International Interventions in Fragile Settings

3 units

Civil wars are the prevailing political crises of our time. The international community devotes considerable financial and human resources to preventing civil wars from breaking out and stopping them once they do. Do such attempts succeed? In this course, we examine international efforts to create sustainable peace after civil wars from a variety of perspectives. Drawing upon theoretical and empirical analyses in political science, we investigate the effectiveness of peacekeeping troops deployed to keep warring parties from fighting as well as statebuilding initiatives that attempt to construct or reconstruct domestic institutions in a postconflict state. We also consider the spatial challenges facing peacekeeping operations, which may prevent certain operations from succeeding locally where they have succeeded nationally. Finally, we examine different types of peacekeepers, including the United Nations's extensive network of peacekeeping operations around the globe.