The celebration in Prague should have been more raucous. The most successful alliance in world history has extended to corners of Europe unimaginable just a few years ago. The military capacity gained for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from expansion is minimal but the political returns will be fantastic. More than any other institution, NATO has helped make Europe democratic, peaceful and whole. What is particularly striking about the new members -- Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia -- is how many of them emerged from Communist rule with no democratic traditions. The pull of NATO, the desire to join this Western club, created real incentives for democratic consolidation.

Book description:

The basic logic of preventive diplomacy is unassailable. Act early to prevent disputes from escalating; reduce tensions that could lead to war; deal with today's conflicts before they become tomorrow's crises. Yet as we look at the record of these first years of the post-Cold War era, it is quite mixed. There have been some preventive diplomacy successes and opportunities that have been seized by major powers and international organizations to help preserve and protect the peace. But there also have been other opportunities that have been missed, with some of the century's most deadly conflicts the result. This study examines ten major post-Cold War cases including Croatia-Bosnia, Rwanda, the Baltics, Russia-Ukraine, Macedonia, and North Koreato assess the key factors contributing to both the success and failure of preventive diplomacy. The method of case study analysis employed is based on the work of Alexander L. George. Authors include both leading academics and prominent policy officials with first-hand knowledge

Book chapter in Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World , B.W. Jentleson, ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

This report is the result of a workshop held in April 1998, when fifty policy experts, government officials and scholars met in Washington, DC. to discuss an issue of great import: the future of the relationship between Ukraine and NATO, This event, the Workshop on Ukraine-NATO Relations, was sponsored by the Harvard University Project on Ukrainian Security and the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. The express goal of the workshop was to bring together representatives of Ukraine, NATO, and the United States so that they could collaborate on developing concrete recommendations for short and long-term next steps to broaden and deepen Ukraine-NATO relations.

The conveners of this workshop believed that the relationship developing [at that time] between Ukraine and NATO had the capacity to evolve into an important force for stability and security in Europe and the world, and to serve as a model for other countries in the region. While the NATO-Ukraine Charter and Ukraine's participation in the Partnership for Peace and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia provided a strong foundation, the longer-term direction of this very important relationship continued to be largely undefined. Further, they strongly believed that the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership signed by Ukraine and NATO in the summer of 1997 was only the first step towards institutionalizing the growing Ukraine-NATO relationship. Ensuring that the Charter was meaningful depended on concrete implementation of the cooperation anticipated in that document. Thus they decided that a concerted effort needed to be made to develop a gameplan for the future.

On March 4 and 5, 1996, the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control, in conjunction with the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, convened a research planning conference on "Police Reform in States under Transition." The conference was unusual in that its primary purpose was to foster an ongoing discussion between academics working in the area of democratization and police reform, and policymakers running police reform programs in countries such as Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, South Africa, and EI Salvador. Our primary goal for the conference was to construct a research agenda that would allow continued dialogue between scholars and policymakers, and would focus on questions of theory and practice immediately applicable to policymakers in the field.

Participants in the conference included Robert Perito, Special Advisor to the Director of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), U.S. Department of Justice; Frederick Mecke, Director, Office of International Criminal Justice, U.S. Department of State; Arnstein Overkil, Police Major General of Asker and Baerum Police Headquarters in Norway, and advisor to the Palestinian Authority on policing; Diana Gordon, Chair of the Department of Political Science at City College of New York; Louise Shelley, professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University; William Stanley from the Department of Political Science at the University of New Mexico; Jeffrey Ian Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Justice; and faculty and staff from Stanford University and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

In this paper, we investigate the extent and likely impact of employee ownership on the transition process under way in Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the fact that political realities in most of the region imply that sales or transfers to employees often represent a significant privatization path, much of the literature on economic reform has been critical of the potential role of employee ownership in enterprise restructuring (for example, Blanchard et al., 1991), although the ownership form also has a few proponents (for instance, Ellerman, 1990). The relative merits and differences in behavior of employee-owned firms compared with "conventional" capitalist firms in market economies have received considerable attention in the Western literature (for example, Bonin and Putterman, 1987; Bonin, Jones, and Putterman, 1992; Hansmann, 1990; Pencavel and Craig, 1994). What is not yet well understood is the particular strengths and deficiencies brought by employee ownership to the process of transition itself. Our attempts to answer this question provide the conceptual framework in this paper against which actual privatization programs in various countries are evaluated and against which hypotheses about relative performance may derived and tested.

The tasks of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention are neither self-evident nor value-neutral, as some of their proponents seem to believe. Diplomacy that aims to resolve long-standing conflicts may have to take sides and coerce powerful parties into concessions. Diplomacy that aims to manage conflict so that it does not become violent may have to sacrifice a quest for justice in deference to the powerful. Prevention might conflict with important national and even global interests. If, as President Clinton has suggested many times, the primary American interest in Bosnia is thwarting the spread of the war, then the arms embargo has been an unqualified success. If, however, the primary American and global interest has been denying Serbian aggression and upholding the principle of Bosnian sovereignty, then the embargo has failed.

A focus on prevention ignores the role that conflict plays in driving political change in societies. For grievances to be redressed, they must be vocalized. If they are vocalized, those with a stake in the status quo will attempt to suppress them. Often the balance of change depends on the ability of the grieved to amplify the conflict to increase their support. If we have learned anything from the disparate cases of conflict resolution in recent decades -- the civil rights movement in the United States, the fight for human rights in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fight for national self-determination in the Middle East, the fight against apartheid in South Africa -- it is that some conflicts must be intensified before they are resolved.

Preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention do not lessen the difficulty of choices for leaders, nor do they really lessen costs. For either to succeed, policymakers must still spell out their interests, set priorities among cases, and balance goals with resources. The president will still need to educate the American people about the rationale behind a policy and convince them of the need for action. Absent well-defined interests, clear goals, and prudent judgment about acceptable costs and risks, policies of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention simply mean that one founders early in a crisis instead of later.

Chapter in Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies, edited by Valentine Moghadam.

Exploring the effects of the post-1989 developments in Eastern and Central Europe on the social and economic position of the women of the region, Valentine Moghadam explains how the economic crisis and subsequent development, social breakdown, and changing institutions and practices of the state have an impact upon women's roles and status. The volume combines a theoretical analysis of fundamental gender specific issues and empirical studies on aspects such as educational attainment, social security provisions, political representation, and level and type of employment. Several papers use comparative analysis, drawing on previous research into women's position during development in the Third World, and under socialism in the years prior to 1989. Countries covered in empirical case studies are Russia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, the former East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The authors draw the conclusion that women are among the principal losers in the restructuring process, both through the rise in conservative cultures, and through the economic imperatives of competing in a market-based system.