary to ethnicize a society that had until then not 

been divided along ethnic lines” (151). Only through extensive efforts at demobilization, “by 

using the image and discourse of injustices being perpetrated against innocent civilians by 

evil others defined in ethnic terms, conservative elites managed successfully to divert attention away from demands for change toward the question of these injustices. The violence thus 

served to silence and marginalize the proponents of fundamental change” (181). 

Democratic Decision Making and the Democratic Peace

Turning to the influence of democracy on international conflict, Paul K. Huth and Todd L. 

Allee construct three models in The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth 

Century, each with a different causal mechanism, to specify exactly how domestic democratic 

Ashutosh Varshney

Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: 

Hindus and Muslims in India

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University 

Press, 2002

V. P. Gagnon Jr.

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and 

Croatia in the 1990s

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 

2004

Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee

The Democratic Peace and 

Territorial Conflict in the 

Twentieth Century

New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2002
institutions influence foreign policy choices of state leaders. The Political Accountability Model 

describes the institutional means by which the political opposition can punish or reward lead-

ers for their decisions. The Political Norms Model sees institutions as a source of values and 

principles that guide bargaining and conflict resolution in international disputes. The Political 

Affinity Modeldescribes the similarity of institutions between states as a basis of mutual per-

ception and political alignment, enabling leaders to differentiate between potential allies and 

security threats. 

To test these models, Huth and Allee constructed a global data set of 348 territorial dis-

putes from 1919 to 1995. (Five appendices to the book summarize the cases and explain their 

coding.) Huth and Allee then used statistical methods to compare the explanatory power of 

each of the three theoretical models in these cases, examining each territorial dispute at three 

stages: challenge to the status quo, negotiation, and military escalation. Their results take into 

account these different phases.

At the negotiation stage, for example, the Political Accountability Model is particularly 

strong. Huth and Allee find that at this stage, leaders in challenger states are sensitive to 

electoral cycles (both their own and their adversaries’). As elections approach, international ne-

gotiations are less likely to produce settlement agreements. Leaders are also less likely to bring 

home agreements that require concessions unless they command significant party support, be-

cause they are keenly aware of the domestic politics of treaty ratification. Similarly, they are not 

apt to put concessions on the table unless they are confident that their opponents (democratic 

or not) can survive the political battle at home over ratification. They are, nonetheless, more 

likely to offer concessions to other democratic leaders. Because of their expectation of domestic 

opposition, leaders of democracies may also avoid accommodation. Thus, democratic politics 

may make compromise more difficult and prolong the time needed to negotiate the settlement 

of a territorial dispute. 

At the phase of military escalation, findings from the Political Accountability Model 

indicate that state leaders are wary of risking wars with opponents who are politically secure 

from domestic opposition. While the Political Norms Model has substantial explanatory power 

during the stage of challenging the status quo, it is weaker for the subsequent stages of negotia-

tion and military escalation. The Political Affinity Model produces the weakest result across all 

three stages of territorial disputes. Huth and Allee’s most powerful single finding is that escala-

tion to war never occurred between pairs of states with strong democratic institutions. Between 

these pairs, war was avoided at an earlier stage than between the other pairs.

32
4

33

International Negotiation Four

I

nternational negotiations range from multiparty talks on momentous issues such as 

climate change and nuclear proliferation to bilateral agreements on seemingly innocuous subjects, such as setting a quota for orange imports. But even apparently humdrum 

subjects have the capacity to excite fierce passions, bring into play a wide range of bargaining 

strategies and tactics, and reveal surprising facets of the negotiating environment.

As they explore the dynamics and intricacies of negotiation, grantees dissect both 

multilateral and bilateral encounters on subjects ranging from torture to pollution, business 

mergers to jet fighters. Grantees confront some of the biggest questions on international 

negotiations, from their fundamental normative bases and long-term viability to the precise 

identifiable qualities of national negotiation styles, as they interpret the formation, content, 

and implementation of international agreements.

Justice and Fairness: Making Negotiation Feasible 

In Justice and Fairness in International Negotiation, Cecilia Albin considers normative issues 

that implicitly or explicitly underlie international negotiations. She examines four case studies: negotiations over environmental pollution and acid rain in Europe, the Israeli-Palestinian 

conflict, nuclear nonproliferation, and the talks under the General Agreement on Tariffs and 

Trade and in the World Trade Organization. The cases vary on the nature of the issues, the 

number of parties involved, their power relations, the institutional settings, and the political 

context. From these varied cases, Albin offers several observations about normative aspects 

of international negotiations. 

According to Albin, “It is clear that although negotiators may not have framed or even 

thought consciously of the issues as matters of justice and fairness, such concepts were 

frequently reflected in their behavior” (217). An absence of words does not mean that the 

concepts of justice and fairness are absent from the debate. Likewise their explicit usage does 

not mean they are being genuinely discussed; they may be deployed tactically. Across the 

different case studies, Albin perceives a concern for justice and fairness at every stage, from 

the beginning as talks are structured and agendas set, in the bargaining phase, and through 

implementation and compliance.

Albin finds that the substance of justice and fairness in international negotiation 

is not precise but tends to cluster around several basic commitments. For example, 

negotiations must be seen by all parties as impartial, with the interests and claims of 

all considered and none asked to act specifically against their interests. The process and 

outcome of negotiations should deliver joint gains. Parties also have a duty to implement freely negotiated agreements. The presence of justice and fairness does not alter 

basic asymmetries of power among the negotiating parties, but it makes negotiation 

feasible. As Albin concludes,

The design of workable arrangements can rarely rely on hard-nosed bargaining 

and the promise of mutual benefits alone. In order to win the respect and voluntary 

approval of the parties and their constituencies, the provisions must be seen as worth 

honoring partly by appealing to their sense of fairness. They must include principles 

of allocation of rights, duties, benefits, and costs among parties who are joined in 

a cooperative venture, and reflect their voices and concerns. Negotiators are thus 

motivated to formulate terms, and behave more generally, on grounds which others 

can freely accepts as reasonable and authoritative rather than merely self-serving. 

This facilitates the achievement of broadly supported agreements. (218)

Cecilia Albin

Justice and Fairness in 

International Negotiation

New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2001
34

Unceasing Negotiation, Evolving Regimes

Contributors to Getting It Done: Post-Agreement Negotiation and International Regimes, edited 

by Bertram I. Spector and I. William Zartman, focus on the aftermath of agreements. The 

book’s premise is that viewing international regimes as though they were final agreements 

followed by clear implementing legislation and then compliance is “both to miss their reality 

and mistake their nature” (5). Rather, the editors concur, “Problems are not static and neither 

are their solutions” (4). Some aspects of a problem are always left unresolved, and new 

problems arise in the process of implementation. Interests and resources of signatories may 

change. Advances in science may offer new solutions to some problems. Changing situations 

create new challenges, unanticipated when agreements were established. Thus, international 

regimes are always ongoing processes, adapting and transforming to remain relevant, 

useful, and vital to their stakeholders. “To be viable over the long term,” the editors argue, 

“regimes have to evolve and that evolution is accomplished through a process of continuous 

negotiation. Regimes are born through negotiation processes, and they evolve through 

postagreement negotiation processes” (4).

Contributors examine four cases in detail. The Mediterranean Action Plan, begun in 1975 

to reduce maritime pollution, provides an opportunity to look at a regional regime dealing 

with the environment. Negotiations involved in establishing and transforming the Conference 

and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (C/OSCE) is a case of a regional 

regime on security issues. The Ozone Depletion Regime, with rounds of negotiations in 

Vienna and Montreal in the 1980s, is a global regime concerning the environment. The evolving regime against torture, particularly the 1984 UN Convention against Torture and creation 

of the special rapporteur on torture, is an example of global negotiations on human rights. 

Three kinds of international regimes emerge from the examination of these cases. First 

are those that remain in force as originally negotiated. Such regimes are rare; indeed, none 

is featured in the book. A second, more common category consists of regimes that grow and 

evolve along a fairly steady course through recurrent negotiation. European negotiations over 

maritime pollution are an example of this type. The regime against torture, at the time of the 

writing of Getting It Done, also exhibited steady though slow progress. The third category, in 

which the international regime against torture may now be placed, comprises regimes that 

“follow a jagged course, forward, backward, and sideways, from one negotiated encounter 

of parties to another” (272). The authors place the C/OSCE in this category, “with its internal 

battles over its appropriate strength and direction and the change in mission occasioned by 

the shift from the Cold War” (272). From their review of different international regimes and 

the ongoing postagreement negotiations that are necessary to keep them viable, the authors 

warn that “regimes cannot at any time safely be assumed to be ‘mature,’ having reached their 

final form” (90).

National Negotiating Styles

Bilateral negotiations over very specific issues would seem far simpler than the multilateral 

encounters discussed in Getting It Done. Yet nation-to-nation negotiations also have many 

elements, involve a surprising number of players, pass through several different stages, 

and feature a wide variety of strategic approaches and tactical gambits. The changing 

political environments, both global and domestic, in which negotiations occur can have a 

significant impact on bilateral negotiations, as can the institutional structures of each party’s 

government, the specific issues at stake, and the individuals sitting round the negotiating 

table. The culture, especially the political and institutional culture, of each nation also 

exercises a significant influence on the negotiating style of its diplomats and politicians. As 

several grantees attest, different negotiators from the same nation tend to display similar 

attitudes toward the use of time, explicit or implicit language, threats, ritual, and so forth. 

However, while some traits are in evidence over many years, others have a shorter life span; 

Bertram I. Spector and I. William 

Zartman, editors

Getting It Done: Post-Agreement 

Negotiation and International 

Regimes

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2003
Michael Blaker, Paul Giarra, 

and Ezra Vogel. Patrick Cronin, 

contributor 

Case Studies in Japanese 

Negotiating Behavior

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2002

as Patrick Cronin points out in his conclusion to Case Studies in Japanese Negotiating Behavior, 

“to find recurring patterns in a national negotiating style is not to point to permanent 

tendencies so much as to underscore prevailing proclivities” (156).

In How Germans Negotiate: Logical Goals, Practical Solutions, W. R. Smyser examines 

German behavior in a range of situations, including official negotiations on economic and 

security issues as well as private business transactions. Across these varied cases, Smyser 

perceives some essential patterns. The most fundamental is German commitment to a 

Gesamtkonzept, a comprehensive or governing concept or foundational logic. According to 

Smyser, “Germans do not argue in immediate and specific terms, seizing principally on 

the details of any particular issue or any particular solution. Instead, they insist that any 

proposal must have a thorough foundation in logic and abstract reason” (24). Strategic 

tenacity on the basis of a Gesamtkonzept is balanced by tactical flexibility. Thus, for example, 

Germans held to the notion that a unified Germany merited a greater role in international 

financial institutions. When Germany’s first nominee to head the IMF was rejected, the 

German government offered a second nominee but did not back away from its commitment 

to the idea that Germans now belonged in the top rank of international finance. It is this 

commitment to an underlying conceptual premise that “distinguishes negotiations with 

Germans from negotiations with others” (89).

In anticipation of negotiating with Germans, Smyser offers two pieces of advice. First, 

be very well prepared, knowing the facts and logic of one’s own position thoroughly and the 

Germans’ position equally well. Second, expect to negotiate in logical terms and be able to 

show how your proposal has a logical basis.

Negotiations with Japanese have a very different quality. In Case Studies in Japanese 

Negotiating Behavior, Michael Blaker, Paul Giarra, and Ezra Vogel explore four cases of 

extended U.S.-Japanese negotiations over trade and security issues: orange imports (1977–88), 

rice imports (1986–93), the development of the FSX fighter aircraft (1985–89), and the U.S.-

Japan Security Relationship (1991–96). Across these cases, the authors identify several 

significant features of Japanese negotiating style.

A first observation is that Japanese prefer to avoid or minimize negotiations. Thus, for 

example, “the Japanese government’s dearest wish in the negotiations over rice imports (and, 

indeed, orange imports) was not to enter negotiations in the first place” (62). Negotiations 

tend to be slow (hence the extended time frames of each case study), with the Japanese aiming to limit the scope of discussion and taking very cautious, noninnovative, defensive, or 

reactive positions, pursuing only incremental change. 

Why is this so? The authors point to the imperative of maintaining harmony within Japanese culture, despite a fragmented and pluralistic society that is mirrored in dispersed power 

among different branches of government bureaucracy. The search for harmony in a vertically 

organized but horizontally competitive environment puts enormous importance on internal 

consensus building, which can be very time-consuming. In Japan, in contrast to Germany, 

“decisions are thus not so much reached by a logical analysis of options as arranged by the 

interests and relative power of the various actors. Effective Japanese leaders are consensus 

builders, able to figure out how to accommodate the interests of each group or to compensate 

those groups whose interests are harmed by an agreement” (9). 

Partly because of the Japanese drive to build an internal consensus, “negotiation is not 

seen as a legitimate clash of different points of view but as a failure of the consensus process. 

International negotiation is to some extent not negotiation at all but an attempt to carry out 

the domestic agreements reached by a consensus-building process” (10). In his conclusion to 

the volume, Patrick Cronin offers this summary of the quality of U.S.-Japanese negotiations,

in the hope that future negotiators will enter talks with greater understanding and sensitivity: 

“Whereas American negotiators conceive of negotiating, in its simplest form, as a dialectical 

process—two competing views clashing to reach a compromise—the Japanese tend to see 

negotiation as the art of explanation, attempting to bring outsiders to understand and accommodate an unyielding internal consensus” (150).

W. R. Smyser

How Germans Negotiate: Logical 

Goals, Practical Solutions

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2003

35
Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation

Asociety emerging from conflict must strive to establish a shared truth, achieve justice, 

and foster reconciliation if it is to escape self-perpetuating cycles of violence and victimization. This is no easy task. There are myriad ways to continue to blame or dehumanize 

the other, to miscarry justice, and to generate shallow or false reconciliation. Fortunately, there 

are also many different ways of overcoming or avoiding those obstacles to building a lasting 

peace. 

As they grapple with the concepts of truth, justice, and reconciliation, grantees assess 

numerous efforts to translate such concepts into post-conflict practice. They examine a 

wide variety both of cases (Peru, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Asia-Pacific, and 

the former Yugoslavia) and of mechanisms (among them, truth commissions, court cases, 

international tribunals, transnational courts, and amnesty). Grantees also dissect the processes 

of forgiveness and reconciliation and discover a number of key ingredients as well as several 

disturbing dilemmas, not least for the victims of violence. 

