Stanford conducted a study of international intervention in civil wars, focusing on some basic questions. As the grantees explained it, with about 16.5 million dead in the course of 122 civil wars in the past half century, their interest was in learning what the principle difficulties are in doing peacekeeping and transitional administration, and how those difficulties might best be resolved. Further, they investigated what causes civil wars, whether there was any way they can be prevented or, once begun, how they can be ended. Stanford’s data showed that civil wars are less about ethnic demographics, religious hatreds, economic inequality, or even absence of political rights than they are about a set of military techniques—rural guerrilla warfare. The best predictors of a higher probability of civil war onset are low per capita income, a large population, recent independence, mountainous terrain, oil production, and recent change in the level of democracy.

This finding strongly indicates that badly run counter-insurgencies are a worse threat to peace than bad policy. For poor countries with weak armies under bad leadership, fighting rebels without creating new rebels becomes the major problem to address. The UN is poorly equipped to engage in such activities, and the long-term result of civil war and UN intervention is likely to be an accumulation of international protectorates or neo-trusteeships around the world, where the international peacekeepers’ only hope for exit will be as a result of nation building leading to the ultimate transfer of responsibility to legitimate representatives of the war-torn country. These conclusions were presented at a series of high-level conferences in New York and Washington, D.C. and were also disseminated in the research paper, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” in American Political Science Review, volume 97, number 1, February 2003. While it is acknowledged that the path from scholarship to policy is an indirect one, according to Stephen Del Rosso, the challenges to conventional wisdom arising from this grant-sponsored research are known to be influencing key decision-makers at the UN, particularly the Peacebuilding Commission, the World Bank and the U.S. State Department as well as its European counterparts. A number of these institutions have recently undergone significant reforms and, in light of recent failures and with the hope of improving outcomes in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, are looking to the conclusions of the Stanford study for help in determining their critical next steps.

Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies made a systematic assessment of peacekeeping operations in self-determination disputes, which aimed at finding out whether external intervention can prevent the direst effects of the struggle for self-determination and, finally, whether peacekeeping in fact helps to keep the peace. The conclusions of their research, simply put, were that peace lasts longer when peacekeepers are deployed than when they are not, all else being equal, and that leadership by a single, highly motivated state with UN backing is the best design for an operation to be both legitimate and effective. Products of this grant included a series of papers and conference presentations as well as the book, Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past, by grantee Kimberly Zisk Marten, published in 2004 by Columbia University Press. The Corporation provided total funding of $683,000 for these projects. These grants not only generated policy relevant ideas, but conclusions were also directed to policymakers wrestling with these challenges in the United Nations and national governments.

The Fund For Peace, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit whose mission is to prevent war and alleviate the conditions that cause war, undertook a concurrent two-year study to examine the feasibility of regional military responses to self-determination disputes. With a $440,000 grant from the Corporation, the organization held a series of international policymaking conferences to find out whether, given the UN’s self-admitted shortcomings in external interventions, other workable alternatives existed and what the criteria should be for other actions.

In 2001 a major project concerning self-determination was launched by the International Peace Academy (IPA). Founded in 1970, IPA is an independent, international NGO dedicated to promoting the prevention and settlement of armed conflicts between and within states through policy research and development. IPA works closely with the United Nations, especially with the secretary-general. According to Kofi Annan, “IPA has been invaluable in working with the UN to tackle essential tasks of reflection and redirection which [the UN has] neither the means nor the manpower to address alone.”

This time their approach was to research the United Nations’ involvement with transitional governments and weigh its impact on self-determination. Citing the UN’s complicated mandate in Kosovo and its role in East Timor, the first instance in which the world body exercised near complete sovereignty over a territory, this effort was directed toward shaping policy on the range of strategies that should involve the UN. By taking on this issue from the UN’s institutional perspective, the intention was to make significant progress in defining the role of the UN and establishing best practices. A grant of $271,000 enabled the academy to do important fieldwork in Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor and Western Sahara as well as extensive analysis and dissemination of research findings.

Stephen Del Rosso believes that by bringing together policymakers and experts, both of these grants not only benefited from the real-world experience of the participants, but established a ready channel for dissemination of project findings. For example, the major event in IPA’s calendar regarding this project was a 2002 conference, “You the People: Transitional Administration, State-building and the United Nations.” Panelists and participants included officials from the UN Secretariat and its specialized agencies, diplomats, academics and NGO representatives, many of whom have held senior positions within UN transitional administrations—most significantly, a number of former and serving special representatives of the secretary-general (SRSG). One of them, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was at this time SRSG for Iraq. (In August 2003, he was killed in a bombing of the UN’s Baghdad headquarters.) The following year, IPA was invited to participate in a series of discussions within the UN about the world body’s potential post-conflict role in Iraq. Although these sensitive meetings were among the most important elements of the project, they were conducted on a confidential basis.

In their final report, the IPA grantees noted that the significant interest in this project within the UN community and beyond was reflected in the large number of publications: five policy reports, fifteen chapters and articles, and two dozen opinion pieces. Grantees were interviewed and quoted at length in the media and invited to present several dozen papers and guest lectures. Finally, the book You the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building by grantee Simon Chesterman was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.

Peacebuilding: The Way Forward

In his address to the General Assembly in September 2003, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized that threats to peace over the past twelve months had shaken the world’s sense of collective security and its confidence in the possibility of finding common solutions. He warned member states that the United Nations had reached a fork in the road, and that if it did not rise to the challenge of meeting new threats, there was a risk of becoming irrelevant. To generate new ideas about the kinds of policies and institutions required for the UN to be effective in the 21st century, Annan created the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. (Two influential members of the panel were Corporation grantees on secondment.) Again responding to the UN’s request, the Corporation provided a $250,000 grant to support the panel’s work.

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