Costly Democracy

The evidence for successful postwar democratic transitions is not encouraging: since 1989, the international community has launched 19 major peacebuilding operations. These operations were reasonably successful in securing peace, but much less successful in establishing a democratic regime. Five years after the operations began, only two countries qualified as liberal democracy; also, no recent missions of significant size – including those in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan – have resulted in the establishment of a liberal democracy.