Fanning the Flames of Peace: The Difficult Role of IOs

Abstract

Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Edited by Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, Elisabeth M. Cousens Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. 729 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-58826-058-5), $26.95 paper (ISBN: 1-58826-083-6). When a civil war is terminated by a peace agreement, what roles can international actors play in helping the former warring parties carry out their commitments and in preventing a return to war? Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements contributes to the peace and conflict studies literature, and more specifically to the growing body of work on war termination and conflict resolution after intrastate war (Licklider 1993; Darby and Mac Ginty 2000, 2003; Wallensteen 2002; Walter 2002), by seeking to answer these questions. Moreover, the editors—Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elisabeth Cousens—argue that they need to overcome some of the weaknesses of past research on peace implementation after civil wars, such as unclear prescriptions regarding implementation strategy and a failure to prioritize among different implementation tasks. They set out to achieve this by focusing on the interaction among three key factors: the challenges posed by the implementation environment; the resources brought to the process by international actors; and the choices made about how these resources should be used. The result is a solid research design and an excellent edited book that cumulates and advances theory while it offers policy relevant findings and recommendations. Ending Civil Wars rests on a study of sixteen cases between 1980 and 1997 in which international actors played a prominent role in the implementation of post–civil war peace agreements. In most, but not all, of these cases, the international implementing agency was the United Nations. Four specific questions guide the analysis: What exactly do international actors do to assist the implementation of peace agreements? How do cases differ in the challenges they pose to implementers? What challenges characterize the most difficult environments? What factors determine which cases get adequate resources? The editors use a multimethod approach that combines single-case …