(Download) "Introduction (Postwar JUSTICE AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO Rebuild) (Essay)" by Ethics & International Affairs " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Introduction (Postwar JUSTICE AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO Rebuild) (Essay)
- Author : Ethics & International Affairs
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 255 KB
Description
Between 1989 and 1993 the United Nations authorized a number of peacebuilding operations to help implement peace settlements in war-torn states, including Cambodia, El Salvador, Liberia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Rwanda. The launch of those operations was a significant departure from the limited peacekeeping missions during the cold war, which typically involved the establishment of buffer zones between conflicting parties and the monitoring of cease-fires. With the addition of political and socioeconomic dimensions, peacebuilding operations in the early 1990s were far more complex. In particular, the new operations involved the monitoring of postconflict elections, demobilization of former combatants, support for the return and resettlement of refugees, human rights investigations, and in some cases the pursuit of international criminal justice, as well as market-based economic reforms. The United Nations came increasingly to share responsibility for these tasks with a host of regional actors, nongovernmental organizations, diverse national development agencies, and international financial institutions. If these new operations were accompanied by high hopes regarding the ability of the international community to bring lasting peace to postwar territories, by the middle of the decade that initial enthusiasm was evaporating. In political as well as academic circles, concerns emerged that, for all their increased complexity, the first generation of post-cold war peacebuilding operations had been too limited, too short, and too narrowly focused on rapid political and economic reforms. In some instances, attempts to rely on quick liberal "fixes," such as elections, and to present those fixes as indicators of success had backfired in tragic ways. In Angola, for instance, elections served only to catalyze further violence, while in Rwanda the peace settlement in which the international community had placed so much hope was unable to prevent genocide. (1)