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Peace-building situations can be described as battlefields of ideas where key international policy makers engage in internal battles for control over intervention policy. Knowledge production, based on timely information and analysis, is seen as crucial to winning these battles of ideas. By providing detailed information, analysis and recommendations, the International Crisis Group (icg) has assumed an important role in this process. Yet we know little about the specific role the icg plays in battles for intervention policy. This article investigates icg analyses and recommendations and the way they fit into the specific internal debates within the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2000–01. By looking at the work of the icg in BiH around the elections in 2000, the article demonstrates that it often acted as a legitimising agent of US positions and policy in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that discusses civilians as threats to national security and mass violence in Yugoslavia. The author reflects on how mass killings and expulsions can reveal military-strategic motivations in addition to ideological motives. Emphasis is given to the development of the Yugoslav military system known as General People's Defence (Općenarodna obrana, ONO) in relation to the theory of the security dilemma, formulated by author Barry Posen.

Building a durable peace by means of external nationbuilding can be a cumbersome and uncertain exercise. The outcome often hinges on the attitudes of the local population and elites and their willingness to endorse the process. This article scrutinises the attitudes of the recipient population and political elites towards different aspects of the external nationbuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It addresses the problems of state identity, reconciliation and democratisation in an externally administered nationbuilding endeavour. The empirical findings from Bosnia and Herzegovina are used to illustrate the degree to which external nationbuilding can lay the infrastructure for a durable peace in the aftermath of ethnic war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]