The current military escalation against ISIS, French engagement in the Sahel, and numerous UN and regional peacekeeping operations illustrate that military interventions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Today, most of these interventions, at least nominally, aim at ending armed conflict and (re)building functional states with some degree of inclusive governance. It is a good idea to ask why such policies often fail. Even when narrow stabilization goals are met, such as in a number of French interventions in Chad and the former Zaire, this often occurs at the expense of long-term stability and democratic governance.
Interventions rarely, if ever, positively contribute to improving the political environments that originally generated the crises which sparked the interventions in the first place.
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