Reviews for The UN, Peace and Force

The average rating for The UN, Peace and Force based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-25 00:00:00 Whitney Collins Excellent book. Holsti develops the first parts of his work by following the positivist method; not so the last parts, a flaw in his work. However, his findings are fascinating. He does not tackle the puzzle of the causes of war from a behavioural perspective, but more likely from the points of view of different peace settlements, which make this research original. In his positivist approach, he identifies and classifies the structural causes of peace treaties departing in 1648 (Westphalia) where he goes from to Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles and San Francisco. By addressing the five most significant peace deals in history, he ignores the circumstances of other settlements. At points his work is frivolous. He does not fully explain the reasons of his chosen cases (DV), so the reader must infer them. He does not attribute specific weight to the causes and characteristics to his chosen conflicts. His quantitative considerations (statistically) are partial. A major flaw in his work is that he does not consider a diversification or correlation with a post WWII (nuclear) world, leaving his conclusions as historic curiosities more than a substantial contribution to the prevention of major conflict in the XXI Century. What we can rescue from that is that it is easy to identify major trends towards armed contest. Another major flaw of the book is that by focusing on those five peace settlements he concentrates his work in Western issues (mainly), which downside is that he does not include the causality of war (or peace) for other regions or periods of history of the world. One could say that his work is (almost) European focused. By underlining the evolution of attitudes towards war, particularly from the XIX to the early XX Centuries (he studies over three centuries of history), Holsti signals the reasoning behind armed conflicts in selected periods of history, but because of that he misses the generalization of his conclusions, one of them being that the prevalence of the state is key (not a new finding, really). Hoslti's work is mainly Realist, but towards the end it becomes a product of his own imagination, not very well, theoretically grounded. His work explains how and why each system ended and how the next one was born but does not explain the structural mistakes that could have prevented those falls from happening. Another flaw in his method is that he analyses what certain key actors did but misses the external influences on them. In this sense he could have classified the similarities and discrepancies in them and their decisions, to identify possible triggers of war, personal traits and, or major dangerous trends. One of the main characters that he analyses is W. Wilson. A notorious interventionist in Latin America matters, but Holsti does not conciliate this trait with his bellicosity towards power politics during the 1919 peace process in France. No possible correlation there. Another problem in the author's work is that he misses the huge role of civic and ethnic nationalism in his research and the war and peace processes: "peace becomes the father of war" (24) but he could have added that nationalism is the grandfather of dictatorship... e.g. Another conclusion in Holsti's statistical conclusions is that territory has become less relevant in international conflicts, however, several other theorists would disagree with that assumption. According to his findings, territory was more of an issue in the past than today, but today's territory is a much more dangerous issue because of new military technologies of the XXI Century, i.e. territorial risk is more dangerous (quality) today than in the past (quantity). He does not contemplate that. Clear, recent examples are Crimea and the failed Islamic Caliphate. Territory continues and will continue being one of the main issues of the nation-state in the foreseeable future. In his research, the author does not discriminate among the relevant issues (in foreign policy e.g.) and those not so relevant, that lead towards war. He could have classified them to guide the reader towards the crucial ones and distract him from the insignificant or less important ones. Holsti makes an important distinction of First, Second and Third World countries, but he does not include an analysis on emergent economies or e.g. a classification of the top 10 third world countries that influence the foreign policies of first and second world nation-states. One accurate conclusion of his work (my takeaway) is that there is a difference between the main intentions of first and second world countries avoidance of major conflicts, i.e. nuclear conflagration, and third world countries, which is balance and permanence of the government in place. His three areas on analysis, while wide, can be incomplete; the issues that create a war among nations, the meaning of war for the implicated actors, and the role of peace settlements in creating new conflicts could enrich his work with other elements, such as the temporality of issues (threats), opportunity or everlasting controversies as citizenship and nationality meanings and interpretations, just to name a few... e.g. he only looks at the meaning of war from the point of view of policy officers, not from the point of view of non-policy makers, which I am sure would provide with an interesting contrast to his findings. According to his findings, wars end with peace treaties, but only those that he studies; However, new international orders are not only the result of formal negotiations but also the consequence of serendipity, unintended consequences, which would have been a major contribution to his conclusions. He does not explain why or how new regulations of the use of force are effective or ineffective according to different circumstances and which ones are those, regimes implications in terms of speed of implementation of foreign policy, classification of the terms of peace settlements that lead to minor or major future conflicts.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-19 00:00:00 Charles Aikens Holsti's book is seeking to address not only why wars might occur, but also when, where and over what issues. This study examines three areas of pronounced neglect. Firstly, what are the issues that initially generate international conflict? What do men fight about? Secondly, what is the meaning of war to those who resort to it? Thirdly, in what ways do the arrangements of peace serve as a source of future international conflict? He argues that most studies completely ignore the issues in whose name war is waged, and asserts that should we ignore this we will fail to understand the conflicts in question. Additionally, he looks at the "meaning of war", or how policy-makers conceptualize war. He notes most wars end with formal negotiations leading to peace; they reaffirm international norms and conventions. The great multilateral peace conferences were attempts to build new international orders, and succeeded or failed to different extents. These new orders included; the definitions of norms regarding the use of force; systems of governance for the society of states; conflict-resolving mechanisms and procedures; the resolution of war-producing issues; specific terms of settlement that will preclude wars of revenge; and some consideration over types of issues that might cause conflict in the future. Holsti then provides an overview of conflict from the Westphalian peace of 1648, until the end of the Cold War. He concludes that different orders were more or less successful based on how the were able to prevent hegemony, prevent transformation of the system, or prevent total war. He argues they failed due to their inability to prepare for transformation of the order (and the resulting wars), as they were backward looking.