Clearly, there is no single recipe for success, but there are a number of elements that must 

be factored into every effort to foster truth, justice, or reconciliation. One such element—

emphasized by many grantees—is time. None of the initiatives analyzed by grantees promised 

or achieved swift results; even court cases typically take years rather than months to unfold, 

and their ripple effects take many more years to work their way through the affected societies. 

Furthermore, in many situations it may actually be wise to let time pass before even attempting 

to confirm truth, redress injustice, or initiate reconciliation. To make matters yet more complex, 

the challenges of truth, justice, and reconciliation appear to endure. Even a successful postconflict process cannot be expected to settle these issues once and for all. Success consists in 

handling them constructively in each iteration.

Truth Commissions: Dispelling Obliviousness in Peru

Truth commissions are frequently the sites of efforts to construct a shared understanding 

of recent history and put an end to inflammatory myths and the self-serving ignorance or 

denial that can feed further cycles of violence. A shared understanding of the past helps a 

society to cohere as a whole that acknowledges and respects all its members.

The film State of Fear, produced by Paco de Onis, records the efforts to establish truth following twenty years of terror in Peru. The film recounts the brutality of the Shining Path terrorist group, the state’s excessively militarized response, and the complacency of much of Peruvian 

society, as investigated by Peru’s truth commission.

The revolutionary movement Shining Path formed in the impoverished Peruvian highlands in the 1970s. Over time it pursued a strategy of violence and terror in the rural Andes, the 

Amazon, and eventually Peru’s cities. The government countered with an aggressive military 

response that included massive violations of human rights and broad repression. The military 

action was ill informed, counterproductive (arming indigenous communities, which fed the 

violence), and ineffectual. It was coupled with a dismantling of democratic institutions as the 

congress was dissolved, the judiciary lost its independence, and mass arrests and preventive 

detention became widespread. Twenty years of political violence left seventy thousand dead 

and a vast record of human rights violations and destruction of the rule of law. 

One motif of the film is the government’s manipulation of the fear of terrorism in order to 

enhance its own power. For years after the Shining Path’s leader was captured and the movement defeated, the government continued to use the threat of terrorism to concentrate its power 

and justify its abuses. Its excesses eventually included gross financial corruption and electoral 

fraud, leading to its popular overthrow.

F5ive

Paco de Onis 

State of Fear

New York: Skylight Pictures, 2005 

36
Another motif of State of Fear is the chasms within Peruvian society. Prior to the emergence 

of Shining Path, the upper classes in the capital city of Lima were unaware of and unconcerned 

about the extreme poverty, exploitation, and exclusion suffered by much of the population. 

Once the revolutionary movement was active, the upper classes were willfully ignorant or permissive of the human right violations the government perpetrated in response. A member of 

the government and representative of the educated upper class describes herself as having been 

“comfortably oblivious,” first of the suffering and then of the scale of repression. A leader of 

the human rights movement that sought to document atrocities and human right violations as 

they were occurring laments, “There was very little we could accomplish in a society that wasn’t 

listening.” Both individuals eventually participated in Peru’s truth commission. 

A Travesty of Justice in Croatia

Efforts to achieve justice and accountability frequently—but not exclusively—occur via court 

cases, whether conducted domestically, internationally, or transnationally. The film Lora, by 

Factum (a documentary production company) and B92 (a radio station), concerns a local court 

case addressing torture in a prison in Split, Croatia. From 1992 to 1996, some fifteen hundred 

prisoners—a mix of soldiers from the Yugoslav National Army and Serbian and Montenegrin 

civilians living in Split—were jailed without arrest warrants or indictments and subjected to 

barbaric torture and other inhuman treatment in the Lora Prison. Sixty to seventy individuals 

were killed. The film covers the attempt in 2002 to prosecute eight members of the Croatian 

Military Police who were among those immediately responsible for two deaths. 

The local court case is a cynical travesty, with the judge expressing his certitude of the 

defendants’ innocence and castigating the media and human rights organizations as “agents 

of Serbian counterintelligence.” Local officials make “humanitarian” visits to the imprisoned 

defendants and express hope for their immediate release, and witnesses are threatened and intimidated. Former prisoners who had escaped the region refuse to return to testify in the case, 

as their personal safety is clearly at risk. All eight defendants are found innocent, although a 

higher court overturns the lower court’s ruling and demands they be returned to custody. Two 

of the defendants have already left the area, and the judge, who must sign documents for their 

recapture, has gone on vacation; according to the local officials, he cannot be found.

The film has three intertwining elements. One is direct testimony. Numerous former prisoners recount the horrors, describing the tortures they experienced or witnessed and exhibiting 

their scars, both physical and psychological. High-ranking Croatian military officials completely deny the events at Lora Prison and assert that all the evidence is fabricated. A second 

element is the conventional, contemporaneous television news coverage of the progress of the 

trial and its outcome, reported without commentary. The third element, interspersed throughout the film, is an elder Croat man in ethnic costume. He plays a folk instrument and sings the 

many verses of a song of ethnic hatred for all Serbians and of the victimization of Croatia. In 

this context, Lora Prison conveys the incapacity of a local court to pursue or achieve justice.

Justice in Yugoslavia Undercut by International Actors

Peace with Justice? War Crimes and Accountability in the Former Yugoslavia, by Paul R. Williams 

and Michael P. Scharf, explores a failure to pursue justice at the international level. In the 

authors’ assessment, international efforts to foster peace in the former Yugoslavia needlessly 

jettisoned justice. Too often, these authors argue, international negotiators made a false 

dichotomy between peace and justice and acted to ensure peace without a commitment to 

justice—thus undermining the stability of the peace achieved. Williams and Scharf charge 

international negotiators with readily accepting falsehoods and propaganda (about ancient 

hatreds or the equal responsibility of all sides) put forth by perpetrators of violence and 

including war criminals (such as Slobodan Milosovic) as essential and legitimate partners in 

peace negotiations. 

37

Factum and B92 

Lora

Croatia, 2004

Paul R. Williams and

Michael P. Scharf 

Peace with Justice? War Crimes 

and Accountability in the Former 

Yugoslavia

New York: Palgrave, 2002
38

Williams and Scharf further discuss the weaknesses of the International Criminal 

Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, attributing them to its undercutting by international actors. They note, for example, the refusal of the United States and Britain to 

cooperate with the tribunal, specifically by withholding evidence obtained by wiretaps, 

electronic surveillance, and satellite photography that would have facilitated Milosevic’s indictment for war crimes in Bosnia. Because Ambassador Richard Holbrooke held 

that “you can’t make peace without President Milosevic,” justice was obstructed for the 

sake of reaching an accommodationist peace. 

International actors also undercut local efforts to achieve justice. The 1996 Rules of 

the Road Agreement, devised by Holbrooke and Milosevic following the Dayton Peace 

Accords, hampered domestic prosecutions by requiring local police officers to send all 

information and evidence concerning suspected war criminals to the tribunal prosecutor’s office for review. Arrest of an individual could occur only when the prosecutor’s 

office indicated in writing to the local authorities that sufficient evidence existed to 

proceed further, resulting in the immediate need to review more than sixteen hundred 

cases from Bosnia and Croatia—and an insuperable bottleneck at the prosecutor’s office. 

Cases could not be pursued effectively, and local authorities resented being bypassed 

and shut out. Thus, according to Williams and Scharf, “the effect of the Rules of the 

Road Agreement was to entirely override the domestic legal structure in the area of war 

crimes” (119). At every level, these authors see missed opportunities to establish truth, 

prosecute justice, and begin a process of genuine reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia. 

Transnational Courts: Prosecuting Pinochet

Transnational courts—that is, national courts acting under universal jurisdiction to prosecute 

crimes against humanity occurring in other nations—are other possible fora for post-conflict 

justice. These are the subject of Naomi Roht-Arriaza’s The Pinochet Effect: Transitional Justice in 

the Age of Human Rights. Each legal forum has its limitations. Local courts may lack either the 

capacity or the political protection to pursue trials of powerful violators. International tribunals 

are costly, relatively inaccessible, and rare, dependent on an unusual expression of international 

political will. Transnational court cases have raised concerns about the validity of universal 

jurisdiction, but they also offer significant opportunities to pursue justice, even where they 

have not resulted in final verdicts.

As Roht-Arriaza explains, the Chilean military had denied the report of the country’s truth 

and reconciliation commission, never publicly acknowledging any institutional responsibility for the human rights violations and crimes committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. It 

granted itself amnesty and immunity from prosecution. In such a context, Chilean courts were 

unable or unwilling to act. 

Then, in 1998, former dictator Pinochet traveled to Britain for medical care. There a Spanish 

judge served him with an indictment for violations of human rights of Spanish citizens who 

had resided in Chile. Roht-Arriaza recounts the twists and turns of this episode: the action and 

inaction of the governments of Britain, Spain, and Chile; the efforts of international networks of 

exiles and activists; the significance of the personalities and styles of some key actors; the mix 

of careful strategies and happenstance; the consequential tactical errors and victories; and the 

side effects of concurrent political battles. 

Ultimately, Pinochet was deemed too ill to stand trial and was permitted to return to Chile. 

The case did not have a formal legal outcome, but, as Roht-Arriaza’s title suggests, it had an 

immense impact—not only on the vulnerability of this particular dictator (“Within the space 

of less than a year, Pinochet had gone from untouchable to the most complained-against man 

in Chile, facing years of charges” [85]), but also on the Chilean courts, the concept of universal 

jurisdiction, and the understanding of transitional justice.

Roht-Arriaza identifies several positive aspects of transnational court cases. One is their 

notable accessibility to victims and survivors, to exile and diaspora communities, and to huNaomi Roht-Arriaza 

The Pinochet Effect: Transitional 

Justice in the Age of Human Rights

Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2005
39

man rights activists and lawyers. With references to cases in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, 

Chad, Congo, and Suriname, she demonstrates that these actors are not passive, waiting to 

be called by prosecutors driving the litigation. Rather, they are agents, mastering the court 

systems of other countries, offering to testify, gathering evidence, and building networks. The 

decentralized structure of such courts, in contrast to international tribunals, has facilitated such 

participation, breaking the isolation and silence of victims and fostering their empowerment. 

Thus, Roht-Arriaza suggests, transnational court cases can have a significant impact even when 

they do not result in final verdicts.

Similarly, the lack of final verdicts has not impeded transnational court cases from making 

substantial contributions to the essential task of establishing the truth. 

“The criminal investigations,” she writes,

acted in part like declaratory judgments: a way to put the evidence together, to have 

it evaluated by an expert and publicly validated in judicial pronouncements. In that 

sense, they share with truth commissions, “truth trials,” and other types of sanctions 

an emphasis on telling the story. They provide a nice illustration of the argument that 

it is fair process, at least as much as outcome, that determines victim satisfaction with 

a judicial process. (214)

A third significant aspect of transnational cases is that they encourage change in 

domestic courts. This transformation occurs via many routes. National courts may be shamed 

or politically embarrassed by transnational cases into taking action. Powerful individuals 

opposing or obstructing the activity of national courts may be politically weakened by being 

subject to trial elsewhere. National courts may also be able to build on evidence gathered, 

testimony collected, and arguments pursued in other courts. In many ways, transnational 

court cases can strengthen domestic courts. Thus, Roht-Arriaza affirms, far from competing 

with, superseding, or obviating domestic efforts, “the very success of the foreign investigations 

changes the domestic conditions that give rise to them and the attitudes of the actors involved” 

(195). In the Pinochet case, the Spanish court’s “investigation affected Chile’s political and 

judicial processes profoundly, speeding up and strengthening already existing tendencies and 

serving as a catalyst for change” (85).

Roht-Arriaza summarizes the transformative power of transnational cases in achieving 

justice:

The power of these cases does not come solely, or even, I suggest, mainly, from the 

capacity to capture errant dictators and torturers. Nor does it come from the possible 

salutary deterrent effects, either on atrocities or, at the least, on post-atrocity travel. In 

any case, these effects are next to impossible to measure in more than anecdotal terms. 

Rather, the primary value lies in the ability of a transnational investigation to prompt 

investigations and prosecutions at home. Through focusing world attention, through 

forcing the government to defend its judiciary, through empowering and strengthen-

ing domestic human rights lawyers and activists, transnational prosecutions time and 

time again have jumpstarted stalled or non-existent processes of accountability. (223)

A further issue addressed by Roht-Arriaza is the timing of efforts to pursue justice and 

their many iterations. In a number of instances, governments have decreed the end of a transi-

tion, sealed cases, established amnesties, or issued final reports—only to have the unresolved 

or untouched issues rise again. Offering as examples the decades that intervened before some 

Nazi prosecutions, France’s admissions of collaboration, Spain’s apologies to Franco’s victims, 

or U.S. payment of reparations to interned Japanese, Roht-Arriaza suggests that calls for justice 

may be periodic or cyclical, perhaps corresponding to generational change. It may be, she suggests, “that at least some aspects of justice prove easier to attain after time has distanced the 

actors, and the society, from the events in question” (221).
40

Time, Revelation, and Reconciliation in South Africa

Ronald C. Slye addresses the timing of efforts to achieve justice in post-conflict settings. Slye 

offers insights on the passage of time, the characteristics of amnesty, and the conditions for 

reconciliation in South Africa in four essays: “Amnesty, Truth, and Reconciliation: Reflections on 

the South African Amnesty Process” (in Truth Versus Justice), “Justice and Amnesty” (in Looking 

Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa), 

“International Law, Human Rights Beneficiaries, and South Africa: Some Thoughts on the Utility 

of International Human Rights Law” (in Chicago Journal of International Law), and “Amnesty” (in 

Truths Drawn in Jest). In each essay, Slye explores the particular quality of the amnesty process 

in South Africa and its impact on the goals of truth and reconciliation. In his definition, truth is 

a society’s shared understanding of its past, while reconciliation requires accountability and the 

creation of a human rights culture that values human dignity and the rule of law. 

In many historical cases, amnesties have not contributed to truth. Rather, they have 

actually concealed facts, obstructed inquiry, and prevented accountability. The South African 

amnesty, however, was innovative because revelation was its main purpose. It had three requirements: that the applicant make full disclosure, that the act for which amnesty was sought 

be associated with a political objective, and that the act was not committed for personal gain or 

from personal malice. 

