Virginia Page Fortna: In her new book she focuses on peacekeeping (HNN Interview)

Virginia Page Fortna is Associate Professor in Political Science at Columbia University. Her most recent book, Does Peacekeeping Work: Shaping Belligerents’ Choices after Civil War examines peacekeeping as a policy tool in mitigating conflict within some of the more volatile countries and regions of the world.

Q: What prompted you to write about the issue of peacekeeping?

A: This is an issue that I've been interested in for a long time, and there seemed to be a fundamental gap in what we knew about this policy tool. To most lay-people, the image of peacekeeping is one of failure or impotence. What most people know about are the failures (Rwanda, Srebenica, Mogadishu), because these are the stories that make the news -- the successful cases are much less well known. At the same time, for policy-makers and academics who work on peacekeeping, there was a different problem. There was a lot of discussion about peacekeeping, and a huge literature, without any basic analysis of whether it worked, because people who work on the topic either look at only one case, or only make comparisons among peacekeeping cases, they don't think about comparing peacekeeping cases to those where belligerents are left to their own devices. So no one was asking what is the "value-added" of this policy tool, does it actually make peace more likely to last? And if it does so, how does it do so? So I wanted to fill those gaps by answering those questions.

Q: What is your response to the critique that peacekeeping often becomes a political tool that is more about short-term stability than resolving longterm mistrust?

A: In some ways, this is a valid critique -- by making war less likely to resume, peacekeeping can take away the incentive for parties to do the hard work of resolving their fundamental differences. But in many cases, long-term reconciliation and the building of trust is impossible without short-term stability. If the war starts up again and again, the prospects for long-term resolution are even worse than if peacekeeping "freezes" the conflict. So while peacekeeping is not a perfect solution, it is often a lot better than the alternative.

Q: What are the most important policy lessons that emerge from the study?

A: The biggest one is simple -- peacekeeping is a very effective tool for managing conflict, it makes peace much more likely to last. And that means it is a tool worth investing in.

Another important lesson, that will come as more of a surprise to a lot of people who work on this topic, is that the more militarily robust peacekeeping missions, known as enforcement missions or "Chapter VII" missions in the UN lingo, are not necessarily more effective than smaller, less well-armed "consent-based" or "Chapter VI" missions. The reason for this is that most of the ways peacekeeping has a stabilizing effect are not military in nature, but have to do with political and economic leverage, or the ability of belligerents to signal their intentions to each other, or the ability of peacekeepers to manage and prevent accidents that might otherwise spiral out of control. This means that the recent emphasis on beefing up the military side of peacekeeping missions and making sure they have robust enforcement mandates may be misplaced. These beefier missions may be best in some situations, but they are expensive and it's often hard to get countries to contribute troops to them. So we shouldn't conclude that if we can't have one of these robust missions that we shouldn't have peacekeeping at all -- the more modest types of missions are surprisingly effective and we should continue to use them.

Q: What's up with the image on the cover of your book?

This is a picture of a former rebel at a meeting held by peacekeepers in Sierra Leone (one of the case studies covered in the book). The image was cropped a little closer than I would have liked, so it's hard to see the "blue helmets" in the background. But I chose the image because it puts the focus on the parties to the conflict (whom I refer to as the "peacekept" in the book) rather than the peacekeepers. Most of the work on this topic focuses on the peacekeepers -- their mandates, equipment, relationships between the field and headquarters, who contributes troops, etc. -- and almost ignores the fact that it is the rebel and government leaders that make decisions about going back to war or maintaining peace, so peacekeeping can only have an effect by influencing the decisions of the belligerents themselves. In my research for this project, I focus on the perspective of the belligerents, and I relied heavily on interviews with government and rebel leaders to assess whether and how peacekeeping works. Since that is one of the unique contributions of the book, I wanted the cover to emphasize it.