a guide to peace support operations - The Watson Institute for ...

Part I, paragraphs 5-7
5. Civilian Casualties
The proportion of civilian casualties in war already had increased in the seventy years
before the end of the Cold War. By far the greatest number of casualties in this period were
civilians, either as a direct result of hostilities or indirectly as a consequence of disruption
and deprivation following a military attack. But in the post-Cold War era, the civilian
population increasingly has become the primary war objective and focus of violence.
Rival militias attack civilian communities far more frequently than they attack each other,
measuring their power by their control of local populations. Militias threaten minorities
to achieve “ethnic cleansing” and civilian populations are deprived of food to attract
humanitarian relief that can be plundered, extorted, and generally added to war resources.
6. Collective Interests
As stronger continental systems have developed, regional and international organizations
proliferated and became more pervasive. Now states rely increasingly on each
other for movement, trade, and communications. This interdependence spreads the
effects of violence and disasters more swiftly across frontiers to neighboring states. The
expansion of continental systems makes states more mutually reliant with common
interests for their prosperity and survival, and their populations move more freely across
frontiers legally or otherwise. They have become less able to act alone to protect their
strategic interests. Shared facilities now bind them together, eroding sovereignty by
collective use of continental systems; these include:
7. Multilateral Responses
a. Collective Security
• international roads and railways;
• airways;
• sea lanes;
• international electronic communications;
• security structures and agreements;
• trade agreements;
• international financial systems and business communities;
• legal, immigration, and policing agreements;
• environment and shared resources; and
• energy resources.
When collective interests are threatened by the distant effects of conflict or
natural disaster, the response is likely to be multilateral; nations seldom have the
power or inclination to act alone to protect a threatened collective interest. A
collective response is organized by combining elements from several “overlapping
and interlocking” international organizations (for example, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] and Western European Union [WEU])
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