The amnesty hearings in South Africa revealed an enormous amount of information. 

“There is no doubt,” affirms Slye, “that the quantity, and probably also the quality, of the 

information elicited from the amnesty hearings was higher that what would have been elicited 

from criminal trials” (“Amnesty, Truth, and Reconciliation,” 177). Indeed, a significant amount 

of the material in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came from the 

amnesty hearings.

Nonetheless, the South African amnesty process is problematic. Of the three requirements 

for amnesty, that of a political objective has proved the trickiest. The privileging of specifically 

political crimes and political violence has weakened the moral legitimacy of the process, which 

is seen to disregard many other aspects of injustice. And in practice, evidence of a political 

objective has often been reduced to whether the perpetrator was following a superior’s orders, thus reintroducing a defense discarded after World War II at Nuremburg, where judges 

affirmed that every individual is a moral being, responsible for his or her own actions. In fact, 

few political superiors in South Africa have taken responsibility for ordering atrocities. This 

has weakened the legal legitimacy of the process. Thus, although valuable, the South African 

amnesty still raises troubling questions about the relationship between amnesty, accountability, and justice. Reviewing South African political cartoons, Slye observes an undercurrent of 

uncertainty. Does amnesty provide justice or prevent it? Might amnesty be “part of a transformative process towards a new and better form of justice for a new and better South Africa?” 

(“Amnesty,” 101).

That question can be answered only by the passage of time, a process Slye reflects 

on further. He considers, for example, myths of French resistance that took decades to be 

challenged and countered by recognition of the degree of French collaboration with the 

Nazis. On the one hand, recurring controversies over the extent of the complicity by Western 

nations with the Nazis suggests that the perpetuation of such myths, in attempting to achieve 

reconciliation at the cost of truth, is bound to fail. Myths do not put these matters to rest. On 

the other hand, Slye suggests, perhaps the myths were necessary for the creation of a stable 

and democratic postwar French government and were thus socially useful. Evaluating the 

two paths—myth creation versus immediate disclosure—is difficult. We cannot know what 

sort of society France would have become if the truth of Vichy France had been revealed and 

discussed in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Nor do we know the long-term effects 

of the delayed revelations. 

These insights lead Slye to consider how best to combine the sometimes competing goals 

of confronting the past and moving forward. He concludes that “reconciliation requires that 

Ronald C. Slye

n “Amnesty, Truth, and 

Reconciliation: Reflections on 

the South African Amnesty 

Process” (in Truth Versus Justice)

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 

University Press 

n “Justice and Amnesty” (in 

Looking Back, Reaching 

Forward: Reflections on the 

Truth and Reconciliation 

Commission of South Africa)

London: Zed Books, 2000

n “Human Rights Beneficiaries, 

and South Africa: Some 

Thoughts on the Utility of 

International Human Rights 

Law” 

Chicago Journal of International Law 

2, no. 1 (Spring, 2000)

n “Amnesty” (in Truths Drawn 

in Jest)

South Africa: David Philip, 2000
41

the goals of both law and history be met: that some form of accountability (legal judgment) and 

understanding (historical judgment) be combined. An amnesty process like South Africa’s is 

the closest thing we have yet seen to achieve the goals of both disciplines” (“Amnesty,” 79).

The Process of Forgiveness

The challenges of reconciliation are engaged from a very broad perspective in Forgiveness in 

International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace by William Bole, Drew Christiansen, and

Robert T. Hennemeyer. On an explicitly sociopolitical, rather than interpersonal, plane, 

the authors offer a fourfold definition of forgiveness involving truth, empathy, forbearance, 

and a commitment to repair broken relationships. The four elements are not sequential, and 

forgiveness is a process, not an isolated act or event. The element of moral truth presupposes a 

judgment by the victim that an objectively moral wrong has been committed knowingly and 

freely against one’s self or group by a responsible agent. Thus past evil is not denied, ignored, 

excused, or forgotten. Via empathy, the victim acknowledges the humanity of enemies, even 

in their commission of dehumanizing deeds. The perpetrator is not defined by his or her 

evil actions. The element of forbearance refuses revenge. Although punishment is possible, 

the victim reaches a decision not to be governed by revenge. Forgiveness is compatible with 

justice, but not with vengeance. The fourth element is the commitment to repair a fractured 

relationship and a willingness to coexist.

The authors emphasize that victims should not be pressured to forgive out of some sense 

of social utility. They also urge advocates of forgiveness to be mindful that “forgiveness in 

politics takes place in politics. The transactions may derive from transcendent values such 

as truth and empathy; but once transported to the political realm, they become subject to the 

uncertainties of that realm, the ambiguities of judgment and possibilities of miscalculation or 

unintended consequences” (82).

The authors offer lessons learned from their review of or involvement in many processes 

of reconciliation, including in Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Among them are 

that shared historical truths should be established and memory should be managed so that it 

does not become mythohistory; corporate apologies must include acknowledgment, repentance, 

and restitution; eventual reconciliation requires an atmosphere of forgiveness at the societal as 

well as the interpersonal level; and a culture of forgiveness requires not only effective conflict 

resolution but also sociolegal mechanisms that facilitate respect for human rights, social peace, 

and equitable development.

The Ingredients of Reconciliation

Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific, edited by Yoichi Funabashi, takes up these themes and lessons in the Asian context. The volume explores seven case studies of the need for reconciliation within or between Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, East Timor, and Australia. 

Contributors to this volume are quite cognizant of the importance of time in achieving 

reconciliation and the lingering problems that arise from a failure to address historical issues. 

Disputes over history textbooks and public memorials continue to aggravate relations between and within nations in Asia, as does the lack of prosecution for crimes against humanity. Funabashi emphasizes that the challenge of facing history and achieving reconciliation is 

a task not only for newly democratizing countries, but for established democracies as well. 

Reviewing the need for reconciliation in several cases in Asia, Funabashi arrives at 

several lessons. Reconciliation, in his view, defies any universal formula, but must be built 

on specific circumstances. It is also a long process—so it is best to begin as soon as possible. 

And it must be a joint effort of victims and perpetrators. Funabashi affirms that human rights 

violations are a universal human experience. Thus one needn’t look for the causes of historical 

problems in the particular traits of another ethnic or national group; no one has a monopoly 

on either cruelty or suffering. And a realistic approach is better than an excess of idealism. As 

Yoichi Funabashi 

Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace, 2003

William Bole, Drew Christiansen, 

and Robert T. Hennemeyer 

Forgiveness in International 

Politics: An Alternative Road to 

Peace

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004
42

Funabashi reflects, a view of human beings as “neither fundamentally evil nor fundamentally 

good but rather fundamentally weak is a productive one” (179). Political leadership is key, but 

individual initiative is also essential. Each person should take a fresh look at history, learn and 

teach the truth, and examine whether past injustices are sources of continuing political and 

economic injustice and disparities. If so, appropriate efforts should be made redress them and 

enhance dialogue and exchange. Cultivating democracy and encouraging multilateralism and 

regionalism will also facilitate reconciliation. Finally, Funabashi affirms, citizens’ behavior 

should project the nation they hope to build. “The manner in which a nation faces up to history 

reflects what kind of country it wants to be and how its people . . . want to be remembered by 

future generations” (183).

While Funabashi and the other contributors to this volume discuss reconciliation at the 

level of international relations, they also attend to the personal pain of violation and the healing experience of forgiveness. Funabashi, for example, ultimately describes reconciliation as 

requiring “the kind of grace that in individuals arises at the intersection of heartfelt remorse 

and heartfelt forgiveness” (183). 

Victims of Violence and Denial in Northern Ireland

Intimate experiences of violence and trauma are the subject of Personal Accounts from 

Northern Ireland’s Troubles: Public Conflict, Private Loss, edited by Marie Smyth and MarieTherese Fay. This collection of fourteen oral histories includes survivors, family members, 

witnesses, police, and paramilitary members who have been deeply and directly affected by 

the violence in Northern Ireland—whether the Catholic-Protestant conflict, disputes within 

different factions, or local groups imposing order and punishments on their own people. 

Victims of shootings and bombings frequently remark on the inadequacy of the posttrauma 

treatment they received, which generally consisted of being sedated and left alone. They 

also discuss the continued sense of threat from either a generalized sense of insecurity and 

paranoia or the knowledge that the known perpetrators remain in the community. And 

many feel themselves to be neglected, ignored, or forgotten. Reflecting on the process of 

collecting these oral histories, the editors note that the individuals “barely needed our 

questions, they only required our attention” (3). In their conclusion, Smyth and Fay express 

their anger over the “denial and disassociation” with which many in Northern Ireland react 

to the troubles.

Dilemmas of Reconciliation in South Africa and Rwanda

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela also grapples with the chasm between personal experience 

and general societal attitudes, particularly in confronting evil directly or finding the means 

to reconcile. As a psychologist who grew up in a black township and later served on South 

Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Gobodo-Madikizela explores the complex 

dynamics of post-conflict reconciliation. In A Human Being Died That Night: A South African 

Story of Forgiveness, she reflects on her own reactions in interviewing Eugene de Kock. Known 

as “Prime Evil,” de Kock was the commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads under 

the apartheid regime. He is currently serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity. 

Gobodo-Madikizela conducted several interviews with de Kock in Pretoria’s maximum 

security prison and uses the experience to explore the nature of evil, remorse, and empathy, as 

well as the proposition that individuals and societies could transcend hate and former enemies 

could live as neighbors. 

About this individual perpetrator, she wonders, “Was evil intrinsic to de Kock, and 

forgiveness therefore wasted on him?” (15). This leads her to ask, “Does knowing that you are 

wrong and persisting in it reveal a greater depth of moral decadence (or psychic damage) than 

having the kind of malfunctioning ethical compass that makes you unable even to realize that

you are wrong? Which kind of individual is the more redeemable?” (67). 

Marie Smyth and

Marie-Therese Fay

Personal Accounts from Northern 

Ireland’s Troubles: Public Conflict, 

Private Loss

London: Pluto Press, 2000

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

A Human Being Died That Night: A 

South African Story of Forgiveness

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003
43

The encounter with de Kock forces Gobodo-Madikizela to question herself. At one point, 

de Kock begins to exhibit remorse: trembling and weeping, in a breaking voice he expresses the 

wish to bring back the people he has murdered. “Relating to him in the only way one does in 

such human circumstances,” she writes, “I touched his shaking hand, surprising myself” (32). 

She then immediately recoils and finds herself deeply disturbed and confused. “I felt guilt for 

having expressed even momentary sympathy and wondered if my heart had actually crossed 

the moral line from compassion, which allows one to maintain a measure of distance, to actually identifying with de Kock” (32).

Such experiences inform Gobodo-Madikizela’s analysis of the psychological dilemmas 

faced by victims. She writes of powerlessness as “the affliction of the traumatized.” Thus, some 

victims, unused to being able to claim their rights, may be unable to express their rage at the 

perpetrator even when the perpetrator no longer poses a danger. Yet the act of forgiveness may 

be empowering. Gobodo-Madikizela observes: 

Although forgiveness is often regarded as an expression of weakness, the decision 

to forgive can paradoxically elevate a victim to a position of strength as the one who 

holds the key to the perpetrator’s wish. For just at the moment when the perpetrator 

begins to show remorse, to seek some way to ask forgiveness, the victim becomes the 

gatekeeper to what the outcast desires—readmission into the human community. And 

the victim retains that privileged status as long as he or she stays the moral course, 

refusing to sink to the level of the evil that was done to her or to him. (117)

Her analysis continues with careful attention to the concept of dialogue between victim 

and perpetrator as a step toward reconstituting society. Dialogue, she writes, 

humanizes the dehumanized and confronts perpetrators with their inhumanity. 

Through dialogue, victims as well as the greater society come to recognize perpetrators as human beings who failed morally, whether through coercion, the perverted 

convictions of a warped mind, or fear. Far from relieving the pressure on them, recognizing the most serious criminals as human intensifies it, because society is thereby 

able to hold them to greater moral accountability. Indeed, demonizing as monsters 

those who commit evil lets them off too easily. (117)

A sustained, engaged dialogue can transform the perpetrator from the demonic to the 

forgiven by creating the conditions for the perpetrator to confront the truth “that all along, 

he knew that he was human and knew right from wrong. The act of humanizing is therefore 

at once both punishment and rehabilitation” (120). And a perpetrator’s remorse can 

revalidate a victim’s pain, “in a sense, giving his or her humanity back” (128). Often the 

victim then takes the further step of forgiveness, not out of altruism or commitment to higher 

principles but as part of the process of becoming rehumanized. The victim needs to forgive, 

she writes, 

in order to complete himself or herself and to wrest away from the perpetrator the fiat 

power to destroy or to spare. It is part of the power of reclaiming self-efficacy. Reciprocating with empathy and forgiveness in the face of a perpetrator’s remorse restores 

to many victims the sense that they are once again capable of effecting a profound 

difference in the moral community. . . . Far from being an unnerving proposition and 

a burdensome moral sacrifice, then, compassion for many is deeply therapeutic and 

restorative. (128–29)

But empathy and forgiveness are difficult. Gobodo-Madikizela attests that people distance 

themselves through anger from those who have harmed them because of the fear that “if 

we engage them as real people, we will be compromising our moral stance and lowering the 
44

entry requirements into the human community” (120). This, she realizes, is the source of her 

own intense discomfort with the empathy she felt for de Kock at the moment she reached 

for his hand. She also observes the discomfort of many of her friends and colleagues when 

she discusses her prison conversations. Many are inclined to surmise that she is personally 

fascinated by de Kock, or even romantically attracted to him. These are more comfortable, 

acceptable conclusions than the prospect of compassion toward such an evil person. They make 

it possible for Gobodo-Madikizela’s listeners to continue to distance and insulate themselves. 

“Confronting on a human level with a monster,” she acknowledges, is “a profoundly 

frightening prospect, for ultimately, it forces us to confront the potential for evil within 

ourselves” (123).

As imperative as the process of forgiveness is for victims and perpetrators alike, it is not 

all there is to societal reconciliation. “The question,” according to Gobodo-Madikizela, “is no 

longer whether victims can forgive ‘evildoers’ but whether we—our symbols, language, and 

politics, our legal, media, and academic institutions—are creating conditions that encourage alternatives to revenge” (118). Further, “true social transformation—and healing of victims—will 

come about only if the issues of economic justice and the myriad problems that postapartheid 

South Africa faces are addressed” (126). 

