yugoslavias implosion

CHAPTER 5
Lessons for peacemakers
What can the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s tell us about the practice of
conflict management? One might assume that what the international
community did—or did not do—to restore peace in so complex and
idiosyncratic a part of the world at so unusual a historic moment can
teach us little about how to make peace elsewhere. In fact, however,
it is in part precisely because of its complexity that the Yugoslav crisis
offers useful lessons for peacemakers in very different parts of the
world. In part, too, the case of Yugoslavia in the 1990s underscores
that certain principles of effective conflict management apply even in
otherwise historically unique circumstances.
This concluding chapter offers a variety of lessons that can be
drawn from the events analyzed in the preceding chapters. Several
of these lessons are interrelated. For instance, when the international
community seeks to address a complex conflict, it needs first to assess
the causes of the conflict accurately and objectively, then to build a
consensus for action around that assessment, and then to act consistently.
The international community must also resist the siren call of
hasty solutions and instead commit itself to long-term involvement,
involvement that includes explaining to the publics in the affected
areas why the international community is acting as it is. The failure
to abide by some of these guidelines helps explain why—as discussed
at the end of this chapter—lasting peace in the Balkans depends
upon a continuing international commitment to encourage Serbia to
acknowledge its responsibility for much of the violence that shook
the region in the 1990s, to relinquish its enduring hopes of building a
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