After Civil War: Bosnia and Herzegovina, El Salvador, and Lebanon

Abstract

This chapter looks at the army building in three very different political environments: the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), and the civil war in El Salvador (1979–92). Although the objective in both Bosnia and El Salvador was to develop a democratic army in the wake of the civil war, it has not been achieved fully in either setting. Lebanon is unique not just in the category of post-civil war army building but because it is an outlier in the entire group of twenty-seven cases studied in two important respects. First, in the first fifteen years after the civil war, a foreign army of Syria controlled some of Lebanon's territory and was instrumental in rebuilding the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Second, aside from the state-controlled LAF, another local, contending or complementary and yet legitimate military force has functioned in the country: the militia of Hezbollah, a Shi'a Islamist political and paramilitary organization.