This book examines every major peacebuilding mission launched between 1989 and 1999. There were fourteen in total; all were deployed to countries in which a civil war had just ended. Despite many differences, these missions shared a common strategy for consolidating peace after internal conflicts: immediate democratization and marketization. What can we learn from the peacebuilding record about the effectiveness of this strategy as a means of preventing the recurrence of fighting in postconflict situations? This volume argues that the idea of transforming war-shattered states into stable market democracies is basically sound, but that pushing this process too quickly can have damaging and destabilizing effects. Market democracy is not the miracle cure for internal conflict. On the contrary, the process of political and economic liberalization is inherently tumultuous: It can exacerbate social tensions and undermine the prospects for stable peace in the fragile conditions that typically exist in countries just emerging from civil war.

A more sensible approach to postconflict peacebuilding would seek, first, to establish a system of domestic institutions that are capable of managing the destabilizing effects of democratization and marketization within peaceful bounds and, second, to phase in political and economic reforms slowly over time, as conditions warrant. To do this effectively, international peacebuilders will have to abandon the notion that war-shattered states can be hurriedly rehabilitated. One set of elections, without creating stable political and economic institutions, does not produce durable peace in most cases.