Two films by Anne Aghion approach the tentative, complex, and unfinished dynamics of 

reconciliation in Rwanda. They examine the gacaca process, citizen-based tribunals established 

because the formal judicial system in Rwanda had no capacity to adjudicate more than 100,000 

imprisoned for their role in the 1994 genocide. Under the gacaca system, leaders of the genocide 

and those who have committed sexual crimes are held for trials, but other prisoners, numbering in the tens of thousands, who have confessed their guilt are released to their communities 

to reconcile and rebuild. 

Aghion’s first film, Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? gathers testimony from survivors and prisoners from the hillside district of Ntongwe in anticipation of gacaca. The second 

film, In Rwanda We Say . . . the Family That Does Not Speak Dies, resumes the story as prisoners 

are released. Returning to the same hillside hamlet, the film follows the impact of the prisoners’ reintegration on this community. Neither film attempts to provide analysis or formal 

interpretation; rather the footage and the testimony speak for themselves. 

Both films include many expressions of survivors’ sense of powerlessness and rage. Many 

scoff at the impunity enabled by the system: “You kill, confess, get three years, come out and kill 

again.” They also express a sense of futility about their own role in gacaca: “I didn’t have him 

imprisoned, nor did I have him released,” says one villager. Another asks, “You think a poor 

farmer has any say?” Several express a sense of insecurity: If they denounce someone, they fear 

they will be subject to baseless denunciations. And many are frustrated by the process of publicly presenting prisoners, feeling “it was impossible to speak” at the public meetings.

Many prisoners, including those who have confessed, express denial or a lack of responsibility. One says, “I was told to confess, to not make waves.” Another hedges, “I ask forgiveness 

for the crimes I was forced to commit. I have a clear conscience.” Accused of killing a woman’s 

husband and stealing her two cows, a prisoner immediately counters: “I just picked up a stray. I 

paid for it.” Some prisoners assert a strange equivalence with their own predicament: “If people 

were killed without reason, you can see that people could be imprisoned without reason.” 

Others discount the accusations, saying that heavy-hearted survivors charge anyone who is 

available: “We were hauled off for no reason, due to their pain.”

The gacaca system appears overly bureaucratized. Officials and scribes record details in 

triplicate, asking for exact addresses and dates and lists of implements used as weapons. Rarely 

do the officials look the accused in the eyes in such sessions. The focus appears to be on the 

bureaucratic act of record keeping, rather than the moral act of confession. In a public session, 

when the prisoners are presented to the community one at a time, the justice official urges the 

village to accept a prisoner, saying: “He’s had the courage to confess. . . . He’ll return here and 

he’ll help rebuild Rwanda.” The official turns to the prisoner, saying, “You are very brave.” The 

camera then catches the face of a survivor in the crowd who has recounted the murder of his 

Anne Aghion

n Gacaca, Living Together Again 

in Rwanda

New York: Gacaca Productions, 

2002

n In Rwanda We Say . . . the 

Family That Does Not Speak 

Dies 

Brooklyn, N.Y.: First Run/Icarus 

Films, 2004
45

entire family by this man and his accomplices. As the official praises the bravery of the con-

fessed killer, the survivor turns and looks away. 

Aghion’s films show innumerable expressions of profound pain and despair. Having 

witnessed the murder of his father, one youth speaks of feeling that his brain is affected. He 

has dreamt of the murder ever since. A woman tells how the perpetrators pulled her child off 

her back to beat the child to death. She knows the killers have returned to her community. “Let 

them come again,” she says. “Let them kill me. Who would stop them? There’s no one left. Let 

them kill me. I’m already dead.” 

Throughout the films, children are a striking presence. They run in the grass, dance in 

the rain, play hopscotch, or wrestle one another, and they are within hearing of all that is 

expressed. One leans against the knee of an adult as he recounts killing a child. Another is 

by the side of the woman as she describes her baby being pulled off her back. In light of what 

many grantees have had to say about the passage of time, one wonders how these children will 

handle the next round of justice and reconciliation. 

After his release and return to the hillside village, the prisoner the film follows most 

closely offers a very different perspective on his presence from that of the survivors in the 

village. He explains that if he were to go to the homes of his accusers, they would think he was 

there to commit further wrongs. But if he just meets them on the path, at the bar, from time to 

time in a simple chat, then this sense will gradually vanish. On the other hand, his neighbors 

whose family members the released prisoner has killed express the opposite sentiment. “The 

worst part,” one says, “is that we meet every day, on the path, at the well.” Another observes: 

“They said they would come to ask forgiveness, but none has come to darken my door. My 

brother’s killer is a neighbor. He has never come.”

There are many enigmatic moments in these films. They preserve a contemporary record 

of the ongoing gacaca and the larger process of reconciliation in Rwanda. Aghion is at work on 

a third film.
Faith in Conflict and Peace

The relationship between religion and conflict is marked by dichotomies. Religious faith 

can, for instance, enflame sectarian hatreds and perpetuate cycles of violence, but it 

can also inspire people to turn away from violence, transcend conflict, and envision a 

peaceful future. In a similarly dualistic fashion, faith can inform grand perspectives on war 

and peace, but it can also provide a framework for very practical methods of peacebuilding in 

very specific cases.

These and other dichotomies feature prominently in the work of grantees as they explore 

some of the many ways that religious faith frames, obstructs, inspires, and enables peace. 

Some grantees take a very broad view, examining the complex interaction between war, peace, 

and religious perspectives over the course of millennia, in numerous countries, and within 

several religious traditions. Others focus on that interaction within a single country, yet still 

discover—as in the case of Guatemala—enormous diversity that defies simple generalizations 

about the relationship between politics and faith. Understandably, Islam attracts significant 

attention, both because of the association between its radical wing and contemporary 

terrorism and because of its rich trove of peacebuilding practices and potential. Other forms 

of peacebuilding also interest grantees, notably the “appreciative inquiry” method, which has 

been fruitfully employed in a wide variety of settings. 

A Broad View

In A History of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim Perspectives on War and Peace, 

William J. Frost provides a comprehensive survey of views on war and peace from several 

major religious traditions. The first of two volumes, The Bible to 1914, surveys ancient history 

through World War I; the second volume, A Century of Wars, brings the study to the present. In 

each volume, Frost considers the influence of organized religion on war and peace, attending 

to theological, institutional, and social manifestations. He searches for the ways that people’s 

faith has caused or prevented wars, shortened the duration of wars, influenced their conduct, 

interpreted their meaning or significance, and shaped the subsequent peace.

Frost readily acknowledges that the uses of faith are rarely determined by a face-value 

acceptance of any theological point. “Those who wish to see their action as ethical,” he writes, 

“can easily find a text or interpretation to suit their purpose—whether their goal is saintliness, 

worldly power, absolution from guilt, or a combination of motives difficult to unpack.” In the 

case of Christianity, for instance, Frost argues that “political and religious authorities have often 

assured their followers that there is a simple Christian attitude to war and peace: believe and do 

what we tell you is right” (74). Similarly, in discussing the political uses of Buddhism and Buddhist uses of politics, he observes that “monks who accommodated the teaching of the Buddha 

to the needs of monarchy facilitated the survival and spread of Buddhism. In return kings who 

still made war to obtain power would support religious institutions, publicly accept the teachings, and use them to justify their reign, pacify the population, and promote morality” (190).

Another recurring theme of Frost’s two-volume study is the primacy for any religion of 

spiritual rather than political peace. Spiritual peace concerns a relationship with an ultimate 

reality, however the divine is manifested within different faith traditions. No political strategy 

can yield such peace. Thus, Frost writes, “to ask that the church, synagogue, ashram, or mosque 

prevent war is to misunderstand how they function in society. Getting involved in a political debate before, during, or after a war would be to divert attention from the eternal wisdom 

needed by all” (781). He concludes, “What religions alone cannot now do and could not do 

in the past is prevent or stop a war, because faith when politicized tends to lose the ability to 

transcend culture” (785).

46

S6ix

William J. Frost 

A History of Christian, Jewish, 

Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim 

Perspectives on War and Peace

Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 

2004
God’s Terrorists

Jessica Stern is also concerned with the relationship between faith and conflict, narrowing 

the focus to religiously inspired terrorists. In Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants 

Kill, she studies leaders and organizations of holy warriors. Stern identifies several types of 

organizations. In leaderless resistance networks, prominent figures inspire operatives to act on 

their own. By contrast, in commander/cadre organizations, leaders may provide orders, training, housing, salaries, payments to martyrs’ families, and punishment for disobedience. The 

different types of organization exhibit comparative advantages. Leaderless networks are more 

resilient, while commander/cadre organizations are capable of mass attacks. Stern also discusses hybrid organizations that combine various features of the leaderless and commander/cadre 

models. She observes that “the requirements for running terrorist organizations are similar to 

those of running a firm or an NGO [non-governmental organization]. Today’s multinational 

terrorist leader is an entrepreneur who brings together mission, money, and market share. He 

hires skilled and unskilled labor and often pays competitive rates” (142). 

Although Stern encounters violent militants from several religious traditions, in her view 

Muslims are more susceptible to becoming terrorists. “The notion that a new world order is 

responsible for all of societies’ ills attracts adherents all over the globe and in every religion,” 

she writes, “. . . but it has spread to large numbers only in Muslim-majority states” (286). 

Pointing to Islamist victories in elections in Algerian and Turkey, Stern suggests that promoting democracy is not necessarily the best way to counter Islamic extremism. She has several 

other proposals for a practical U.S. response. Crushing headquarters and training camps is 

ineffective, she argues, because sleeper cells are already widespread. Furthermore, violent 

repression spawns more recruits. U.S. insistence on the death penalty creates problems with 

most allies. Stern thus advocates covert action and psychological warfare, with greater emphasis on human intelligence and local languages. She notes that the United States “is not entirely 

averse to allowing other governments to use torture. Since September 11, the U.S. government 

has been discretely transporting terrorism suspects to countries that are known to torture” 

(291). Such a policy, Stern argues, should be opposed “not only for moral reasons, but for pragmatic ones as well” (291). Stern further suggests that the United States purchase the expertise 

of terrorist organizations that go out of business, develop educational alternatives to Islamic 

religious schools, improve its public relations campaigns, improve security at nuclear sites, and 

upgrade the global system for monitoring disease, since attacks with biological weapons could 

be indistinguishable from natural outbreaks of disease. She concludes: “I am not arguing in 

favor of cosmopolitanism, but rather, a smarter realpolitik approach. Even if we take no interest 

in the well-being of other states’ citizens, our long-term national security interests demand that 

we carefully consider how our policies impact terrorists’ recruitment drives” (295).

Islam and Peacebuilding

Mohammed Abu-Nimer gives extensive attention to the peacebuilding potential of Islam. 

In Non-Violence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice, he begins by noting a Western 

preconception that Islamic religion and culture are inimical to peace. As one manifestation, 

Abu-Nimer observes that the Library of Congress lists five entries under the category “Islam 

and nonviolence,” while the entries under “Islam and violence” go on for pages. This preconception, Abu-Nimer writes, is itself “an impediment to discussing and promoting nonviolence 

and peace building in Islamic nations” (2). Abu-Nimer’s aim is to move beyond a stale debate 

about whether Islam is or is not inherently inimical to peace and explore instead the myriad 

nonviolent values and methods found within Islam. He begins with a theoretical framework 

and then considers some historical cases. 

At the level of values and principles, Abu-Nimer finds much in Islam to support the application of nonviolent and peacebuilding strategies. These include the primacy of justice and 

the imperative to strive for peace through justice. Forgiveness is also a prized virtue in Islam, 

47

Mohammed Abu-Nimer

Non-Violence and Peace Building 

in Islam: Theory and Practice

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 

2003

Jessica Stern 

Terror in the Name of God: Why 

Religious Militants Kill

New York: Harper Collins, 2003
48

as are patience, solidarity, universality, and inclusiveness. An examination of Islamic texts and 

traditions yields the existence of, and even emphasis on, values that would ground the pursuit 

of peace. 

Turning to historical cases, Abu-Nimer notes first the continuing practice of traditional 

mechanisms for dispute resolution in many Arab-Muslim communities. These mechanisms 

include a role for respected local interveners and accepted methods for indicating that re-

venge will not be pursued, as well as recognized procedures for investigation, mediation, and 

compensation. Public rituals, including the reading of Qur’anic verses, mark the culmination of 

conflict resolution.

Abu-Nimer next gives his attention to recent efforts to conduct peacebuilding training 

workshops in Muslim settings. He is cognizant of many obstacles, both at what he terms the 

macrolevel of social and political structures and at the microlevel of personally held myths. At 

the macrolevel, Abu-Nimer notes the political stagnation of many Muslim countries, their lack 

of imaginative and creative political leadership, dependence on a mediocre technocracy, and 

valuation of loyalty over competence. All these factors can impede social and political progress. 

General economic impoverishment is also an obstacle to the application of peacebuilding strate-

gies, as people must devote all their efforts simply to physical survival. 

A patriarchal social structure is another major stumbling block to fostering peacebuilding 

skills. “Islamic social systems are based on male dominance in all social and political spheres,” 

he writes (116). Thus women’s contribution to social and political movements is simply lost, and 

peacebuilding strategies—which are founded on principles of equality, freedom, and respect 

for all—are sabotaged. “In many male-dominated peace-building training workshops,” AbuNimer observes, “the issues of gender relations and patriarchal system have been defined as 

taboos that are often dismissed with ironic and cynical remarks” (116). 

Obedience to and respect for hierarchy are further obstacles to peacebuilding in many 

Islamic settings. Hierarchical relationships have sometimes made it impossible to use role 

playing and simulations in peacebuilding workshops. Participants have also expressed frustra-

tion as they attempt to execute action plans in the postworkshop phase but must first gain the 

approval of managers, officers, teachers, or husbands. 

At the microlevel Abu-Nimer identifies many myths that obstruct the adoption of non-

violent and peacebuilding strategies among Muslim activists. Many workshop participants, 

for example, need to be reassured about the nature of peace—particularly that it will include 

justice, freedom, and equality and not simply be the absence of violence without justice. They 

are concerned that strategies of peacebuilding will not produce justice. Many either doubt that 

nonviolence can be an effective method of peacebuilding or see it as a Western Christian phi-

losophy rather than something that is also grounded in Islam. 

