This series is focusing on the role of United Nations in helping to resolve conflicts, respond to complex emergencies and promote development and human rights.

This book critically investigates the conditions facing the warring parties during the implementation of peace agreements in Mozambique, Angola and Liberia, as successes and failures in these countries highlight incentives for the international community to keep peace processes from faltering.

The media generally tend to focus in particular on the failures of U.N. peacekeeping operations. In Walking the Tightrope, Jair Van Der Lijn draws a different conclusion. He argues once a peace agreement has been signed, the efforts of the U.N. peacekeeping operations do contribute to durable peace. By analyzing the U.N. peacekeeping operations in Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and El Salvador in a structured focused comparison, this book shows how U.N. operations do have a contribution to make.

In each of the 24 cases examined in this volume, mediation was a multiparty effort, involving actors working simultaneously or sequentially. These accounts attest to the crucial importance of coordinating and building upon the efforts of other players.

The book traces the end of hostilities and the often acrimonious, sometimes naive, but always laboured negotiations towards peace and elections in Mozambique. There is careful examination of the many international factors involved from the covert intervention of South Africa, the reaction of one African state, the role of the United Nations and that of humanitarian and religious groups. The lessons for conflict resolution and peacekeeping for Africa and beyond are discussed.

By the time it ended in 1992, Mozambique's 15-year civil war had exacted a terrible price. Economically paralyzed, the vast, drought-stricken country was rich only in enmity, landmines, and AK-47s. Into this misery was thrust a multifaceted UN mission, ONUMOZ, to manage the transition from military combat to electoral contest. Remarkably, when ONUMOZ departed two years later, that job was largely done. This comprehensive account describes how ONUMOZ went about its tasks--assembling and demobilizing troops, providing humanitarian aid, demining, preparing for elections--and assesses how well each was accomplished and why. Richard Synge takes us behind the scenes of the operation, unearthing new information from confidential UN files and from face-to-face interviews with leading players. Even-handed and rigorous, Synge highlights not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of ONUMOZ, and he puts ONUMOZ firmly in its international and regional context. Among the many lessons ONUMOZ offers future peacekeeping efforts is that success demands the support of an engaged international community and a people eager to make peace work.