New Armies from Old

It is a truism of scholarship and policy that lasting peace in the wake of civil wars requires the integration of the rival militaries. But until now we have known little about how this can work or even whether the truism is true. Careful, thorough, and thoughtful, these excellent essays take us a big step forward both theoretically and empirically.

Licklider and his co-authors shed new light on a question frequently posed by diplomats, military strategists, aid workers and scholars: how to rebuild a functioning army from the embers of civil conflict. This exhaustive collection assembles leading thinkers in the field to consider the prospects for military integration when wars come to an end. It should be essential reading for academics and practitioners involved in stabilization and post-war reconstruction.

What happens when states emerging from civil war attempt to integrate former enemy combatants into their newly reformed and reconstituted security forces? In this fascinating volume, distinguished scholars, policy analysts, and practitioners explore the politics and causal processes of various power-sharing arrangements across numerous well-researched cases, and evaluate the consequences that particular choices and underlying structural factors have for military effectiveness, democratic civilian control, and the prevention of renewed violence. This important addition to the literature on the aftermath of civil war is a must read for anyone interested in security-sector reform, ethnic conflict, or international intervention.

Roy Licklider is professor of political science at Rutgers University and an adjunct research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.