In his final case, Abu-Nimer considers the application of nonviolence within the first Inti-

fada, 1987–92. Acknowledging that this was not an entirely nonviolent movement, Abu-Nimer 

is nonetheless impressed by the level of restraint and the degree of steadfastness shown by 

Palestinians in the face of repression. Among the organized, nonviolent strategies used during 

the Intifada, Abu-Nimer notes economic, political, and social noncooperation, symbolic expres-

sions (such as flags, colors, and graffiti) of independence and resistance, and the development 

of alternative institutions through popular committees. In his view Islamic values of unity, 

solidarity, justice, forgiveness, and steadfastness reinforced the use of nonviolent strategies in 

the Intifada.

In conclusion, Abu-Nimer offers six guidelines for fostering peacebuilding skills in Muslim 

communities. First, recognize that Islam encompasses values and norms that promote peace-

building. Second, appreciate and utilize the indigenous peacebuilding practices and values in 

Muslim communities rather than importing Western models. Third, understand that peace-

building programs will “eventually run up against certain problematic core values in the socio-

cultural structures of many Muslim communities (especially in the Arab Muslim context), such 

as hierarchy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and so on,” (185) and overcome such obstacles by 

harnessing local forces for change. Fourth, design and implement projects in accordance with 
49

values derived from a specific context. Fifth, include local participants in planning and implementation, beyond mere tokenism. And sixth, see long-term conflict resolution and sustainable 

socioeconomic development as inseparable.

An Innovative Path to Peacebuilding

Mohammed Abu-Nimer is the coeditor of another book on peacebuilding, Positive Approaches 

to Peacebuilding: A Resource for Innovators. Along with fellow editors Cynthia Sampson, Claudia 

Liebler, and Diana Whitney, Abu-Nimer explores the practice of “positive approaches” to 

building peace. Although these practices originated chiefly within the field of organizational 

development, specifically for business management and leadership, they have been adopted 

and employed by many religiously inspired peacebuilders. Contributors to this volume focus 

particularly on the method of “appreciative inquiry” and offer the reflections and experiences of 

Mennonite, Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, and other faith-based peacebuilders around the world.

Many ways of confronting a difficult situation begin by trying to identify and analyze the 

problem. The technique of a problem tree asks stakeholders to name the problem they face, 

then specify the conditions that cause this problem, determine what causes these conditions, 

and identify the root causes of the problem. The method of appreciative inquiry, by contrast, 

proposes a possibility tree that asks stakeholders what dreams they have, how they can make 

those dreams happen, and what they will do to enact and sustain the dreams. 

The four recognized elements of appreciative inquiry are discovery, dream, design, and 

destiny. Discovery involves appreciating and valuing the best of what is. This is not necessarily 

“what is good” but rather “what gives life.” The underlying notion is that in all human systems 

some things work well (or once did), and these can be identified, analyzed, and built on. The 

dream phase consists of envisioning what might be and offering bold statements about ideal 

possibilities. Design involves dialoguing about what should be, especially in terms of principles 

and priorities. Destiny consists of generating what will be by taking and sustaining action. 

Appreciative Inquiry rests on several premises. One is that reality is cocreated or constructed through people’s language, thoughts, images, and beliefs about reality. The act of asking questions and the content of those questions are very influential. Questions themselves are 

seen as an act of intervention, and the type of questions asked determines the type of answers 

produced. Appreciative inquiry also holds that people manifest what they focus on and grow 

toward what they ask questions about. Appreciative inquiry is a holistic and meaning-making 

undertaking. It values storytelling as a means to convey holistic wisdom.

At times, its advocates acknowledge, appreciative inquiry may be inappropriate on its 

own or may need to be adapted to the local context. In posttraumatic settings there may be an 

imperative need to grieve. In situations of deeply held resentments, failing to name these resentments may leave them repressed. And in war zones, contributors Paula Green and Tamra 

Pearson d’Estrée observe in “The Positive Power of Voice in Peacebuilding,” 

starting with “appreciation” may seem naïve, silencing, and violating to the aggrieved 

parties. If we encourage premature appreciation, it may appear as if we as facilitators 

are collaborating with the lies, serving as partners in the denial of injury. . . . [T]o focus 

on “good news” in such contexts allows the stronger group to avoid hard questions of 

responsibility and yet feel as if they have contributed to making peace purely through 

their participation. (316)

Yet its advocates see great value in appreciative inquiry, even for “addressing structural 

and direct violence, as long as it remains dynamic and adaptive to particular contexts” (188). 

One crucial life-giving quality they identify in Appreciative Inquiry is simply the experience of 

narrative, or finding the voice to tell the lived story. “Voice,” according to Green and d’Estrée, 

“validates identity, shifts power, and restores one’s humanness. It is not just the voice of the 

speaker as victim that is critical to successful dialogue, but the recognition, acknowledgement, 

Paula Green and Tamra Pearson 

d’Estrée

“The Positive Power of Voice 

in Peacebuilding” (in Positive 

Approaches to Peacebuilding: A 

Resource for Innovators)

Washington, D.C.: Pact Publications, 

2003

Cynthia Sampson, Mohammed 

Abu-Nimer, Claudia Liebler, and

Diana Whitney, editors

Positive Approaches to 

Peacebuilding: A Resource for 

Innovators

Washington, D.C.: Pact Publications, 

2003
50

and validation of that victimhood by the listener, especially when the listener is part of the perpetrating community” (317). Besides, its advocates argue, in almost all settings appreciative inquiry can be adapted to or accompanied by other approaches. And the alternative of a straight 

problem-solving approach also has its shortcomings, because it may reinforce hierarchy, erode 

community, and instill a sense of self-enfeeblement.

Contributors reflect on their experiences introducing appreciative inquiry to a variety of 

groups, including youth gangs in El Salvador, indigenous communities in northeastern India, 

evangelical and gay groups in the United States, participants in Muslim-Serb dialogue in 

Bosnia-Herzegovina, and local communities in postgenocidal Rwanda. In a concluding note, 

the editors urge those who would make use of appreciative inquiry not to get caught up in it 

as a means, but rather to keep the emphasis on the end goal of peace: “In some circumstances 

the most effective Appreciative Inquiry work can be done without calling it a methodology 

and giving it a name. This is not for the purpose of deceiving, but to preserve the focus of the 

process on meeting the interests and needs of the group and not on a preoccupation with the 

technology for getting there” (391). 

Guatemala’s Religious Mosaic

Appreciative Inquiry’s concern to discover and acknowledge “voice” is shared by the makers 

of the film Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala by the Catticus Corporation and the Gr and 

GR Projects. This documentary presents some of the many voices of religiously active people 

in Guatemala—a country with five-hundred-year “culture of violence.” Out of fear that the 

impoverished and racially excluded indigenous Mayan population might rise up, Guatemala’s 

rulers have always followed the dictum, “be assimilated or eliminated.” Government repression and massacres of the Mayans in the second half of the twentieth century prompted the 

formation of a guerrilla movement, which in turn sparked further government repression, with 

the Mayan population often victimized by both government forces and guerrillas. 

Although the indigenous Mayan population has been the primary victim of that violence, 

no faith group—and Guatemala has many, including some three-hundred different Protestant 

denominations—has been untouched by the violence. The film conveys the remarkable plurality of religious perspective and organization in Guatemala and displays some of the diverse 

views that coexist despite their incompatibility. In the film progressive Catholics decry the 

“structural violence” of the situation in Guatemala and lament that Protestants are not more 

political. (Members of the Catholic hierarchy were involved in Guatemala’s truth commission, 

while Lutherans organized talks between the government and guerillas in Oslo, leading to the 

1996 Peace Accords.) Mennonites speak of creating an alternative space for peace. Pentecostal 

congregations participate in an exuberant worship service that they assert resonates with Mayan spiritual expression. Its leader criticizes the Catholic Church for engaging only in political 

analysis, while he feels his own church is more relevantly present in people’s lives, through not 

only worship services but also schools and hospitals. At a school run by a sect called Primitive 

Methodists, no politics is permitted, according to the school’s director. Although its students 

are Mayan, the curriculum has no indigenous content. Students learn to take dictation in secretarial classes, and the director explains, “We don’t teach religion; we teach about the Lord Jesus 

Christ.” The evangelical El Shaddai congregation pursues a strategy of “health and wealth.” Its 

prosperous leader affirms that for those who follow the path of God, economic development will 

result, while those who do not follow the path are cursed. A Mayan spiritual guide conducts a 

fire ceremony, attended by a Presbyterian, that celebrates the Mayan vision of the cosmos while 

also offering a blessing of this film and a prayer for peace. 

The film does not attempt to generalize about religion in Guatemala but rather conveys 

some of the complexity of the country’s religious plurality. At the close of the film an individual 

involved in religious dialogue laments that too often people come from the United States 

“wanting to do something”—build roads, construct houses, labor in fields. He wishes they were 

willing to come just to listen and learn.

Catticus Corporation and Gr and 

GR Projects

Precarious Peace: God and 

Guatemala

2003
Africa

Grantees examine Africa from many different vantage points. Some undertake vast comparisons, looking at the parallels in state failure across Africa and the former Soviet Union. Others look in depth at particular conflicts within communities in Nigeria or 

Congo. Many grantees describe efforts to mediate or manage conflict. These range from international collaboration between the United Nations and the African Union to local initiatives, 

such as disputes over taxi routes in Cape Town. Others look at aspects of building the rule of 

law, from the experiences of a judge in Tanzania to the efforts of women to gain legal access to 

land in Rwanda. 

Fragile States and a Fragile Peace

In Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective, edited 

by Mark R. Beissinger and Crawford Young, contributors explore similarities between two 

seemingly very different regions and discover that both are suffering from the same grievous 

condition: not just a crisis in democratic governance or market economies, but a protracted 

crisis of the capacity of states to fulfill the functions expected of them. Acknowledging the vast 

differences between Africa and the post-Soviet states, contributors analyze patterns of dysfunctionality in both regions—particularly the disintegration of state authority, encompassing 

criminalization, corruption, ineffectual regulation, and the inability to provide basic services. 

This massive deterioration of state capacity means that the goal of reform must shift. “Liberalization, political or economic, is emptied of its content if its object, the state, lacks minimal 

capacity,” note Beissinger and Young in their conclusion (483). 

In contrast to Beissinger and Young’s grim diagnosis, Ken Menkhaus sees reason for 

Africans to be optimistic, albeit guardedly. In “A ‘Sudden Outbreak of Tranquility’: Assessing 

the New Peace in Africa,” Menkhaus observes a fragile peace emerging since 2002, where many 

had expected renewed violence. His assessment leads him to anticipate a future that is “sobering, but not bleak” (74). 

While many observers try to explain why Africa’s wars persist, Menkhaus wonders why 

some appear to be ending. He offers three possibilities. First, the peaceful period is merely a 

lull before conflicts reignite. Second, the interests of the many who benefit from violent conflict 

(war merchants trafficking in materiel, soldiers looting civilians, warlords seizing humanitarian aid, businesses offering services to international aid organizations) are changing. To the 

degree that they perceive that the rule of law would protect their plundered wealth, they might 

shift, in effect, from being warlords to being landlords. A third possibility is that warlords are 

altering tactics in response to changed circumstances (including international pressure to hold 

war criminals accountable and enforce arms embargoes), creating an appearance of peace and 

governance while working to perpetuate the underlying conditions of lawlessness from which 

they benefit. 

Menkhaus is inclined to foresee continuing peace in Africa but is concerned that this 

“new peace” may indeed be merely a “new purgatory”—that is, “peace without reconciliation, 

governments of national unity that are neither unified nor provide governance, and communal 

violence and armed criminality that replace open warfare but have comparable effects on human security” (88).

As Menkhaus narrows his focus to Somalia, he dissects the crisis without finding much 

basis for optimism. In “Protracted State Collapse in Somalia: A Rediagnosis,” Menkhaus asks 

why all efforts to revive a central government in Somalia failed. He acknowledges the relevance 

of many factors, including the incompetence of external mediators, the greed and stubbornness 

of Somali leaders, public fear of the reemergence of a predatory central state, and the centrifu51

Seven 7

Mark R. Beissinger and

Crawford Young 

Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial 

Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in 

Comparative Perspective

Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson 

Center Press, 2002

Ken Menkhaus 

n “A ‘Sudden Outbreak of 

Tranquility’: Assessing the New 

Peace in Africa” 

Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 28, 

no. 2 (Summer 2004)

n “Protracted State Collapse in 

Somalia: A Rediagnosis”

Review of African Political Economy

(2003)
52

gal tendencies of clan structure. Menkhaus further suggests that the general concept of state 

failure be disaggregated into three phenomena: protracted collapse of central government, 

protracted armed conflict, and lawlessness. 

Such disaggregation makes it easier to see whose interests are being served by Somalia’s 

state failure and whether that failure is in fact the desired outcome for some constituencies. 

Among the groups that might want to perpetuate the power vacuum are those who feel they 

have not gained enough in the conflict and are therefore unwilling to permit a peace process 

to progress; others who benefit from a continued situation of lawlessness and conflict (including war criminals and merchants of war); and a third group whose members could potentially 

benefit from peace and government but are unwilling to relinquish the modus vivendi they 

have constructed and accept the high level of uncertainty involved in the reestablishment of the 

state. Because these different constituencies exercise veto power over peace processes, Somalia’s 

crisis is protracted. 

Pierre Englebert and James Ron also explore the causes of enduring conflict in “Primary 

Commodities and War: Congo-Brazzaville’s Ambivalent Resource Curse.” Congo-Brazzaville’s 

substantial petroleum resources have fueled its civil war, but domestic politics have shaped 

the trajectory of war and peace. When the political system was more stable (as in the 1980s), 

civil war did not occur. The process of democratization in the early 1990s engendered some instability, permitting civil war to break out. Comparing this with other cases of natural resource 

wealth and political stability in Africa, the authors conclude, “No matter how tempting natural 

resources might be and how they may exacerbate ongoing instability and armed conflict, 

they are unlikely to stimulate civil war on their own unless the political context is already 

unstable” (76).

Gérard Prunier examines conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In “CongoKinshasa: The War Nobody Stopped,” he observes the indifference of the international community and its inclination to furnish humanitarian aid but avoid any further involvement. In “The 

Catholic Church and the Kivu Conflict,” Prunier focuses on the DRC provinces of North and 

South Kiva. Here the role of the Catholic Church is complicated by the fact that its clerics have 

come to share the ethnic and political prejudices of the communities they serve.

