By developing a strategic approach to the implementation of peace accords in civil war, the United Nations can better the odds for ending a war and fostering development in the long run. Recent attempts at implementation have suffered from recurring difficulties: incomplete, vague and expedient agreements; lack of coordination between implementing agencies; lack of sustained attention by the international community; incomplete fulfillment of agreements by warring parties; and the presence of 'spoilers' who seek to destroy and incipient peace. To overcome these difficulties, the UN must encourage the parties to choose political, cultural, social and economic security-building measures during the negotiation phase and systematically apply confidence-building measures to the military components of implementation. This demands a reconsideration of peace making in a civil war to include a long-term international commitment to the development of war-torn societies.

This essay surveys and seeks to explain the (re-)emergence and enforcement of international minority-rights standards in Europe after the Cold War.  The period since 1989 has seen a marked divergence between strengthening minority-rights standards at the international level and worsening conflict and repression in many states in the region.  Enforcement efforts by the CSCE/OSCE, Council of Europe, and European Union have been modest and are focused on states integrating economically and militarily into Western Europe.

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.

Those studying international peace and security tend to look for the origins of violence in differences, whether among economic interests, ethno-cultural groups, or clashing ideologies. Arguing from the Girardian perspective (described in an appendix to this essay), Bland argues that it is the similarity of the warring camps in Northern Ireland that underlies cycles of violence and retribution. Over the past two centuries, periods of relative calm and socioeconomic equalization in the region have been followed by outbreaks of inter-group violence and rapid social polarization.

Bland shows that symbolic displays of "marching and rising"--in which Protestant and Catholic extremists reassert their respective roles as triumphant masters and defiant rebels--are generative rather than merely symptomatic of differences and violence between the two sides. Acts of terror beget more than retaliation: they permeate the entire fabric of society and become self-perpetuating, as each person becomes a potential victim and a potential killer in the eyes of the other side. The only protection and "justice" in Northern Ireland was that offered by the very perpetrators of violence. Whereas social scientists have argued for security guarantees and constitutional engineering as solutions to internal wars, Bland shows that a "hurting stalemate" of violence and retribution can persist indefinitely as long as making peace with the enemy is unacceptable.

Bland argues that protacted inter-group conflicts are best resolved in ethical and interpersonal terms. Combatants on each side must transcend their conflict by recognizing and affirming publicly their common humanity, and by unilaterally renouncing the principle of retributive justice. To paraphrase Anwar Sadat, whom Bland cites as such a "transcender," peace is won not by signing agreements but by embracing enemies.

Given that organized violence within states is currently more widespread and destructive than war among states, many advocate expanding the concept of security to include elements of political and personal security at the domestic level. Since individuals generally look to governments to provide this security, deadly violence--whether by insurgents, polite forces, or criminal networks--can undermine the stability and legitimacy of state authorities. Unfortunately, democratization has accompanied increases in such violence in many parts of the world.

In a case study of contemporary Benin that has much broader implications, Bruce Magnusson argues that democratizing states must solve simultaneous and interrelated threats to public security in order to survive. At the level of the state, leaderships must safeguard democratic institutions from violent overthrow, particularly by disaffected militaries. At the level of society, democratic legitimacy rests on protection from criminality and from the arbitrary exercise of public and police authority. These challenges must be met jointly within a democratic constitutional framework: domestic order is key to averting military takeover, and likewise constitutionality provides the central guarantee for individual rights and civil liberties.

During the Cold War, the United States carried out a number of covert actions against elected governments in the Third World. Critics of the "democratic peace" suggest these covert operations are potential invalidations of, or at least exceptions to, the proposition that liberal democracies rarely or never wage war on one another. Democratic peace theorists, however, argue that the targets of these covert actions were not long-term, stable democracies, that covert action falls short of interstate war by Correlates of War (CoW) criteria, and that the covert nature of these operations meant that liberal norms and institutions in the United States did not have an opportunity to function. Even so, by forcing the executive to use covert means, democratic institutions may have prevented the higher level of international violence known as war, although they were not robust enough to prevent covert action. Liberal interventionist and anti-communist ideology provided policymakers with a justificatory frame for intervention which, however, did not amount to war between democracies.

