The purpose of peace building is to create conditions for a stable and lasting peace and to prevent the recurrence of large-scale violence in a post-civil war environment. Roland Paris's thesis in At War's End is effectively his claim that the Institutionalization Before Liberalization (IBL) strategy is the only effective way to support a society coming out of civil war, so as to avoid the destabilizing effects of liberalization, and that certain conditions are critical to its success. These particular conditions, as summarized by Paris, include a large, and often invasive, international presence, a long term commitment with no fixed end date or rush to an exit strategy, and large amounts of resources. However, while these terms for long lasting peace appear to be sound, they have not always been successful , or implemented as such, and in fact have essentially been counterproductive in some cases. Paris's approach has not always and may not always produce long-term sustainable peace with functioning institutions of democracy and the economy, because of dilemmas inherent in the approach. Though it is observed that most stable and peaceful states are democracies with productive economies, implementing the IBL strategy requires fine tuning and specific adjustments for every post-civil war state on a case by case basis.
Several dilemmas arise in Paris's approach as observed in peace building operations in different country cases. I will outline two that subsequently lead to further sub dilemmas that necessitate accountability. The first is that there are a great deal of differences across the peace building missions in that they take place in very different environments. Each country in which peace building operations are...
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... to support its implementation however, such an approach may essentially be counterproductive if implemented in a uniform procedural, short-term manner for every country case. The IBL program must proceed with the needed understanding of post-conflict needs and goals of a country's people, the cooperation and incorporation of a country's own initiatives, and a carefully personalized long-term democratic and market liberalization infrastructure for each country case. If every one of these conditions is not fulfilled than the IBL may certainly not produce long-term sustainable peace with functioning institutions of democracy and the economy because it is these very conditions that are the dilemmas inherent in the approach.
Works Cited
Paris, Roland. 2004. At War's End : Building Peace After Civil Conflict. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Is it true Americans are rightfully notorious for creating inaccurate paradigms of what really happened in historical events Americans are tied to? Has America ever censored historical events in order to protect Americans innocent democratic reputation? After reading, “The Best War Ever” by Michael C.C Adams, I have found the answers to these questions to be yes. Some of the myths that Adams addresses in his book include: 1. America was innocent in world war two and was an ever acting protagonist in the war; 2. World war two or any war for that matter can be, or is a “good war” and bring prosperity to America; 3. War world two brought unity to Americans.
"A Separate Peace Summary." Study Guides & Essay Editing. Grade Save, 16 Aug. 2000. Web. 02 May 2014. .
War is the means to many ends. The ends of ruthless dictators, of land disputes, and lives – each play its part in the reasoning for war. War is controllable. It can be avoided; however, once it begins, the bat...
Published in 1961, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is a satire of war with a twist. Heller wrote his narrative nonlinearly. Although certain critics described the novel as “disorganized, unreadable and crass”, the mismatched chronology complements Heller’s style of writing and draws the reader’s interest. One key point of Catch-22, the catch-22 paradox, makes use of the nonlinear structure to encircle the reader in the contradictions. In addition, Heller’s style of writing provides a point of viewing different from most novels. While the narrative may seem complex and overwhelming at first, the reader learns to appreciate the subtleties of Heller’s labyrinthine plot.
An article called, “The Real War,” written by Roger J. Spiller, begins with a quote by Walt Whitman, “The real war will never get in the books.” The author writes about an interview with Paul Fussell, who was a soldier in World War Two and has written many books about World War One and World War Two. Fussell is very opinionated and critical about other books written about these wars, asserting they are not realistic or portray the true essence of what really occurred by soldiers and other people participating in the wars. I claim that it is impossible to convey the actual personal feelings and emotions of those involved in a war in books or any other forms of media.
"Peacekeeping and Peacemaking." Reading and Remembrance . N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2014. . (tags: none | edit tags)
Tim O’Brien states in his novel The Things They Carried, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat” (77). This profound statement captures not only his perspective of war from his experience in Vietnam but a collective truth about war across the ages. It is not called the art of combat without reason: this truth transcends time and can be found in the art produced and poetry written during the years of World War I. George Trakl creates beautiful images of the war in his poem “Grodek” but juxtaposes them with the harsh realities of war. Paul Nash, a World War I artist, invokes similar images in his paintings We are Making a New World and The Ypres Salient at Night. Guilaume Apollinaire’s writes about the beautiful atrocity that is war in his poem “Gala.”
The idea of a lasting, ideally global, peace has been present in the minds of people for centuries. The most notable formulation of this is Kant’s vision of perpetual peace. “He saw it as a condition that needed to be maintained by politics between states with governments which represented society and separation of power. From this basic framework stems the idea called “democratic peace theory” (pg. 82). Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) asserts that democracies do not generally fight other democracies because they share common norms and domestic institutions that constrain international, state actors from going to war. Sebastian Rosato states, “In practical terms democratic peace theory provides the intellectual justification for the belief that spreading democracy abroad will perform the dual task of enhancing American national security promoting world peace” (pg. 585).
Review of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read, but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all the wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
stress and fear by the men at the front in the First World War. In
Rosato, S. (2003). The flawed logic of the democratic peace theory. The American Political Science Review, 97(4), 585–602.
Holsti, K. J. Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.
The Syrian Civil War is a good example of world leaders playing by the rules of realism. The civil war began in March of 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, and by July of 2012 17,000 have died and another 170,000 fled the country (Almond). The United Nations Security Council in February of 2012 had tried t...
Pillars of Peace, an annual report published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, consistently indicates that nations with high levels of development, democracy and economic prosperity are unlikely to engage in interstate conflicts. This provides the framework for yet another crucial argument in favor of free trade and globalization. In his article, The Capitalist Peace, Eric Gartzke (2007) does a rigorous statistical analysis into how free trade effects a variety of sociological metrics such as development, democracy, prosperity and peace. Gartzke found a high correlation between each of these factors. Most notably, he found a mutually causal relationship between free trade and each sociological metric. That is, free trade causes development, democracy and peace and vice versa. Acemoğlu and Robinson (2011) give insight into the mechanisms of this mutually causal relationship. They claim that elements of the global economy and by extension, affluence, will make their way into any country that recognizes property rights and has some form of democracy. Thus, one can say that the policy of governments have an effect on their likeliness to engage in international conflicts. This point is illustrated by Thomas Freedman(1999 ) who came up with the “Golden Arches Theory of Peace.” Freedman discovered that no two countries in which
War is such a debatable topic of whether it is just to wage a war on our neighbours or invade a country.One thing is very clear there are consequence and a cost. Martin Luther once stated,“War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families”. This was exactly what did. War was not a fun game like what Jessie Pope described it as in her poem, ‘Who’s for the game’. What war did was it changed people and society. The war caused soldiers to suffer from PTSD, it left families to face the feeling of grief and it crippled the economy.