The Transformation of the World of War and Peace Support Operations

Interdisciplinary and diverse in political perspective, Praeger Security International publishes insightful and timely material on international security, including defense and foreign policy, strategy, regional security, military history, and terrorism. All PSI titles are seamlessly added to PSI Online, our vast virtual library on critical security issues.With the end of the Cold War, the euphoria of the Gulf War of the 1990s, and the avowal of a "New World Order", peace-operations were declared as the recipe for a better world through international intervention in conflict arenas. However, the debacles and failures in Cambodia, Somalia, and the Balkans led to disillusionment and a sense of strategic helplessness among leaders, experts, and scholars in the industrial democracies. While these arguments have been the focus of intense criticism and discussion, they nevertheless underscore the fact that since the end of the Cold War, the armed forces of the industrial democracies have undergone very significant transformations. This is the first work linking those changes to Peace Support Operations (PSOs), those operations with major state-building components that demand broad and coherent cooperation between military forces and civilian entities.The Transformation of the World of War and Peace Support Operations is a timely book, as the recent debates over PSOs continue to take center stage. This work embodies a new set of ideas and concepts that aid in grasping and interpreting the transformations taking place in the world of war and in PSOs. It seeks to understand how social, economic, political, and organizational transformations around the globe are related to the complexlinks between armed forces and PSOs. Additionally, the work addresses issues that will continue to define the character and makeup of modern warfare and the missions of PSOs for decades to come.