The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis: Identity, Violence, and Power, edited by Jean-Pierre Chrétien 

with Richard Banégas, is a collection of essays dealing with many aspects of conflict in Africa’s 

Great Lakes region, particularly issues of identity, moral violence, collective memory, and 

victimhood. The people of the region are being asked to undertake immense tasks of reconciliation and rebuilding in record time. Democracy in these settings, the authors argue, should 

acknowledge the value of preexisting pluralism and the importance of consensus and not be 

equated with electoral majority rule. 

African Solutions to African Challenges

African Capacity-Building for Peace Operations: UN Collaboration with the African Union and ECOWAS, by Victoria Holt with Moira Shanahan, reviews efforts to improve cooperation between 

the United Nations, the African Union, and the Economic Community of West African States 

(ECOWAS) as they engage in conflict intervention in Africa. Collaboration, while a desired goal, 

has not been easy: “Fundamentally, the UN is not designed to support other organizations’ peace 

operations” (5). Meanwhile “ECOWAS does not easily coordinate offers of outside assistance, 

since it has lacked a central office that can report on its needs, coordinate offers of support and 

manage inquiries” (55). A new approach is needed, especially as the demand for peacekeeping 

missions in Africa has grown. Synergies in funding, planning, logistics, and training could lead 

to more effective complementarity between the different organizations.

Daniel Lieberfeld examines the process of getting to negotiations in South Africa in 

five articles and chapters: “Contributions of a Semi-Official Prenegotiation Initiative in South 

Africa: Afrikaner-ANC Meeting in England, 1987–90,” “Evaluating the Contributions of 

Track-Two Diplomacy to Conflict Termination in South Africa, 1984–1990,” “Getting to the 

Pierre Englebert and James Ron

“Primary Commodities and War: 

Congo-Brazzaville’s Ambivalent 

Resource Curse”

Comparative Politics 37, no. 1 

(October, 2004)

Gérard Prunier

n “Congo-Kinshasa: The War 

Nobody Stopped”

African Geopolitics, no. 1 (2000)

n “The Catholic Church and the 

Kivu Conflict”

Journal of Religion in Africa 31, 

no. 2 (2001)

Jean-Pierre Chrétien with

Richard Banégas

The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis: 

Identity, Violence, and Power

London: Hurst, 2007

Victoria Holt with

Moira Shanahan

African Capacity-Building for Peace 

Operations: UN Collaboration with 

the African Union and ECOWAS

Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson 

Center, 2005

African Centre for Constructive 

Resolution of Disputes

Taxi War

2002
53

Negotiating Table in South Africa: Domestic and International Dynamics,” “Nelson Mandela: 

Partisan and Peacemaker,” and “Peace Profile: Nelson Mandela.” He finds that preliminary 

initiatives substantively supported official negotiations. They enabled participants to gain 

information about their counterparts, test responses to specific proposals, allay mistrust, 

and enhance the sense that a negotiated resolution was possible. Track-two talks also built 

popular acceptance of the prospect of negotiations, accustoming each side’s constituents to 

the idea of talks with the enemy.

Intervention in the Niger Delta has occurred at many levels. Conflict and Stability in the Niger Delta: The Warri Case, by T. A. Imobighe, Celestine O. Bassey, and Judith Burdin Asuni, 

reports on efforts to mediate ethnic conflict in the oil-rich Warri area of Nigeria through a 

series of workshops and training sessions for a variety of constituents: youth, community 

leaders, educators, and local government officials. The workshops were preceded by research 

into the conflict and were followed by conciliation meetings. The authors report that the 

initiative made progress in facilitating communication, allaying fear, and ending misperceptions among the different ethnic groups competing for control of Warri.

In Cape Town, South Africa, disputes over control of routes by two rival transport associations were escalating toward violence in the early 1990s. The film Taxi War recounts the 

successful mediation efforts conducted by Africa’s Centre for Constructive Resolution of 

Disputes (ACCORD). Its approach emphasizes inclusiveness, openness, and reconciliation 

by building relationships. ACCORD sees its mediation of the taxi dispute as an example of 

“African solutions to African challenges.” 

Building the Rule of Law

Establishing an independent and effective judiciary has many dimensions in Africa. Jennifer 

A. Widner provides an account of the development of Tanzania’s judicial institutions through 

the life story of Francis Nyalali, who served as the country’s chief justice from 1976 to 1999. 

In Building the Rule of Law: Francis Nyalali and the Road to Judicial Independence in Africa, Widner 

identifies challenges faced by the judiciary, including a lack of resources and training and a 

heritage of deep legal pluralism characterized by the coexistence of customary and religious 

law, as well as state and international law. Nyalali’s long tenure included presiding over the 

transition to multiparty democracy and Tanzania’s first multiparty election in 1995. In telling 

his personal story, Widner examines many aspects of the establishment of an independent 

judiciary. 

Matters of law are as significant at the personal and local level as at the institutional and 

national level. Laurel L. Rose investigates the strategies of women seeking to gain a legal 

right to land in “Women’s Land Access in Post-Conflict Rwanda: Bridging the Gap between 

Customary Land Law and Pending Land Legislation.” Although women produce 70 percent 

of the country’s agricultural output, many do not have adequate access to land. Rose finds that 

women are caught between different legal systems—customary local systems and incomplete, 

formal national systems—and they therefore try to select the best forum in which to pursue 

their goal of access to land. The situation is made more insecure by the unclear legal status of 

widows whose common-law husbands were killed in the genocide and by the disruption of 

established local practice as villagers fled violence. Rwandan women are maneuvering between 

a traditional customary system that discriminated against them and a still incomplete national 

effort to craft new, comprehensive legislation governing land tenure. Rose concludes that in this 

time of transition, Rwanda needs to define and guarantee women’s land rights in both theory 

and practice.

Daniel Lieberfeld

n “Contributions of a Semi-Official 

Prenegotiation Initiative in South 

Africa: Afrikaner-ANC Meeting 

in England, 1987–90” (in Paving 

the Way: Contributions of 

Interactive Conflict Resolution to 

Peacemaking)

Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 

2004 

n “Evaluating the Contributions of 

Track-Two Diplomacy to Conflict 

Termination in South Africa, 

1984–1990”

Journal of Peace Research 39, 

no. 3 (2002)

n “Getting to the Negotiating Table 

in South Africa: Domestic and 

International Dynamics”

Politikon 27, no. 1 (2000)

n “Nelson Mandela: Partisan and 

Peacemaker” 

Negotiation Journal 19 (2003) 

n “Peace Profile: Nelson 

Mandela”

Peace Review 16, no. 3 (2004)

T. A. Imobighe, Celestine O. 

Bassey, and Judith Burdin Asuni

Conflict and Stability in the Niger 

Delta: The Warri Case

Ibadan, Nigeria: Academic Associates 

Peaceworks, 2002

Jennifer A. Widner 

Building the Rule of Law: Francis 

Nyalali and the Road to Judicial 

Independence in Africa

New York: W. W. Norton, 2001

Laurel L. Rose

“Women’s Land Access in PostConflict Rwanda: Bridging the Gap 

between Customary Land Law and 

Pending Land Legislation.” 

Texas Journal of Women and Law 13, 

(2004)
Asia

Grantees writing on Asia focus on the high level of distrust between nations and the 

means to dispel it, including greater efforts at cooperation, confidence-building 

measures, track-two meetings, and popular exchanges. Some of these efforts 

encompass entire regions, while others are bilateral affairs between old enemies (such as the 

two Koreas), more recent regional rivals (such as China and India), and global competitors 

(notably, China and the United States). Of course tensions exist not only between but also 

within Asia’s nations, and secessionist movements have emerged in countries such as 

Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. Grantees look at the history of and responses 

to such movements and focus in particular on the potential of autonomous arrangements to 

defuse intrastate conflict.

Efforts to Overcome Distrust and Build Confidence

In Northeast Asia’s Stunted Regionalism: Bilateral Distrust in the Shadow of Globalization,

Gilbert Rozman surveys regional relations between China, Japan, South Korea, and 

Russia during the fifteen years after the end of Cold War. He finds that mutual suspicions, enduring nationalism, and clashing strategies undermined aspirations for 

regionalism. Whether in the area of economic integration, shared security agenda, 

political cooperation with collective action, social exchange, or popular consciousness 

of regional identity, the potential for regionalism in Northeast Asia was not realized. To 

overcome mutual distrust and achieve that potential, Rozman offers a number of suggestions, including embracing globalization, fostering a regional identity, compromising on territorial disputes, steering North Korea toward transition, encouraging Russia’s 

active involvement in regional security, and strengthening large joint projects such as 

energy pipelines, transportation corridors, and urban networks.

ASEAN has undertaken a series of track-two meetings to ease tensions over the 

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and a number of disputes regarding 

reefs, islands, and seas. Finding Common Ground on the Oceans: The Informal Meeting 

of the ASEAN Sea Law Experts on the UNCLOS, edited by Carolina G. Hernandez,

reports on these meetings. Coming to a shared understanding on UNCLOS has been 

difficult due to the ambiguities of the law itself (such as the lack of definition of key 

terms and the failure of states to specify their territorial baselines) and the very 

divergent interpretations of the law among ASEAN member states. Informal meetings 

continue.

Sheldon W. Simon also reports on track-two efforts within ASEAN in “Evaluating 

Track II Approaches to Security Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific: The CSCAP experience” 

and “Managing Security Challenges in Southeast Asia.” Councils on Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAPs) are national track-two groups preparing studies on 

security matters for use in ASEAN’s official negotiations. They are composed of scholars, non-governmental security specialists, and government officials acting in a private 

capacity who meet regularly in working groups to prepare reports on such topics as 

confidence- and security-building measures, comprehensive security, maritime security, and transnational crime. Simon reports that officials from ASEAN’s regional forums 

have “uniformly expressed appreciation for CSCAP proposals and have positively 

evaluated their utility” (194). In Simon’s view CSCAPs may nonetheless suffer from 

“group think,” as they are made up of many of the same individuals who have always 

worked together in think tanks and universities, with little input from anyone outside 

these circles or from non-governmental organizations.

54

Eigh 8 t

Gilbert Rozman

Northeast Asia’s Stunted 

Regionalism: Bilateral Distrust in the 

Shadow of Globalization

New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2004

Carolina G. Hernandez, editor

Finding Common Ground on the 

Oceans: The Informal Meeting of 

the ASEAN Sea Law Experts on the 

UNCLOS

Manila: Institute for Strategic and 

Development Studies, 2003

Sheldon W. Simon

n “Evaluating Track II Approaches 

to Security Diplomacy in 

the Asia-Pacific: The CSCAP 

Experience”

Pacific Review 15, no. 2 (2002)

n “Managing Security Challenges 

in Southeast Asia”

NBR Analysis 13, no. 4 (2002)
55

Moonis Ahmar edited a volume on efforts to reduce distrust and foster cooperation in South Asia. Contributors to The Challenge of Confidence-Building in South Asia

affirm the need for and great potential of confidence-building measures, not only on 

military and security matters, but also on water use, environmental protection, trade, travel, 

and cultural exchange. Such measures would allay a generalized sense of insecurity at the 

societal level and on specific military matters, affecting the mutual perception of adversaries 

in the region.

Prospects for Stability in a Nuclear Subcontinent, edited by S. Rajagopal and Sridhar K. 

Chari, focuses on security issues in South Asia. The book asks, “Has overt nuclearisation 

increased instability in the region?” and concludes that it has not (171). Rather, contributors 

see sources of instability in the weaknesses of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), 

including its discriminatory nature, indefinite extension, and the signatories’ failure to move 

toward the disarmament to which they committed themselves or to prevent the clandestine 

transfer of weapons technology and equipment to both NPT and non-NPT states.

Misperception and Reconciliation in the Koreas

The Reshaping of Korea, a monograph prepared by the Pacific Council on International Policy, 

reports on transformations in and between both Koreas. After its export boom, South Korea 

is struggling to reform its economy in the face of obstruction by inefficient conglomerates. 

Politically it needs to become less autocratic and centralized and strengthen the rule of law. 

North Korea appears to understand that it cannot continue as it has, but its economic shifts 

may be mere tactical responses rather than deeper changes in strategy. Sources of political 

change in North Korea are not clear; yet, “as in the economic realm . . . tactical changes can 

cumulate over time” (35). Reconciliation between the two states in formal, government-togovernment negotiations has been “a perilous enterprise,” which bolsters the rationale for 

multiplying track-two contacts (44). The U.S. role in reconciliation is hampered by the United 

States’ view of North Korea as a rogue state. For the United States “perhaps the place to start 

is with a richer understanding of what is occurring in North Korea and what might ensue in 

the future” (46).

In Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation, Roland Bleiker also looks at the 

limitations that result from misperceptions between the two Koreas and between the United 

States and North Korea. Bleiker writes, “Neither North nor South Korean people have a 

realistic idea of what everyday life looks like in the vilified other half” (xxxii). For decades, 

each regime has legitimated itself by demonizing the other. The United States, for its part, 

seeks to limit North Korea to its role as a rogue state, but this ideological stance prevents 

the United States from recognizing and reacting to the interactive dynamic of security 

relations or generating innovative approaches. The solution to the problems caused by these 

antagonistic perceptions, Bleiker affirms, is “the promotion of communication and face-toface contact among Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, and a willingness to 

accept that after half a century of division, North and South Korean people have developed 

a different—and perhaps inherently incompatible—sense of identity and politics” (116).

China and India: Asian Competitors

Threat perceptions are also problematic between China and India. According to Waheguru 

Pal Singh Sidhu and Jing-dong Yuan in China and India: Cooperation or Conflict?, the two nations are engaged in an undeclared competition for influence and dominance in Asia. Sidhu 

and Yuan foresee three possible futures for relations between these two nations: open competition for regional hegemony in both military and economic terms; joint efforts to promote 

multipolarity; or, most pragmatically, a continued search for solutions to their unresolved 

disputes while they explore areas of potential cooperation via both track-one and track-two 

exchanges.

