Of course, it is my duty to draw your attention to ‘Whither NATO?’, the chapter written by Professor Mats Berdal, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and myself on the evolution of NATO and its possible role in international peace and security. Offering an overview of NATO’s attempts at transformation since Kosovo, the chapter points to the need for NATO, on one hand, to embrace, more than it has done, stabilization and wider peacekeeping as core activities, and on the other, to think about more modest, yet still important military tasks that it has the capabilities to conduct and around which political agreement may also be struck, now between 28 member-states. It is not an entirely pessimistic take on the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, but it should be considered a call for much greater realism regarding its constraints on NATO’s role as a global security actor.

Click here for more information on the book from the publishers, and here to get a preview or to buy the book.

The blurb:

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 analyses 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.

Berdal also looks critically at the ways in which governments and international organisations, particularly the UN, have responded to these many challenges. He highlights the pivotal role of politics in planning peacebuilding operations, and offers some sober reflections on the future prospects for post-conflict intervention.