UID:
kobvindex_DGP1639757139
ISSN:
0039-6338
Content:
Fifteen years after the Dayton Accords, Bosnia is still at peace. In some ways, Bosnia was an easier case than Afghanistan and Iraq, and is a sobering lesson in both the promise and inherent limitations of contemporary military interventions and state-building operations. While the international community proved adept at stopping the violence, generating self-sustaining peace has been much more difficult. Dayton posed an inherent dilemma: on the one hand, the political structures it had established were unworkable and too often served the interests of Bosnia's most malign political forces; on the other, the agreement was the foundation of the peace, and uprooting it threatened a return to war. Bosnia's current predicament should not be construed as evidence of the inherent impossibility of state-building, but only of the extreme difficulty, resource-intensiveness and decades-long timeframe such projects require. A policy of benign neglect or a purely military approach are not, in most cases, apt to be more effective. Ultimately, the logic of intervention can be very compelling for liberal democracies in possession of the power to stop violence, and extended interventions will thus sometimes be unavoidable. (Survival / SWP)
In:
Survival, Philadelphia, Pa. [u.a.] : Routledge, 1959, 52(2010), 5, Seite 47-74, 0039-6338
Language:
English