Moonis Ahmar, editor

The Challenge of ConfidenceBuilding in South Asia

New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 

2001

 S. Rajagopal and Sridhar K. Chari, 

editors

Prospects for Stability in a Nuclear 

Subcontinent

Bangalore, India: National Institute of 

Advanced Studies, 2003 

Pacific Council on International 

Policy

The Reshaping of Korea

Los Angeles: Pacific Council on 

International Policy, 2001

Roland Bleiker

Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of 

Reconciliation

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press, 2005

Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu and

Jing-dong Yuan 

China and India: Cooperation or 

Conflict?

Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003
56

China and the United States: Competition 

or Cooperation?

David M. Lampton and Richard Daniel Ewing focus on the changing relationship between 

the United States and China in their monograph, U.S.-China Relations in a Post-September 11th 

World. Terrorism has replaced China as the looming threat in U.S. perception, easing the 

relationship between the two countries in some ways, as both assert a need for cooperation in 

combating terrorism. Yet it also complicates their relations, as China has long-standing, ongoing relations with several nations (North Korea, Iran, and Iraq among them) of concern to the 

United States. To encourage cooperation between China and the United States, Lampton and 

Ewing counsel the Bush administration to ease pressure on China regarding Taiwan, which 

remains China’s primary security concern. The United States should also exercise restraint 

in market protection measures, thereby facilitating China’s steady integration into the world 

economy. They further advocate that the United States strengthen the role of the National 

Security Council in creating policy toward China, so as to ease bureaucratic friction between 

different policymakers dealing with economic, military, and diplomatic matters.

Cheng Li examines one aspect of cooperation between the United States and China 

in his edited volume, Bridging Minds across the Pacific: U.S.-China Educational Exchanges, 

1978–2003. In twenty-five years, China sent more than 700,000 citizens abroad to study, primarily to the United States, and hosted 350,000 foreign students. This educational exchange 

enhanced China’s intellectual vitality and fostered the diffusion of international norms in 

China, particularly as its citizens returned to take teaching posts and hold high government 

positions. Li also notes changes in China’s political elite in “Poised to Take the Helm: Rising 

Stars and the Transition to the Fourth Generation” and “The New Political Elite and the New 

Trend in Factional Politics.”

Consequences of changes in China’s economic elite are the subject of Bruce J. Dickson’s 

Red Capitalists in China. New economic entrepreneurs are the hope and fear of those who do 

and do not want economic reforms to lead to political change in China. Both groups share the 

presumption that private entrepreneurs will be agents of political change. Dickson’s research 

leads him to doubt that presumption. He finds that China’s private entrepreneurs are generally 

apolitical and share the interests and policy preferences of China’s government and party officials. They are more likely to support the status quo than to challenge it. “The entrepreneurs’ 

pronounced fear of instability,” Dickson writes, “may make them a conservative force, rather 

than a liberalizing one. . . . On issues of political participation, they exhibit an elitist perspective 

that is not conducive to full democratization” (163). 

Secessionist Challenges, Autonomous Solutions?

Change in Indonesia, particularly in response to secessionist challenges, has included initiatives and reversals. As Rodd McGibbon explains in Secessionist Challenges in Aceh and Papua: 

Is Special Autonomy the Solution?, Indonesia’s government conceded autonomy to provincial 

secessionist movements in 2001, when central authority was weakened due to political 

transition and an earlier economic crisis that had resulted in extensive IMF intervention in 

policymaking. The Indonesian government at this time feared state disintegration. As crises 

receded and centralization was reasserted, the government’s attitude toward autonomy 

changed. By 2003 the Indonesian government was imposing martial law in Aceh and subdividing Papua. McGibbon concludes that autonomy is a fragile policy, subject to reversal. If 

it is to be a solution to separatist conflict, it must be not just a matter of negotiation between 

elites but part of a broader process that cultivates popular support.

Jeffrey Ayala Milligan examines long-standing efforts to maintain autonomy among 

Muslims in the Philippines in Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling 

and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines. With a historical perspective extending 

back centuries, Milligan examines a variety of efforts to subdue, subordinate, marginalize, 

Cheng Li

n Bridging Minds across the 

Pacific: U.S.-China Educational 

Exchanges, 1978-2003

Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 

2005

n “Poised to Take the Helm: Rising 

Stars and the Transition to the 

Fourth Generation”

Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003

n “The New Political Elite and the 

New Trend in Factional Politics.”

Paris: Institut français des rélations 

internationals, 2003

Bruce J. Dickson

Red Capitalists in China

New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2003

Rodd McGibbon

Secessionist Challenges in Aceh and 

Papua: Is Special Autonomy the 

Solution?

Washington, D.C.: East-West Center, 

2004

David M. Lampton and Richard 

Daniel Ewing 

U.S.-China Relations in a PostSeptember 11th World

Washington, D.C.: Nixon Center, 2002

Jeffrey Ayala Milligan

Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, 

and Educational Policy: Schooling 

and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the 

Southern Philippines

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
57

or assimilate Mindanao’s Muslim, or “Moro,” population. He observes the continuity of approaches in colonial and postcolonial periods and pays particular attention to “pedagogical imperialism.” More recent efforts at noncoercive integration and limited autonomy, in 

Milligan’s view, leave in place the assumption that “the so-called Moro Problem was a problem located among Muslim Filipinos. . . . However, it was never just their problem, for it was 

driven in large part by the centuries-old stereotypes, bigotry, fear, and mistrust of Christian 

Filipinos for Muslim Filipinos. The autonomy project did not—indeed could not—address 

this aspect of the problem” (111–12).

Greater success may be underway in Bouganville. Andy Carl and Lorraine Garasu

edited a collection of essays, Weaving Consensus: The Papua New Guinea–Bouganville Peace 

Process, which recounts the violent separatist conflict of the late 1980s and the subsequent 

internationally mediated peace process and truce monitoring. The peace agreement 

includes provision for a binding referendum to be held in ten to fifteen years to determine 

Bouganville’s ultimate political status and a high degree of operational autonomy in the 

interim.

In Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Terrorism, and Development from Sri Lanka’s 

Civil Wars, John Richardson offers his conclusions on the best ways to avoid secessionist 

conflict based on his study of Sri Lanka. Among his ten imperatives for preventing conflict 

are maintaining public order as a prerequisite to all other development initiatives, meeting 

the needs and aspirations of fighting-age young men, offering generous funding and training to professionalized internal security forces, and adopting development policies that meet 

people’s aspirations while pursuing a middle path between capitalism and socialism, including greater involvement of multinational corporations and private businesses in supporting 

successful development policies. 

Andy Carl and Lorraine 

Garasu, CSN 

Weaving Consensus: The Papua 

New Guinea–Bouganville Peace 

Process

London: Conciliation Resources, 2002

John Richardson

Paradise Poisoned: Learning 

about Conflict, Terrorism, and 

Development from Sri Lanka’s Civil 

Wars

Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Center 

for Ethnic Studies, 2005
Europe

Grantees assess prospects for peace and security across Europe. Some focus on the 

small scale, as in an anthropological study of refugees returning to a Bosnian village. Others look at the national level, particularly the aspirations and viability of 

separatist states in Eurasia. Large-scale intercontinental security relations are also addressed, 

including the broadest strategies to ensure peace between Russia, Western Europe, and the 

United States.

Return and Reintegration in the Balkans

The film Returning Home: Revival of a Bosnian Village, by Tone Bringa and Peter Loizos, recounts the efforts of families displaced by war to return to their homes, many of which have 

been destroyed or are occupied by other displaced persons. The way back is complicated by 

cross-cutting patterns of flight and refuge. Often, for one family to return, a second family 

must vacate the home of the first, requiring a third family to vacate the home of the second, 

and so on. Returning refugees also emphasize their need for international assistance to 

rebuild houses. The film shows conversations and coffee shared between Bosniac and Croat 

families who have become neighbors in the confusion, commiserating over their common 

experiences of flight and rebuilding.

In Reintegration of Former Kosovo Liberation Army Combatants in Post-Conflict Society in 

Kosovo, Sultan Barakat and Alpaslan Özerdem assess international efforts to reintegrate 

former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters. The authors’ research leads them to emphasize the importance of microenterprise development programs for ex-combatants. Vocational 

training programs, although less expensive, are effective only if there are opportunities for 

graduates in the local labor market. Microenterprises can provide employment for family 

members as well as the ex-combatants themselves and can generate positive multiplier effects 

on the local economy.

Separatism and Conflict in Eurasia

Dov Lynch turns to unsettled disputes in Engaging Eurasia’s Separatist States: Unresolved 

Conflicts and De Facto States. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in fifteen new 

internationally recognized states and five other “states” that declared themselves 

independent: Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. 

Although Chechnya’s self-proclaimed independence has been crushed, the latter four 

have endured—despite being unrecognized and isolated. In a tangle of criminality and 

corruption, none is prospering although all are surviving. Their unsettled status exacerbates 

the region’s poor economic situation, reinforces tendencies toward criminalization, and 

destabilizes the area militarily. Because neither the recognition nor the elimination of these 

states is practical, Lynch proposes a coordinated international approach. It would include 

some degree of sovereignty without full independence; the return of internally displaced 

persons; security measures such as the reduction of troops and weapons; economic support 

to put a brake on criminalization; and more direct exchanges between political elites, 

business elites, educators, and others.

Thomas De Waal’s Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War examines 

a violent conflict that remains unresolved despite a 1994 cease-fire. De Waal observes “a 

kind of slow suicide pact in which each country hurts the other, while suffering itself” (3). 

Hate narratives and the cultivation of a sense of victimhood through media and official 

discourse have fed the conflict. In De Waal’s view, “the biggest problem is not so much lack 58

N9ine

Tone Bringa and Peter Loizos

Returning Home: Revival of a 

Bosnian Village

Sarajevo: Saga Film and Video 

Production, 2001

Sultan Barakat and Alpaslan 

Özerdem

Reintegration of Former Kosovo 

Liberation Army Combatants in 

Post-Conflict Society in Kosovo

York, U.K.: University of York, 2001

Dov Lynch

Engaging Eurasia’s Separatist States: 

Unresolved Conflicts and De Facto 

States

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2004

Thomas De Waal

Black Garden: Armenia and 

Azerbaijan through Peace and War

New York: New York University Press, 

2003
of a readiness to compromise as lack of a readiness to contemplate any future with the other 

side at all” (281).

Building Euroatlantic Security

Turning to security issues at the broadest level, James Goodby, Petrus Buwalda, and Dmitri 

Trenin coauthored A Strategy for Peace: Toward a Euroatlantic Security Community. Although 

peace has become stable in North America, Western Europe, and Northwestern Europe, 

elsewhere within the Euroatlantic system it is precarious. Between Russia and the West, “war 

has not yet been excluded and military deterrence remains a factor in interstate relations, 

even though war is a remote contingency. This situation can be called a conditional peace” 

(4). How might a comprehensive stable peace be achieved? The authors recommend a security 

community “in which the main centers of gravity are the European Union, Russia, and the 

United States, with no one of them dominant” (8). To facilitate cooperation, the European 

Union should reform its decision-making process, Russia should develop its civil society 

based on democratic principles, and the United States should support the enlargement of 

NATO and a common European defense force. A convergence around democratic values 

and means of governance need not require identical institutions and policies. Rather, “what 

matters is that disputes and conflicts between nations be regulated by some means other 

than resort to force” (25).

In Nuclear Nonproliferation in U.S.-Russian Relations: Challenges and Opportunities,

Vladimir Orlov, Roland Timerbaev, and Anton Khlopkov look further at security concerns 

and cooperation. They note the United States’ and Russia’s common interest in preventing 

the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons. The two 

countries should continue to strengthen safeguards and upgrade systems of protection and 

control. As the international stalemate in nuclear disarmament continues, these authors urge 

all nuclear nations to undertake unilateral disarmament while continuing with formal arms 

control negotiations. Official negotiations create legally binding and verifiable agreements, 

but unilateral actions can also yield substantial pragmatic results. 

59

Vladimir Orlov, Roland Timerbaev, 

and Anton Khlopkov

Nuclear Nonproliferation in U.S.-

Russian Relations: Challenges and 

Opportunities

Moscow: Center for Policy Studies in 

Russia, 2002

James Goodby, Petrus Buwalda, 

and Dmitri Trenin 

A Strategy for Peace: Toward a 

Euroatlantic Security Community

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2002
Latin America

I

n the Latin American context, grantees examine a wide variety of subjects, from postconflict police reform, to Colombia’s “democratic security” policy, to the empowering 

effect of participation in women’s organizations in Nicaragua. Despite their diversity, most 

of the grantees’ topics speak in one way or another to the fragility of democratic institutions 

in Latin America and the need for greater popular participation. 

Slow Progress toward Police Reform

In From Peace to Governance: Police Reform and the International Community, Melissa 

Ziegler and Rachel Neild provide a rapporteurs’ report on a 2001 conference on police 

reform following dictatorship or violent conflict, often in a context of rising crime and 

public demand for tough measures. Overall, progress in Latin America toward democratic policing has been slow, due in part to ill-defined reform strategies, disorganized 

reform coalitions, and the size and length of the task. Issues of effectiveness and accountability dominate debates on police reform. Many reform advocates see the two as 

mutually dependent. Indeed, as Ziegler and Neild summarize this view, “the heart of 

democratic policing precisely lies in the intertwined nature of the two” (19). Populations 

subject to high levels of crime are less convinced and often demand repressive policing 

practices. Referring to South Africa as well as Latin America, conference participants 

suggested that police reform projects should include efforts to convince the public that 

effectiveness and accountability are complementary.

Security and Democracy in Colombia

Several working papers and other articles—most from the Inter-American Dialogue—offer 

updates on issues of security and democracy in Colombia: “A New Approach: Álvaro Uribe’s 

Democratic Security Project,” by Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez; “Álvaro Uribe: Dissident,” by

Fernando Cepeda Ulloa; “Turning Point in Colombia?” by Vinay Jawahar; “State Building 

in Colombia: Getting Priorities Straight,” by Michael Shifter and Vinay Jawahar; and “U.S. 

Human Rights Policy toward Colombia,” by Michael Shifter and Jennifer Stillerman. These 

call attention to President Uribe’s unfolding policy toward militant revolutionaries, paramilitaries, and narcotics traffickers in Colombia. Departing from the policies of his predecessors, 

Uribe called for “democratic security,” which includes reasserting state authority over the 

entire national territory, denying resources to state opponents by shutting down the flow of 

resources from drug trafficking, reestablishing clear and complete military superiority, and 

eventually entering a negotiated peace settlement. Although impressed with Uribe’s commitment and engagement, critics have expressed concern that he is strengthening presidential 

authority but weakening institutional authority. Others worry that the pursuit of security 

has entailed measures, including antiterrorist legislation, the weakening of the judiciary, and 

mass arrests, that are fundamentally undemocratic. 

