This instructive volume aims to sort out the reasons that peacekeeping missions today so frequently fail. Kimberly Zisk Marten throws a wide net in investigating why. While her main case studies are Haiti, the Balkans, East Timor, and Afghanistan, she also makes more passing reference to a number of other recent or current interventions, including Iraq. As the subtitle of her book indicates, she also considers a variety of efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by liberal (for the times) colonial powers to ensure order and to restructure local societies and governments in line with what was perceived as beneficial both for the subject populations and the imperial homeland.

Marten's conclusions are mostly pessimistic. Peoples who come under foreign military occupation—whether today or more than a century ago—are inherently difficult to manage, much less reform, in liberalizing ways when deep-set ethnic differences have been long contained by authoritarian rule. Moreover, the intervening powers often lack the political will to do more than maintain order, finding that greater challenges at the center of world affairs preoccupy them much more than trying to perfect human relations and governing institutions on the periphery. By showing that in many ways the same dilemmas of “enforcing the peace” bedeviled both peacekeeping nations today and their predecessors a century or so ago, the author points to a recurrent set of obstacles that almost always eventually means that an enduring change toward stable democratic rule is not achieved.

Marten is careful to point out differences in time and place as well as similarities. Thus, the colonial powers of a century ago were more interested in consolidating their own hold on power than in preparing their subjects for eventual self-rule, which is the essential task today. Or again, the vicissitudes of 1994–95, first in Rwanda and then in the Balkans, led to critical changes in the way peacekeeping was conceived in our era, as it became understood that the intervening powers had to be prepared to use decisive military force if their ambitions were to have any hope of success. And she is careful to point out the peculiarities of individual cases—the fact that East Timor had never had its own government, for example—that make each situation unique to some extent.

On the basis of her review of a wide range of armed interventions—especially those of the 1990s and in Afghanistan beginning in 2002—Marten comes to pessimistic conclusions. “Nowhere have the liberal democratic military peacekeeping operations of the 1990s created liberal democratic societies,” she writes. “They did not even create much forward momentum in that direction in any of the countries where they were deployed” (p. 13). From this finding, the author does not conclude that armed humanitarian interventions should cease, but she does think that states involved in these actions should be aware of the limits of their abilities to enforce the peace for positive state-building ends and be satisfied instead with achieving what they can accomplish: stopping civil violence, protecting local populations against famine, engaging in limited projects to improve the economy (infrastructure development, for example), and hoping against hope that eventually the locals themselves will come to a positive resolution of their differences.

Calling for “a new model of security building” (p. 158), Marten explicitly warns against the kinds of inflated expectations that hold that stable governing institutions can emerge from peacekeeping occupations. Even the modest mission she describes for outsiders—in effect, the essentials of law and order plus a bit of humanitarian outreach and economic improvement—should be anticipated to take time and incur real costs. While international bodies such as the United Nations have critical roles to play, specific states should have lead authority in managing specific cases. States leading such interventionist missions should have some self-interest involved in the undertaking but not expect dramatic gains from their efforts. As a new government emerges, the foreign influence in place should support it—which may involve the armed control of borders, facing down rioters, or breaking the power of organized criminal operations. Interventions need to be bucked up by a clearer commitment to use force and to stay the course, yet at the same time they should be scaled back in terms of thinking that outsiders can build states or nations, for these are tasks that must be left to the locals.

For this reviewer, the main merit of Enforcing the Peace lies in its decidedly sober assessment of what progressively minded intervention can hope to achieve in today's world, combined with a determination not to throw in the towel completely. By calling for what I might label the depolitization of intervention in favor of more modest goals delivered with a firmer hand, Marten's approach might be similar to that recently announced by David Rieff, who has in effect repudiated his past calls for ambitious state-building schemes in favor of much more modest humanitarian ends (A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, 2003; and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, 2005). The pessimistic restraint of both Marten and Rieff might be compared profitably to the kind of enthusiasm that reigned only a few years ago with social scientists like Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (The Power of Human Rights, 1999). The interventions of the late 1990s were sobering; those of the early twenty-first century are frankly depressing. We are chastened by our times of an earlier optimism born of the end of the Cold War on terms we thought might continue to sweep forward in the world, if only we gave the push.

I would suggest a few amendments to the book's argument. First, the flashbacks to the imperial past are too brief to be compelling, and in any case, are they really useful? The subtitle of the book is surely misleading in any case. And the effort to make the two periods comparable strikes me as stretching it. Between the taking of the Philippines and the invasion of Iraq, for example, lies something called the twentieth century with its wars, its ideologies that were blueprints for political change, its winners and losers, its nationalism, its rebirth of religion—the list could be extended. Political scientists are at risk when they ride roughshod over history, gaily assuming that they may compare whatever they please when in fact circumstances are so changed.

Second, why can the international community not act more forcibly to bring about border rectifications where they make sense? Marten appears to think that trying to get the various ethnicities of the Balkans together within Bosnia in the Dayton Peace Accords was a mistake (I agree), but why not redraw boundary lines (for example, putting more ethnic Albanians now under other state authorities in Kosovo proper, while ethnic Serbs are permitted to be citizens of Serbia)? Many of these communities live very close to borders in any case, and some kind of proportional exchanges might be envisioned, such as now are discussed in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, for example. We can thus avoid the terrible ethnic transfers that occurred among Greeks and Turks or Indians and Pakistanis, while at the same time creating an ethnic homogeneity that makes whatever government is in power more likely to be stable.