The Transformation of the World of War and Peace Support Operations

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, or 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 the changes in armed forces to Peace Support Operations (PSOs), those operations with major state-building components that demand broad and coherent cooperation between military forces and civilian entities.

Kobi Michael is Assistant Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Senior Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Dr. Michael is a recipient of the Tshetshik Prize (2005) and the Yariv Award (2002). His most recent book is Between Militarism and Statesmanship in Israel. David Kellen is the Israeli Coordinator of the Strategic Affairs Unit at the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information. He holds an MA in Conflict Analysis from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eyal Ben-Ari is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has carried out research in Japan, Israel, and Singapore on white collar communities, early childhood education, business expatriates, the Israeli and Japanese militaries and peacekeeping forces.