Inside and Out: Peacekeeping and the Duration of Peace after Civil and Interstate Wars

Arguably the most important innovation in conflict management in the last fifty years is the practice of peacekeeping: the concept of sending personnel from the international community to help keep peace in the aftermath of war. 1 What is now referred to as ‘‘traditional peacekeeping’’ developed during the Cold War and generally involved international personnel monitoring a cease-fire, or placing themselves between belligerent armies. Most peacekeeping operations during the Cold War involved wars between sovereign states (exceptions include United Nations [UN] missions in the Congo, Lebanon, and Cyprus, and the Organization of African Unity’s mission in Chad). Since the end of the Cold War, the international community and the UN have moved beyond traditional peacekeeping, becoming much more involved in civil conflicts. Doing so has meant adding a new set of functionsFelection monitoring, police training, sometimes even administering the stateFto facilitate the transition from war to peace. Scholars and practitioners of peacekeeping have debated the merits of the new wave of more ‘‘robust’’ and complex forms of peacekeeping and peace enforcement developed after the Cold War and the effectiveness of more traditional forms of peacekeeping (Tharoor 1995/96; Luttwak 1999). The conventional wisdom in this debate is that the international community has been better at peacekeeping between states than within them. But no one has tested this assumption. There is a dearth of rigorous empirical studies of the effects of peacekeeping in either setting, let alone a comparison of the two. Does peace last longer when peacekeepers are deployed than when belligerents are left to their own devices? And are the effects of peacekeeping different after internal and interstate conflicts? This article presents some preliminary analysis of the effects of peacekeeping on the duration of peace in both interstate and civil conflicts to begin to answer these questions. The assumption that peacekeeping would be less effective in internal conflicts than between states stems first from the fact that civil wars presented a new challenge to the UN. By the end of the Cold War, the established principles and practices of interstate peacekeeping rested on decades of experience. Applying this tool to internal wars meant developing new practices and operating in an unfamiliar environment. No longer could peacekeepers simply interpose themselves between well-defined armies and keep watch along a fixed cease-fire line. Now they had to become involved in disarmament, in military training for newly created unified armies, in electoral procedures, and many other civilian tasks. 1 Peacekeeping is usually done by the UN, but regional organizations have also undertaken it. The Organization of American States monitored the ceasefire between El Salvador and Honduras after the Football War; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been the primary peacekeeper in Bosnia. Peacekeeping is also sometimes performed by an ad hoc group. The Neutral Nations Supervisory Committee sent monitors to observe the cease-fire in Korea.