NATO and peacebuilding

The demand for peace-building has never been greater and is growing by the year. In the course of the past decade, the NATO Alliance has become increasingly involved in peace-building and is currently running complex operations in both the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. This issue of NATO Review, which is entitled 'NATO and peace-building', examines the Alliance's work in this area from a variety of angles. In the first of four articles devoted to the central theme, James Dobbins of RAND examines how NATO should work together with other international institutions. Diego A. Ruiz Palmer of NATO's Operations Division analyses the impact of NATO's engagement in Afghanistan on the Alliance's wider transformation. Jeffrey Schwerzel of the Free University in Amsterdam assesses the importance of cultural and religious factors. And Mark Crossey of the British Council's Peacekeeping English Project considers the importance of linguistic interoperability.

In the debate, Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Danish Institute for International Studies and David Lightburn, an independent peace-operations consultant who helped develop the Alliance's involvement in peacekeeping in the 1990s, discuss whether and how NATO should support UN peace operations. To mark 50 years of Germany's NATO membership, Helga Haftendorn of the Free University of Berlin analyses the debates and events surrounding Germany's accession to the Alliance. Ronald D. Asmus of the German Marshall Fund of the United States examines the remake that NATO requires to meet the challenges of the post-post Cold War era. Kristian Fischer and Jan Top Christensen from the Royal Danish Ministry of Defence and Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs respectively describe how Denmark seeks to optimise civil-military cooperation in peace operations and how this experience might be useful both to other Allies and to NATO. Thomas Yde reviews two recent books examining the role of Balkan émigrés in the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution. And Jean-Yves Haine of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London assesses the evolution of the European Security and Defence Policy and the military transformation required for Europe to become an effective crisis manager.