Can Peacekeeping Operations Promote Democracy?

Abstract

Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past. By Kimberly Zisk Marten. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 202 pp., $27.95 (ISBN: 0-231-12913-0). Should peacekeeping operations use armed force in self-defense only, or are “robust” operations preferable? Should peacekeeping be carried out by regional actors, or do such actors threaten the neutrality of these operations? These are questions that have been raised repeatedly over the past decade in the literature on peacekeeping (see, for example, various articles in the journal International Peacekeeping ). More recently, debates have focused on whether democracy can be imposed through outside intervention—either through unilateral or multilateral missions. Indeed, democracy is sometimes used as a criterion for measuring the success of peacekeeping operations (Heldt and Wallensteen 2005). Others have argued that establishing or supporting democracy should be part of the exit strategy for all peacekeeping operations (for example, United Nations 2000a, 2000b, 2001; see also Fearon and Laitin 2004 for a discussion on exit strategies). Yet, statistical studies indicate that democratization increases the risk of civil war (Hegre et al. 2001), that democracies following military intervention (as opposed to peacekeeping) tend to be short-lived and, therefore, evidently artificial (Gates and Strand 2004; Gleditsch, Christiansen, and Hegre 2004), and that post-civil war periods (Wantchekon 2004) are associated with increased levels of democracy. Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past by Kimberly Zisk Marten touches on all of these questions, and thus it relates to several strands of literature. The book focuses on “complex peacekeeping operations,” by which Zisk Marten means operations that (1) aim to rebuild domestic political and legal institutions by overseeing elections, through economic reconstruction, and so on; (2) consist of large and heavily armed peacekeeping contingents that are able to stop spoilers from wrecking peace processes; and (3) are carried out with UN Security Council support but not under UN command (pp. 34–36). In contrast to traditional peacekeeping, these operations are no longer …