Diplomacy And Crisis Management In The Balkans

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, observers and players of American foreign policy have been wrestling with what US policy is and, more importantly, what it should be in the post-Cold War era. The breakdown of communism in the East has coincided with the outbreak of warfare in the former Yugoslavia to add a new sense of urgency for those seeking a direction for US foreign policy. This work seeks to demonstrate how reactive rather than proactive measures by the US, in both democracy promotion and in crisis management have been short-sighted, resulting in the present failure.

This book offers a critical analysis of the EU's first police and military crisis management missions in the Balkans--in Bosnia and Macedonia. The authors have conducted extensive research both in the field and at EU headquarters in Brussels. Their findings yield some important lessons for ongoing and future missions, from establishing mission goals to operational planning and specialized training of troops to battlefield tactics and weaponry to adapting to shifting political situations and controlling the local populace. Contributors include Isabelle Ioannides (Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK), Anna Juncos (Department of Politics, Loughborough University, UK), and Ursula Schroeder (European University Institute, Florence, Italy).

The wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were the deadliest European conflicts since World War II. The violence escalated to the point of genocide when, over the course of ten days in July 1995, Serbian troops under the command of General Ratko Mladic murdered 8,000 unarmed men and boys who had sought refuge at a UN safe-haven in Srebrenica. Shocked, the United States quickly launched a diplomatic intervention supported by military force that ultimately brought peace to the new nations created when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Peacemakers is the first inclusive history of the successful multilateral intervention in the Balkans from 1995--2008 by an official directly involved in the diplomatic and military responses to the crises. A deadly accident near Sarajevo in 1995 thrust James Pardew into the center of efforts to stop the fighting in Bosnia. In a detailed narrative, he shows how Richard Holbrooke and the US envoys who followed him helped to stop or prevent vicious wars in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. Pardew describes the human drama of diplomacy and war, illuminating the motives, character, talents, and weaknesses of the national leaders involved. Pardew demonstrates that the use of US power to relieve human suffering is a natural fit with American values. Peacemakers serves as a potent reminder that American leadership and multilateral cooperation are often critical to resolving international crises.

This book provides an eyewitness account of a key political crisis triggered by the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2007.

A state-of-the-art consideration of the European Union's crisis response mechanisms based on comparative fieldwork in a number of cases.

Consisting of eight parts, this book includes the changing nature of the defence of national territory role; expeditionary warfare; peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention; defence diplomacy; domestic military assistance; and internal security. The authors come from a range of different groups involved in defence transformation processes.

Can a distinct national foreign policy still be identified for small EU member states, and what accounts for the balance between national and EU foreign policy? Henrik Larsen develops an analytical framework for analyzing these questions and offers solutions through an empirical examination of the foreign policy of a small EU member state in the context of EU foreign policy - the case of Denmark. The book looks at seven policy areas: policy towards other EU member states, anti-terrorism, development, the Balkans, Africa, Latin America and trade. On the basis of the empirical study, the implications for the theoretical study of national foreign policy in an EU Context are outlined. It is suggested that we need a new, mixed approach to foreign policy analysis within the EU taking into account the nature of the policy area concerned and national conceptions of actorness.