Review of Virginia Page Fortna . 2008 . Does peacekeeping work ? ( Princeton : Princeton

This is an excellent book which addresses an interesting, important, and understudied issue. Peacekeeping has been used in an increasing number of internal conflicts since the end of the Cold War, but we really know quite little about how effective a strategy of conflict management it is. General media descriptions of peacekeeping often focus on dramatic failures and listening to scholars and policymakers’ general sentiments could suggest that it is an ineffective tool. While there are a large number of studies that examine specific cases of peacekeeping, and one recent systematic study of the role of the United Nations in “building peace” (Doyle and Sambanis 2006), Fortna’s study is the first to systematically examine the effect of peacekeeping. The book’s title sums up Fortna’s main research question, however, there are really three, related, questions. First, where do peacekeepers go? Do peacekeepers pick “easy” cases or go to the conflicts where they are most needed? Second, once they have been deployed, does peacekeeping actually prolong peace? Finally, if peacekeeping is effective, why? What does peacekeeping do that makes peace longer lasting? Fortna addresses each of these questions. A major barrier to evaluating whether peacekeeping “works” is the selection problem—if peacekeepers select cases where they are most likely to be effective and we find some effect of peacekeeping on prolonging peace, it is difficult to determine whether peacekeeping has had an independent effect on the length of peace. To show that peacekeeping works, Fortna needs to first demonstrate that peacekeepers are not just picking easy conflicts. She does this by developing a statistical model to test how various indicators thought to make peace more or less stable affect the duration of peace. She limits her analysis to wars fought between 1945 and 1989 because peacekeeping in civil war was quite rare in this period, so she can capture the effect of these indicators in the absence of peacekeeping. Fortna then tests how these same indicators affect the likelihood of peacekeeping in conflicts after the Cold War. She Rev Int Organ (2009) 4:101–103 DOI 10.1007/s11558-009-9053-x