Pursuing sustainable peace through post-conflict peacebuilding: The case of Sierra Leone

Many of the world's poorest states have experienced violent conflict in the past decades and it is today widely accepted that armed conflicts require sustained efforts that address not only the military, but also the political, humanitarian, economic and social dimensions of conflicts. For some years there has been a growing international concern with and emphasis on peacebuilding programming in the area of conflict resolution and peacekeeping. In Sierra Leone, a country that was engulfed in a brutal civil war for more than ten years, peace was hard won—a peace that would not have been possible without the presence and active post-conflict assistance of the United Nations (UN). However, Sierra Leone remains in a precarious state, being one of the poorest countries in the world, and needs the commitment of the international community in ongoing post-conflict peacebuilding to sustain its delicate peace. This article examines the challenges, extent and achievements of peacebuilding programming in Sierra Leone, and assesses the prospects for sustainable peace in this once war-torn West African state.     

Figuring out fighting organisations: The new organisational analysis in strategic studies

Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars, Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp.xi + 161, biblio. index; £23.50. ISBN 0–8014–3034–8.

Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp.xiii + 297, 19 illus. 9 maps, 2 tables, biblio. index; £25. ISBN 0–521–44168–4.

Leonard A. Humphreys, The Way of the Heavenly Sword: The Japanese Army in the 1920s, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp.x + 252, 7 illus., biblio. index; £27.50. ISBN 0–8047–2375–3.

Jeffrey W. Legro, Cooperation Under Fire: Anglo‐German Restraint During World War II, Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp.xii + 255, 1 table, biblio. index; £27.50. ISBN 0–8014–2938–2.

Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp.vii + 275, 1 table, biblio. index; £27.50 (cloth), £11.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8014–2556–5 and ‐8196–1.

Kimberly Martin Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955–1991, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp.x + 286, biblio. index; £33.50. ISBN 0–691–06982–4.     

Professionalization and suicidal defence planning by the Irish army, 1921–1941

Recently declassified war plans reveal the Irish Army preparing a conventional defence against expected British invasion in 1940–41. Irish Army planners realized such a defence would have been suicidal in the face of overwhelming British military superiority, yet they rejected the obvious alternative of preparing a defence which incorporated their operational experience of guerrilla warfare from the Anglo‐Irish War of 1919–21. This was because in building a professional organization in the 1920s and 1930s, Army leaders formed beliefs about military professionalism by imitating the British Army. This, in turn, led them to believe that guerrilla warfare was not the business of professional armies.     

NATO's Transformation Gaps: Transatlantic Differences and the War in Afghanistan

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has since the turn of the new century experienced a double transformation gap: between global and regionally oriented allies and between allies emulating new military practices defined by the United States and allies resisting radical change. This article takes stock of these gaps in light of a decade's worth of collective and national adjustments and in light of counter-insurgency lessons provided by Afghanistan. It argues first of all that the latter transatlantic gap is receding in importance because the United States has adjusted its transformation approach and because some European allies have significantly invested in technological, doctrinal, and organizational reform. The other transformation gap is deepening, however, pitching battle-hardened and expeditionary allies against allies focused on regional tasks of stabilization and deterrence. There is a definite potential for broad transformation, our survey of officers' opinion shows, but NATO's official approach to transformation, being broad and vague, provides neither political nor military guidance. If NATO is to move forward and bridge the gap, it must clarify the lessons of Afghanistan and embed them in its new Strategic Concept.     

Rebel movements in the DRC

Despite a generally valiant effort on the part of the United Nations (UN) since 1999 to bring peace and stability to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country continues to be destabilised by rebel forces. These armed movements pose a constant threat to the fragile transition in the DRC, and security in the country is continuously undermined. This article examines rebel forces in the DRC from two perspectives. Firstly, it examines such movements as a manifestation of sub-national terrorism. Secondly, it examines armed movements from the perspective of so-called ‘ungoverned spaces’. The view taken in this article supports the scholarly insight and argument that in countries such as the DRC, armed movements and militias are filling power vacuums that are the result of the inability and lack of military capacity of weak states to fight these movements effectively. Specifically, the eastern and north-eastern parts of the DRC have been major conflict zones where sub-national terrorists employ terror as a strategy. In this context, the DRC is severely affected by terrorism – a phenomenon in the DRC that is intimately linked to the failure to effect sustained development and to consolidate accountable and effective governance.