The vocation of the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy is to make sure that the results of important scholarly work find their way into the realm of political decision-making. Democracy is as much about power as it is about learning. In order to pursue future-oriented policy-learning, the council favours research-informed dialogues between those who have the time to do research and those that have accepted the responsibility to design policies and to make decisions. In this book, the subject matter of these policies and decisions is as important as it is complex and challenging: the domain of international peacebuilding operations. These operations, many of which are systematically explored and evaluated in this study, most of the time follow many years of violent conflicts and civil wars, atrocious assaults on human dignity and international military intervention. Many countries and policymakers have experienced the dilemmas and uncertainties that accompanied these operations, that have often not been much of a success.

The author of this book, professor Joris Voorhoeve, serving as a member of the Dutch Council of State, is especially qualified and motivated to contribute to this important field of study. Having served not only in politics (notably as minister of Defence during the tragic failure of UN peace-keeping efforts in Bosnia), but also as a professor of international relations at Leyden University, he wholeheartedly accepted the invitation to contribute to the body of knowledge that might help us to improve our efforts to make future peacekeeping and –building missions more successful. Such an effort demands an interdisciplinary and future-oriented approach, one that dares to transcend and challenge the usual divisions of policymaking routines and responsibilities.

The Scientific Council is proud to be able to publish the results of the research that Voorhoeve was carrying out as a special guest of the Council. Indeed, the most vexing questions of political and other social sciences are how political violence can be avoided, how conflicts can be settled peacefully and how the safety of human beings and their basic rights can be ensured. Voorhoeve explores these urgent and difficult questions which need to be solved after a country has been ravaged by war. Most war-torn societies return to political violence within a few years. Wars, civil wars and other forms of contemporary political violence tend to repeat and multiply themselves