This paper describes the development of the first community service learning program for democratic education in South Africa. The Democracy Education Project, which is based on Swarthmore College's innovative Democracy Project, was designed and implemented by a Swarthmore College student working with a high school in a Black community near CapeTown. This case study demonstrates that the successful transposition of a model of community service learning from one country to another requires recognizing the complex relationships among history and culture, and theories and practices of democratic education. It is also crucial to involve the new community as an equal partner at every step of the process. Together, the Democracy and the Democracy Education Projects suggest the potential of community service learning for strengthening citizenship, and for bridging the gaps between races, in the United States as well as in South Africa.

Information warfare is a relatively new rubric, which is receiving increasing attention within the United States from both the government and the general population. Recent studies and Congressional hearings have discussed the vulnerability of the U.S. civil infrastructure to information sabotage, perpetrated by both state and non-state actors. Most recently, President Clinton established the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection to identify vulnerabilities in the nation's overall infrastructure and to recommend policy actions to reduce them. One of the areas that the Commission will investigate is the nation's information infrastructure. For instance, the armed services foresee new uses for digital systems to enhance military capabilities, but they also recognize the growing U.S. vulnerability that might be exploited with the techniques of information warfare.

The existence of softer and perhaps more critical homeland targets is creating interest in information warfare at a strategic level. That interest has two very different themes: new weapons the United States might use against an adversary and, in the hands of others, new threats to U.S. civil information-system-dependent infrastructure. The latter, the defensive concern, is currently receiving the larger measure of public attention.

The size of the defense industry in Russia has been a primary concern for policymakers and scholars interested in international security and arms control, as well as for students of Russian politics and economy more generally. For an issue attracting so much apparent
interest, however, there appears to be remarkably little quantitative information available on the scope of the military production sector and, particularly, on the extent to which it has changed in recent years. Analysts of the military-industrial complex (MIC)1 have either
combined the scraps of information derivable from official reports to try to form an overall picture (e.g., Cooper (1991a and 1991b), Despres (1995), Gaddy (1994), Sapir (1994), Sanchez-Andres (1995) and most of the published literature in Russian language), or they have been limited to detailed case studies of just a few firms, eschewing any attempt to measure the sector as a whole (e.g., Bernstein (1994)). Both approaches have contributed substantially to our qualitative understanding of the organizational structure of the military industry and of recent changes in the operation of some of its enterprises. But neither provides quantitative answers to the following questions: How large is Russian defense industry? What is the magnitude of decline in military production since reforms began?
What are the sources of the change? To what extent are resources being released for civilian purposes? Yet the answers have important implications for international security and for the design of foreign aid and domestic policies to assist the conversion and industrial
restructuring processes.

Has the rapid ownership transformation in Russia had an impact on enterprise performance or on worker behavior and attitudes? This paper investigates this issue using data from a nationwide survey of 1,176 Russian workers conducted in April 1995. We focus on the two primary types of ownership change in Russia: the privatization of existing state-owned enterprises, and the creation (de novo) of new, private organizations. Examining such types of firm behavior as restructuring of product lines, investment in new equipment, changes in internal organization, influences on decision-making, and labor market behavior, we find large and significant differences between privatized and state- owned enterprises, and between new private and all old organizations, controlling for other firm characteristics. Differences in the labor market behavior and attitudes of workers are significant when comparing new and old firms, but less so when comparing privatized to state enterprises. Finally, we analyze the relationship between the ownership of the firm in which an individual works and her political attitudes and voting intentions, finding that employees of the privatized companies tend to be the most anti-reform group while those in new private firms are the most pro-reform.