On 18 February 2010, Mats Berdal, Professor of Security and Development at Kings College London, IISS Senior Consulting Fellow, spoke on his Adelphi Book, Building Peace After War. Andrew Parasiliti, Executive Director, IISS-US, and Corresponding Director, IISS-Middle East, moderated the discussion.
The widespread practice of intervention by outside actors aimed at building ‘sustainable peace’ within societies ravaged by war has been a striking feature of the post‐Cold War era. But, at a time when more peacekeepers are deployed around the world than at any other point in history, is the international will to intervene beginning to wane? And how capable are the systems that exist for planning and deploying ‘peacebuilding’ missions of fulfilling the increasingly complex tasks set for them?
In Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal addresses these and other crucial questions, examining the record of interventions from Cambodia in the early 1990s to contemporary efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book analyzes the nature of the modern peacebuilding environment, in particular the historical and psychological conditions that shape it, and addresses the key tasks faced by outside forces in the early and critical ‘post‐conflict’ phase of an intervention. In doing so, it asks searching questions about the role of military force in support of peacebuilding, and the vital importance of legitimacy to any intervention.
Mats Berdal is Professor of Security and Development at King’s College London and a Consulting Senior Fellow at the IISS. His publications include United Nations Interventionism, 1991‐2004, editing with Spyros Economides for Cambridge University Press in 2007.