Andean Instability

In “Breakdown in the Andes,” Michael Shifter turns to sources of instability in Peru, 

Ecuador, and Bolivia. In all three countries Shifter sees fragmented societies suffering from 

discredited political parties, ineffectual leadership, and corrupt institutions. Shifter faults the 

general U.S. reaction of indifference and fatalism and calls for Washington to rally international support for ambitious development efforts in the region.

60

10Ten

Melissa Ziegler and Rachel Neild

From Peace to Governance: Police 

Reform and the International 

Community

Washington, D.C.: Washington Office 

on Latin America, 2001

Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez

“A New Approach: Álvaro Uribe’s 

Democratic Security Project”

Washington, D.C.: Working paper, InterAmerican Dialogue, 2003

Fernando Cepeda Ulloa

“Álvaro Uribe: Dissident”

Washington, D.C.: Working paper, InterAmerican Dialogue, 2003

Vinay Jawahar

“Turning Point in Colombia?”

Washington, D.C.: Working paper, InterAmerican Dialogue, 2004

Michael Shifter and Vinay Jawahar

“State Building in Colombia: 

Getting Priorities Straight”

Journal of International Affairs 58, 

no. 1 (2004)

Michael Shifter and Jennifer 

Stillerman

“U.S. Human Rights Policy 

toward Colombia”

Washington, D.C.: United States 

Institute of Peace Press, 2004

Michael Shifter

“Breakdown in the Andes” 

Foreign Affairs 83, no. 5 (2004)
Civil Society: Participation and Empowerment

Other grantees examine civil society in Latin America and some of the ways participation 

in organizations and networks can be empowering. In “Toward a Transnationalism of the 

Middle: How Transnational Religious Practices Help Bridge the Divides between Cuba and 

Miami,” Sarah J. Mahler and Katrin Hansing explore some popular efforts to interact across 

the Florida Straits, particularly via sister parishes, despite a dominant discourse discouraging 

cooperation between the United States and Cuba. These transnational religious ties constitute 

an intermediate level of interaction and offer potential for reconciliation.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo explores women’s organizations in Nicaragua in “Mobilizing 

Mothers for War: Cross-National Framing Strategies in Nicaragua’s Contra War” and “The 

Nonmaterial Long-Term Benefits of Collective Action: Empowerment and Social Capital in 

a Nicaraguan Women’s Organization.” In her studies of the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs 

of Matagalpa, de Volo examines the utility of such organizations for the state in channeling 

member grievances, disseminating propaganda through supposedly apolitical mothers, and 

evoking sympathy nationally and internationally. De Volo also explores members’ valuation of the emotional support, collective identity, and empowerment they gained from active 

participation in the organizations following the Contra war of the 1980s. She argues that 

participation in such organizations enhances its members’ political engagement and can thus 

strengthen democratic foundations.

Sarah J. Mahler and Katrin 

Hansing

“Toward a Transnationalism of 

the Middle: How Transnational 

Religious Practices Help Bridge the 

Divides between Cuba and Miami”

Latin American Perspectives 32, no. 1 

(2005)

Lorraine Bayard de Volo

n “Mobilizing Mothers for War: 

Cross-National Framing Strategies 

in Nicaragua’s Contra War”

Gender and Society 18, no. 6 (2004) 

n “The Nonmaterial Long-Term 

Benefits of Collective Action: 

Empowerment and Social Capital 

in a Nicaraguan Women’s 

Organization”

Comparative Politics 38, no. 2 (2004)

61
The Middle East

Grantees analyze many aspects of political change and stasis in the Middle East, from 

variations in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region and the interaction 

between Arab elites and political change to enduring stumbling blocks in IsraeliPalestinian relations and the prospects for U.S.-Russian cooperation in the region.

From Arab Secularism to Islamic Fundamentalism

In Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse, Mansoor 

Moaddel explores the social conditions that enabled the emergence of powerful 

ideologies in the Arab world: Islamic modernism in India and Egypt in the latter part of 

the nineteenth century liberal nationalism in Egypt and Iran and Arab nationalism in 

Syria in the early twentieth century, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, Syria, Iran, 

and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century. Paying explicit attention to the sociological 

method for explaining the proximate conditions of ideological change, Moaddel 

examines how the rise of secularist modern states generated their nemesis, Islamic 

fundamentalism. 

Endorsing a dialogic approach, Moaddel affirms that each side of a debate structures the kind of argument its opponents advance against it. Nonpolitical plural targets 

generate apolitical, dispersed, oppositional discourses; monolithic state-centered targets generate politicized ideologies. In a series of discontinuous cultural episodes in the 

Middle East, Moaddel sees the rise of secularist states whose ruling elites intervened in 

cultural affairs to promote their ideology. It is in opposition to such states, Moaddel argues, that politicized fundamentalist Islamic movements have formed. Thus, across the 

Middle East “the main culprits in the genesis of religious extremism were the totalitarian despots who resided at the pinnacle of state power” (343).

Jordan, in Moaddel’s view, is the exception that proves the rule. In Jordanian 

Exceptionalism: A Comparative Analysis of State-Religion Relationships in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, 

and Syria, he highlights the peaceful relations between the state and the Muslim 

Brotherhood following the democratization movement launched by King Hussein in 1989. 

Moderation and pluralism from the authoritarian state, which intervened little in cultural 

production and did not attempt to impose a secularist ideology, meant that Islamic 

opponents were less extremist, founding the Islamic Action Front Party to compete in 

elections. This leads Moaddel to the view that secularization should consist not of the 

separation of state and religion, but rather of the freeing of the state from any ideology. 

Elites and Political Change

Arab Elites: Negotiating the Politics of Change, edited by Volker Perthes, examines politically relevant elites in nine settings. Contributors focus on changes in elite composition 

and agendas and their import for political change. In Jordan, Morocco, and Syria, the 

elite has renewed itself and adapted. 

A change in the composition of the elite may be coming in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. 

In Algeria, the elite is fragmented, hampering political reform; in Tunisia, new elites 

have been co-opted into the state. In Lebanon routes to power for new elites, other than 

those tied to Syria, have been blocked, while elites in the Palestinian territories have 

shifted from state building to crisis management. In his conclusion Perthes underscores 

that “elite change in autocratic systems should not be confused with transition to a new 

system” (306).

E11leven

Mansoor Moaddel

n Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, 

and Fundamentalism: Episode 

and Discourse

Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 2005

n Jordanian Exceptionalism: A 

Comparative Analysis of StateReligion Relationships in Egypt, 

Iran, Jordan, and Syria

New York: Palgrave, 2002

Volker Perthes

Arab Elites: Negotiating the 

Politics of Change

Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004

62
Aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 

Negotiating Jerusalem, by Jerome M. Segal, Shlomit Levy, Nadar Issat Sa’id, and Elihu Katz,

examines public attitudes toward Jerusalem. Control of the city appears to be an insurmountable obstacle, with both Palestinians and Israelis reflexively declaring that its status is nonnegotiable. But these authors found in the course of their research that phrasing questions about 

Jerusalem’s future differently yields different answers. No one is willing to give up the city, 

but each is willing to relinquish control of certain neighborhoods to the other side. Israelis 

and Palestinian each value most highly those portions of the city where their fellow nationals 

live, as well as their respective religious sites. Thus, by disaggregating the question of control 

of Jerusalem, progress may be made toward a final agreement on its status. 

Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinians and Jews, edited by Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. 

Lustick, examines another major obstacle to peace: disagreement on the status and rights of 

Palestinian refugees. Eschewing further technical or legalistic formulas, contributors to this 

volume aim to construct a “new intellectual infrastructure” for imagining approaches to the 

refugee question. Noting the changes that have occurred in Israeli historiography, contributors 

concur that the source of the enduring refugee problem is neither mass expulsion nor mass 

flight in 1948, but rather the Israeli government’s decision to ban the return of the displaced. 

“This ban,” the editors note, “was enforced immediately, systematically, and coercively. On 

this point there is no controversy” (7). This is the basis of the Palestinians’ continuing sense of 

injustice. In chapters on many aspects of the refugee question, several contributors return to 

the importance of establishing shared truths, perhaps through a truth and reconciliation commission, and the potential power of public apologies. Lustick argues that Israelis will have to 

be “gradually socialized away from depending on narratives of national pride that require the 

denial of palpable Palestinian truths” if there is to be any “normalization of ties between the 

two nations that claim the Land of Israel/Palestine” (127).

In Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine, Nathan J. Brown 

argues that Palestinian politics consists of more than the conflict with Israel. Palestinians are 

also concerned with “resuming” their past political entity, Arab identity, and normal political life beyond the nationalist struggle. In their political discourse, Palestinians portray their 

political institutions as “having authentic antecedents that need only be revived or redirected 

toward nationalist ends. This is, to be sure,” Brown notes, “a very retrospective reading of 

history, one that imposes a nationalist narrative on a very complicated past” (6). Brown examines this dynamic within Palestinian legal structures, constitutional framework, parliament, 

civil society, and educational curricula. Until the violence ends, Brown contends, Palestine 

remains interrupted. 

The International Crisis Group (ICG) studied aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 

in three reports published in 2004. Dealing with Hamas argues that international community 

should abandon an incremental approach to the conflict. It should also stop waiting for a 

“reliable Palestinian partner” to emerge. To the contrary, “only a credible political process can 

produce an effective Palestinian leadership, not the other way around.” (ii). After a cease-fire 

is reached, Hamas should be brought into negotiations. 

ICG’s second report, Palestinian Refugees and the Politics of Peacemaking, notes that the 

geographically dispersed refugees have not been an organized political force. An internal 

Palestinian dialogue is long overdue. “Achieving strategic consensus and clarity among 

Palestinians on the refugee question,” this report asserts, “is a key component of the peace 

process” (ii).

The third ICG report, Identity Crisis: Israel and Its Arab Citizens, examines discriminatory 

laws and the inequitable allocation of land and other state resources in Israel. Such systemic 

inequities increase the impoverishment, alienation, and anger of Israel’s Arab citizens. The 

report challenges Israel to redress these injustices and urges the Arab Israeli leadership to 

pursue change democratically, including dismantling patronage and client networks that 

undermine effective, representative local governance.

Jerome M. Segal, Shlomit Levy, 

Nadar Issat Sa’id, and Elihu Katz 

Negotiating Jerusalem

Albany, N.Y.: State University of New 

York Press, 2000

Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. Lustick

Exile and Return: Predicaments of 

Palestinians and Jews

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 

Press, 2003

Nathan J. Brown 

Palestinian Politics after the Oslo 

Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine

Berkeley: University of California Press, 

2003

International Crisis Group 

n Dealing with Hamas

ICG Middle East Report, no. 21 

(2004)

n Palestinian Refugees and the 

Politics of Peacemaking 

ICG Middle East Report, no. 22 

(2004)

n Identity Crisis: Israel and Its Arab 

Citizens

ICG Middle East Report, no. 25 

(2004)

63
64

U.S.-Russian Cooperation in the Middle East

Geoffrey Kemp and Paul Saunders examine international perspectives and cooperation on 

the Middle East in America, Russia, and the Greater Middle East. They review the history of U.S.-

Russian relations regarding the Middle East and assess current U.S. and Russian interests in 

the region. These interests are not identical, but neither are they fundamentally incompatible, 

and Kemp and Saunders see the potential for cooperation in seven areas: terrorism, proliferation and Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the aftermath of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drug trafficking, regional stability, and energy projects. Such cooperation, the authors 

advise, “should be pursued with realistic, rather than idealistic, expectations” (58).

Geoffrey Kemp and Paul Saunders

America, Russia, and the Greater 

Middle East

Washington, D.C.: Nixon Center, 2003 
65

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About the Author

Amy L. Smith, Ph.D., is a political scientist. As a senior partner of the consulting firm Social 

Insight, she writes on a variety of international issues, including conflict management, 

transitional justice, public health, and education issues. Her work generally involves extracting public policy recommendations from scholarly research. She has conducted research for, 

taught for, and worked with a variety of advocacy and policy organizations in the United 

States, Brazil, and Switzerland. In addition to several previous monographs for the United 

States Institute of Peace, her publications include A Forced Agreement: Press Acquiescence to 

Censorship in Brazil (1997).

About the Institute

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent conflicts, 

promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase peacebuilding capacity, tools, and 

intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, 

skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.

Chairman of the Board: J. Robinson West

Vice Chairman: María Otero

President: Richard H. Solomon

Executive Vice President: Patricia Powers Thomson

Vice President: Charles E. Nelson

Board of Directors

J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy, Washington, D.C.

María Otero (Vice Chairman), President, ACCION International, Boston, Mass.

Holly J. Burkhalter, Vice President, Government Affairs, International Justice Mission, Washington, 

D.C.

Anne H. Cahn, Former Scholar in Residence, American University, Washington, D.C.

Chester A. Crocker, James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies, School of Foreign Service, 

Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Laurie S. Fulton, Partner, Williams and Connolly, Washington, D.C.

Charles Horner, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C.

Kathleen Martinez, Executive Director, World Institute on Disability

George E. Moose, Adjunct Professor of Practice, The George Washington University, 

Washington, D.C. 

Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.

Ron Silver, Actor, Producer, Director, Primparous Productions, Inc.

Judy Van Rest, Executive Vice President, International Republican Institute, Washington, D.C.

Members ex officio

Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State

Richard H. Solomon, President, United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting)

Frances C. Wilson, Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps; President, National Defense University


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OF RELATED INTEREST

Several other publications from the United States Institute of Peace summarize work supported by 

Institute grants.

Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking. 

Vol. 2, 1996–2000.

Advances in Understanding International Peacemaking. 

Vol. 1, Lessons Learned from Completed Grants Projects, 1987–97.

Contributions to the Study of Peacemaking. 

Vol. 6, Summary of Projects Completed by Grantees and Fellows, 1997–99. 

Contributions to the Study of Peacemaking. 

Vol. 5, Summary of Completed Grant Projects, 1995–98. 

Contributions to the Study of Peacemaking. 

Vol. 4, Summary of Completed Grant Projects, 1992–94.