The Peacekeeping Prescription

If I were a doctor examining the health of the world today, I would be greatly alarmed at the state of my patient. The international community, vibrant in its resolve to achieve a strong, stable, and healthy political environment as the post– Cold War era began, has been drained and weakened by one bout after another of violent confl ict during the last decade. In Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and elsewhere, it has had to weather the massive displacement of people, extensive loss of life, and irreparable damage, which are confl ict’s concomitants. Clearly, this is a pattern that must be broken. Ideally, each of these bouts of confl ict would either have been prevented completely or nipped in the bud. Prevention is—and would have been—by far the best medicine. But the practice of prevention, in both medicine and politics, is uneven. Some diseases resist early treatment. Some patients resist treatment until their conditions become critical—or even longer. Because of this, it becomes necessary to address confl ict fully blown, to treat the bout of confl ict at or near its height. Even at this stage, the efforts undertaken, while hopefully curative and sometime palliative, also have a preventive aspect to them. They can prevent the escalation of confl ict or the resumption of it. As in the case in which a primary tumor is discovered, intervention of this kind can prevent metastasis and hopefully bring the disease into remission. Thus, when we speak here of the “peacekeeping prescription” or the “treatment” it entails, we must always be clear that, while we have one eye on the crisis of the moment, we have the other on protecting the future and preventing the threat now posed against it from becoming a reality. Prevention is a great part of the goal of peacekeeping, and, in many instances, has constituted a large (and often overlooked) part of its success. Many of the confl icts of the last ten years have had to be treated using the peacekeeping prescription, for various reasons. And, as with any other ailment, the disease has manifested itself differently in each instance, and the treatment has had to be adapted to those variations. Peacekeeping has proved itself a fl exible rem