Societies After Conflict: Bosnia and Kosovo.
Several terms that the greater part of the world has become very familiar with over the latter half of the 20th, and now the first part of the 21st century to describe the actions and processes that accompany a pre or post conflict region of the world. These terms also carry the implied weights of political, social, economic, and security goals over short or, more often, long periods of time. The essences of the aforementioned operations are very similar while at the same time very different, and as the Rand Corporation puts it, "These terms do not fully capture the scope of such operations. Neither does the term nation-building, but we believe it comes closest to suggesting the full range of activities and objectives involved."" .
These operations have become increasingly complicated because the overwhelming majority of conflicts in the last two decades have been intra-state in nature and have been further exacerbated by policies of ethnic expulsion, exclusion, or annihilation. Such was the situation with the unrest in the former Yugoslavia and in the province of Kosovo throughout the 1990's on to the present day. The United States along with her allies in NATO recognized the destabilizing threat that these conflicts posed to Balkan region and to Europe as a whole and acted with both diplomatic and armed force. In the aftermath lies a dizzying hodge-podge of ethnically divided locales, unstable political institutions, and at best an uneasy peace amongst the region. All of this is held together by a thread of UN and NATO peacekeepers and monitors to try to maintain some fashion of order and rebuilding of the war ravaged former Yugoslavia. But it is in the issue of the rebuilding and stabilization that is found a separate war, albeit fought with political rhetoric and multinational agreements, of how to actually approach the ways and means necessary to paving a road to making Bosnia and Kosovo two self sufficient and "Democratized- states.
