Civil wars pose some of the most difficult problems in the world today and the United Nations is the organization generally called upon to bring and sustain peace. Lise Morjé Howard studies the sources of success and failure in UN peacekeeping. Her in-depth analysis of some of the most complex UN peacekeeping missions debunks the conventional wisdom that they habitually fail, showing that the UN record actually includes a number of important, though understudied, success stories. Using systematic comparative analysis, Howard argues that UN peacekeeping succeeds when field missions establish significant autonomy from UN headquarters, allowing civilian and military staff to adjust to the post-civil war environment. In contrast, failure frequently results from operational directives originating in UN headquarters, often devised in relation to higher-level political disputes with little relevance to the civil war in question. Howard recommends future reforms be oriented toward devolving decision-making power to the field missions.

Howard (director, Conflict Resolution MA Program, Georgetown U.) utilizes comparative case studies in order to explore the determinants of success and failure in UN peacekeeping operations in civil wars and the types of organizational learning that can improve UN operations. Examining UN operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia, Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, Eastern Slavonia (in Croatia), and East Timor, he argues that three conditions are necessary and jointly sufficient to explain successes: favorable "situational factors" of the country emerging from civil war, consensual but only moderately intense interests of the powerful members of the Security Council; and ground-level organizational learning on the part of the peacekeeping mission. Pursuant to this argument, he develops models of both the "first-level" organizational learning that happens within the mission and the "second-level" organizational learning that takes place at UN headquarters in between missions. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

An in-depth analysis of the sources of success and failure in UN peacekeeping missions in civil wars.