Stedman and Downs: Evaluating Issues in Peace Implementation

Tags: papers, un and global governance lecture 7

• Stedman, Stephen John, and George Downs, eds. “Evaluating Issues in Peace Implementation.” In Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner, 2002.

• Peace implementation differs based on peace environment, including three major factors

  1. Presence of spoilers
  2. Hostile neighboring states
  3. Resources available for extraction (resource curse)

• UN has only succeeded in the least challenging environments

• How do we measure success?

  • measurement by mandate achievement
    • can be worked around by setting modest mandate goals
    • nations can also offload impossible tasks to the UN
    • does not ask any questions about the appropriateness of the mandate
  • conflict reduction, disputant resolution, etc
    • variety of metrics can be evaluated
    • how/what is the appropriate ensemble
    • difficulty in ascribing a casual relationship to the mission

• can success be measued by looking @ subgoals?

  • likely to be biased towards ascribing a clean casual relationship
  • i.e. human rights watch is more likely to say the failure of human rights causes problems

• mission success as:

  • end of large scale violence
  • sustainable peace in wartime

• certain regions are off limits (less in Asia, never in a P5 country, avoids civil war in countries with large armies)

• issues with success

  • # of warring parties
  • absense of pre-signed peace agreement
  • liklihood of spoilers
  • collapsed state
  • # of soldiers
  • disposable natural resources
  • hostile neighboring states
  • wars of succession

• conclusion: important to think about the metrics that we think of as “successful”