Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past

By Kimberly Zisk Marten and Kimberly Marten Zisk

Book Overview

Anarchy makes it easy for terrorists to set up shop. Yet the international community has been reluctant to commit the necessary resources to peacekeeping--with devastating results locally and around the globe. This daring new work argues that modern peacekeeping operations and military occupations bear a surprising resemblance to the imperialism practiced by liberal states a century ago. Motivated by a similar combination of self-interested and humanitarian goals, liberal democracies in both eras have wanted to maintain a presence on foreign territory in order to make themselves more secure, while sharing the benefits of their own cultures and societies. Yet both forms of intervention have inevitably been undercut by weak political will, inconsistent policy choices, and their status as a low priority on the agenda of military organizations. In more recent times, these problems are compounded by the need for multilateral cooperation--something even NATO finds difficult to achieve but is now necessary for legitimacy.

Drawing lessons from this provocative comparison, Kimberly Zisk Marten argues that the West's attempts to remake foreign societies in their own image--even with the best of intentions--invariably fail. Focusing on operations in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor in the mid- to late 1990s, while touching on both post-war Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, Enforcing the Peace compares these cases to the colonial activities of Great Britain, France, and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The book weaves together examples from these cases, using interviews Marten conducted with military officers and other peacekeeping officials at the UN, NATO, and elsewhere. Rather than trying to control political developments abroad, Marten proposes, a more sensible goal of foreign intervention is to restore basic security to unstable regions threatened by anarchy. The colonial experience shows that military organizations police effectively if political leaders prioritize the task, and the time has come to raise the importance of peacekeeping on the international agenda.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231129122
• ISBN13: 9780231129121
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

My book: Enforcing the Peace by Kimberly Zisk

This book is fundamental in the area of International Peace and Security. Even though it is a book aimed mostly to scholars I think it has a valuable message for all people interested in the reality behind PK. Zisk Marten compares complex UNPKO's to the 20th century Imperial colonialism. These practices are almost the same, but today's colonialism (carried out through PK, among other mecanisms)is sophisticated and justified under new speeches of power under which it is intended to re-create societies based on western values. I highly recommend this book.

Worthwhile but Stops Short

This book came highly recommended to me, but I now believe, after reading it, that is was recommended because it contributes to the tarring of America for being an imperial power in the present, while also documenting the almost certain failure of any imperial power in the present that chooses to a) act unilaterally and b) impose its values and form of governance on an uncooperative indigenous population. On balance, I find the book worthy in so far as it draws parallels between the imperial occupations of the past and those of the present that focus on winning the war but pay no attention to winning the peace. Unfortunately, the book stops precisely where I was hoping it would start: it fails to address the two biggest aspects of winning the peace: a) inter-agency operations that mobilize *all* sources of national power and b) a deliberate concept, doctrine, manning, funding, and capabilities for stabilization and reconstruction, such as the Defense Science Board has recommended and the US Department of Defense is now implementing. A few notes: 1) The author coins the term "complex peace operations" where the term is not needed--the author means to discuss peace enforcement missions; 2) The author is completely correct and helpful in pointing out that multilateral operations inspire legitimacy, while unilateral operations inspire counterinsurgency; 3) The author focuses on political will with respect to sustained occupation by military forces (we do not have it), but does not engage in what I regard as the more important discussion, which is the need for political will and wit to understand, as General Tony Zinni understands, that the fastest way to reduce violence and restore legitimacy is to introduce water, food, and medicine to the area; 4) The author very helpfully spends time discussing why the German and Japanese reconstruction models are irrelevant to today's failed states; 5) The author praises the military for being able to do humanitarian and other "operations other than war" when the military is well-led and carefully monitored, but misses the larger point that most military professionals and historians will gladly point out: one needs both forces--a big war force put into OOTW operations will lose its skill at big war within two years, while also being incompetent at small war/OOTW for the first two years it is thus engaged; 6) The author suggests, and I believe with good reason based on solid research, that the West is over-reaching when it seeks to impose Western values, Western forms of governance, and even singular governments on ethnic divisions that have stood the test of time--flexibility in accepting multiple forms of self-governance is essential; 7) Finally, and I have seen this myself in Viet-Nam and in El Salvador, and read of it in many other places, the author points out that any time the West intervenes and seeks to select leaders on the basis of its own criteria, it inevitably disregards local reali