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At the end of 2004 over 64,000 military and civilian police personnel and 4,000 civilian personnel were deployed in 21 UN missions, arguably putting the UN in danger of overstretching its institutional capacities. At the same time 35 peace missions, with a total of 225 385 military and civilian personnel, were carried out by regional organizations and UN-sanctioned non-standing coalitions of states. It is against this backdrop that the report of the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change addressed UN peace operations, in particular the challenge of post-conflict peace-building, and proposed the establishment of a Peace-building Commission, which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan endorsed in his own report, 'In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All', in March 2005. Peace-building is an increasingly central component of multilateral peace missions, as reflected in the fact that the mandates of 17 of the UN missions launched since 1999 include peace-building tasks. Peace-building is a process involving external actors enabling a post-conflict society to function in the political, social and economic spheres. The magnitude of the peace-building task means that priorities have to be set. Over the past few years, a fair degree of consensus has emerged on what these tasks are and the order in which they should be carried out. However, current peace-building endeavors under way in Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, Iraq and Liberia demonstrate that the challenges of magnitude and legitimacy (both international and local) intersect to make the practical tasks of peace-building difficult to address. Re-establishing the state's ability to provide security -- or 'renationalizing' the use of force and the prevention of violence within society -- is the first priority. Afghanistan is a vivid example of the complexities involved: the lack of progress with demobilization, disarmament and reintegration there contributed to the deterioration of the security situation throughout the country. The second priority area is the establishment of functioning law and order within the society. Without the necessary legal and administrative structures and mechanisms in place, economic reconstruction and social rehabilitation cannot take place. In Liberia, the need to set up a temporary skeletal legal system before embarking on a substantive overhaul of the rule of law highlights the challenge of balancing short-term versus long-term goals. The third and fourth priority areas for peace-building-economic reconstruction and governance and participation -- are considerably more difficult to prioritize. Perfect sequencing of peace-building tasks, however, does not necessarily guarantee sustainability. What is needed but often neglected is local participation in the process. A cursory glance at the scope of the tasks and responsibilities of contemporary peace operations raises the question of how the UN and regional organizations can continue to effectively oversee multiple peace operations of a multi-dimensional nature. A variety of responses have been offered. Some have argued that a minimalist approach towards peace-building should be taken and that the role of the international community should be limited to establishing security, leaving the rest to the local population. Others argue that a period of 'benevolent autocracy' from external actors offers the best chance for successful peace-building. Adapted from the source document.

This book is about the process and, more generally, about the opportunities that peace research and the teaching of conflict resolution can offer academic diplomacy. As such the book is both an empirical and a theoretical project. While it aims at being the most comprehensive analysis of the conflict in West Kalimantan, it also launches a new theoretical approach, neo-pragmatism, and offers lessons for the prevention of conflicts elsewhere.

Is there a dictatorial peace that resembles the democratic peace? This paper uses a new data set I compiled by Barbara Geddes to examine the conflict behavior of three types of autocratic regimes - personalist, military, and single-party dictatorships - in the post-World War II era. We find some evidence that specific types of authoritarian regimes are peaceful toward one another. No two personalist dictators or two military regimes have gone to war with each other since 1945. These dyads were not less likely to engage in militarized interstate disputes than were mixed dyads, however. Although single-party regimes were the only homogeneous dyad in this study to have experienced war, multivariate analyses of participation in militarized interstate disputes suggest that single-party states are more peaceful toward one another than are mixed dyads. Thus, while we have found no unambiguous evidence of a dictatorial peace to match the robustness of the democratic peace, there is substantial interesting variation in the conflict behavior of specific types of authoritarian regimes. The analysis presented here demonstrates that studies of the impact of regime type on conflict behavior must work from a more sophisticated conception of authoritarianism. (American Political Science Review / FUB)