United Nations activities in support of maintaining international peace and security were designed to fall under either Chapter VI of the UN Charter—encouraging the peaceful settlement of disputes—or Chapter VII—calling for a range of coercive enforcement measures against errant member states. The system of collective security never came into being as envisaged. Instead, the UN embarked on the innovative practice of “peacekeeping,” a word that famously does not appear in the charter yet has been the characteristic UN military operation. Since the UN's establishment in 1945, the nature of war and armed conflict has changed substantially, with interstate warfare steadily waning. With the end of the Cold War, the cover of superpower protection for local client regimes often disappeared at the same time that the major powers began to discover common interests in inserting international troops and other peace-supporting personnel into conflict and postconflict situations.

In this impressive work of scholarship, Lise Morjé Howard subjects UN peacekeeping in civil wars to critical and rigorous scrutiny, concluding that accounts of their failures have been much exaggerated. Having been led to expect failure by the dominant narrative in popular, political, and academic circles, Howard instead ends up having to explain successes. She does so through a systematic examination of the successful cases—Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique, eastern Slavonia, and East Timor—that centers on three variables. She does not neglect the failures, and indeed devotes a chapter to peacekeeping failures in Somalia, Rwanda, Angola, and Bosnia. But she focuses on the successes, devoting a chapter to each case. A penultimate chapter then looks at the mixed bag of a number of ongoing operations, with the final chapter bringing together the main thematic narratives in a crisp conclusion. Howard's central point is that successful peacekeeping requires the kind of careful attention to local postwar situations that is best assured by according a high degree of autonomy to peacekeeping missions in the field.

The strengths and merits of the book easily and far outweigh relatively minor quibbles and a few more serious reservations. The cases are studied methodically using a common structure. The literature coverage is extensive, even while this book marks a self-conscious departure in the sophistication of its conceptual and theoretical analysis. The care with which Howard treats so seemingly simple a statistic as the number of people killed in Cambodia (between 1 and 1.7 million), citing several reputable sources for the lower and higher ends, is a good example of her scrupulous scholarship (pp. 131–32). She was able to interview an extensive range of relevant actors. Being a UN insider, she is able to draw on some important documents held inside the Secretariat. At the same time, she never allowed the mass of material to overwhelm her, cloud the big picture, or distract her from her main analytical story line. The writing is crisp, clear and succinct. And there are some gems: One is the description of Yasushi Akashi as too restrained and excessively tactful as a counter to his often self-effacing but (in the Cambodian context) effective style of leadership (pp. 148–49). Another is Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his UN memoir, Unvanquished (1999), writing thus: “I felt I had no choice but to rely on my political intuition, which told me I was right” (quoted on p. 170). That probably sums up his tenure as secretary-general about as well as anything can. Howard's wry comment that “the demise of the Khmer Rouge” has “not necessarily given rise to freedom and democracy in Cambodia” (p. 174) is reminiscent of the Japanese emperor's famous broadcast to his people—“the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage”—announcing surrender at the end of World War II.

The study proceeds by way of answers to four questions: When has UN peacekeeping been successful, what are the sources of success and failure, how can the UN learn to do better, and what types of learning does the UN record show? Howard notes that success is both unexpected and difficult, for external, multilateral actors have to alter the actions and behavior of leaders and peoples in postconflict environments, while simultaneously restructuring political institutions, among others. Her argument can be stated with deceptive simplicity. Each of three conditions is necessary, and in combination they are sufficient, for the success of UN peacekeeping in civil wars: 1) consent of the warring parties (a “situational” factor) for the UN operation; 2) consensual but not very intense interest by the Security Council (supportive but not micromanaging); and 3) “first-level organizational learning” by the operation in the field.

For Howard, the last, whereby individual learning by key actors in their official roles is manifested as organizational change, is the most critically important of the three. It includes information gathering, coordination of international efforts, integration of the mission with the local postconflict environment, and the exercise of leadership and judgment. She also identifies preconditions (“permissive situational factors,” p. 10) for organizational learning in the field: information-gathering mechanisms, centralized field coordination, experienced staff distributed over the field, and capable leaders. Additional preconditions include the supply of well-trained and well-equipped troops in adequate numbers and requisite funding.

At the second level of organizational learning—the Secretariat applying the right lessons from one mission to the next (as opposed to learning in the field within any given mission)—the typical behavior is incremental adaptation. One important lesson that has been learned is the division of labor in the use of force, whereby the UN leaves this to powerful states or regional organizations while concentrating its own efforts on state building. Likewise, the UN has been markedly reluctant to take on the burden of administration since the Kosovo and East Timor missions.

Howard labels failure to learn, at either level, as dysfunction. Examples include the failure to address the problem of competing local administrations, or the insistence that international monitors and peacekeepers have been mandated and organized to be on the ground when ceasefires take effect.

This is a very impressive book. And like all work in political science, there are aspects of its analysis about which one might quibble. One such quibble relates to Howard's use of the concept of “civil war” or “intrastate conflict,” whereas in most cases, what we face are transnational and regional conflicts. The role of leadership—especially by the head of mission, force commander, and the UN secretary-general—is also underemphasized. It would have helped to bring in the principal-agent literature in discussing the role of the Secretariat as an independent actor in relation to member states (pp. 339–42). By the same token, “second-level organizational learning” blurs learning by the Secretariat and by member states. In Bosnia, for example, the safe-area resolutions were adopted against the professional advice of UN military ground reports (p. 46). The book strengthens my impression that the Secretariat has been ahead of its political masters.

Howard is also sometimes more generous than she needs to be in assessing UN performance. She is diplomatically reticent in failing to note that no senior UN official was ever held accountable for the failures of omission in Rwanda. In the same way, she avoids the really hard question of whether Kosovo and East Timor can be viable as independent states or will be permanent dependencies of international or external actors. More fundamentally, her account understates the problem of the unintended and perverse consequences of peacekeeping, an ethical and pragmatic issue increasingly recognized by practitioners of “humanitarian intervention.”

Yet while such issues no doubt warrant further analysis and debate, they do not diminish the fact that this is a first-rate book that deserves wide readership in policy, university, and informed public circles.