Critical Review: Peace After The Civil War

Critical Review Students Name Institutional Affiliation In Fortna's article, "Does peacekeeping keep the peace? International intervention and the duration of peace after the civil war", he points out various ideas in regard to the effectiveness of peacekeeping. The main argument of the article revolves around the question as to whether the presence of peacekeeping plays an important role in the creation of peace after a civil war or its absence performs the purpose (Fortna, 2004). An analysis is provided in regard to the civil conflicts that occurred in 1944 and 1997. The results of the analysis indicate that peacekeeping plays a substantial role in keeping the peace after a civil war. The international peacekeeping reduces the occurrence of another war among the involved parties by approximately 55%. Therefore, peacekeeping is an important international mission because through peace among nations; trade partners are able to grow the global economy hence reducing poverty. The ease of peacekeeping depends on various factors hence making it a difficult process. For instance, the factor that led to the end of the war plays a substantial role in helping intervention teams to create peace. In most cases, it is easier in a case whereby the war ended in a decisive victory among both parties. This makes it easy to come up with treaties that would prevent the occurrence of such war in the future. However, in the case whereby one of the parties seems to have lost more than they anticipated, then chances of another war occurring remain high. In such cases, a high number of death toll increases the chances of creating another revenge war. Therefore, international peacekeeping entities have found it difficult to maintain peace in deadly wars as compared to minor wars. In addition, peacekeeping is necessary because a loophole in one trade region could cause a detrimental impact on the global economy. This is most evident in cases whereby there is political instability in nations whose ports are globally relied upon by other trade partners. During the war, it means that the ports are mostly inaccessible and hence, creating substantial losses to the nations that rely on them for importation and exportation. Therefore, this makes it important to have peacekeeping intervention teams as soon as possible in order to ensure that such areas are stable again. In war whereby there is a stalemate between rebel forces and the government, it becomes difficult to maintain peace since the rebellion continue to take place as long as that particular government is still in power. This has been the case in certain African countries such as Sudan and Kenya. During an election in Kenya, thousands of people died in a war because the rebellions claimed that the results if the election where unfair. However, regardless of the peacekeeping interventions which were employed, the government remained in power. The peacekeeping period took a long period as the death toll kept on rising. The same case happened in Sudan which led to the division of the country into a northern and southern kingdom, each of them having its government. This is just a few of the examples to show how difficult the peacekeeping process is. A lot of strategizing needs to be done to ensure that the p...