In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “America's Awesome Military: And ow How to Make It Even Better,” by two grandees of American security policy, Michael O’Hanlon and David Petraeus, readers were assured that they are safe as, in the author's words, “the United States has the best military in the world, by far.” We are further assured that all US military branches and weapon systems are technologically far superior to those of any competitor country and that this Western military superiority will continue in the foreseeable future. The United States, together with its Western allies, controls about two-thirds of all defense spending worldwide. Who can speak of a decline in global Western dominance?

However, boasting about military superiority might miss the point. The United States, with or without all of its huge military hardware and software, is losing its status as the world's only superpower and, although still very influential, it can no longer dominate world affairs as it once did. Geopolitics have changed. We are now entering a multipolar world with many global and regional players and different political systems. And we have entered a world in which intrastate armed conflicts have replaced interstate wars. This has created a completely different form of warfare. Military superiority has not helped the United States or its Western allies in dealing decisively with these kinds of intrastate armed conflicts and win their engagements against belligerent nonstate actors. Faced with the problems of intrastate armed conflicts, any overwhelming military superiority appears to simply melt away.

After a post-Cold War period during which the West mostly failed when relying unilaterally on its exceptional military might to force its peace solutions, political solutions based on collective security should now be given a new chance in preserving global peace and security. In order to do so, the collective security system of the United Nations would have to be reformed to enable it to respond to the new security challenges emanating from failing nation-states and the rising influence of armed nonstate actors.

Critically discussing the term “nation-state” in Chapter 2 may have been irritating for many readers. Suggesting in this chapter that we must also rescue the nation-state to preserve global peace must, hence, be awfully provocative. But this is exactly the argument this book is making.

This book is not about any kind of resurrection of nationalism nor is it against closer integration of nation-states as, for example, in the European Union. It makes, however, the argument that human societies must continue to be built around social communities that have some common identities and values and form structured organizations that reflect these identities and values. Despite the huge advances in globalization, in international travel, transnational trade, and in information technologies, these social organizations will continue to be based on clearly defined territories and hence have borders. Such a social organization is the nation-state and there is no other known form of social organization that could replace it. In the foreseeable future, the nation-state will hence remain a social framework that ensures – or fails to ensure – peace, security, justice, and prosperity to defined groups of citizens living within clearly defined territorial borders.

The nation-state will also continue to remain the basic building block on which international relations are built. If nation-states fail, one of these building blocks will break, and if several nation-states fail, this risks bringing down the entire international building. Today, through instant communication, global travel, and an international economy, these broken building blocks could easily contaminate neighboring societies and bring down the entire building of the international system. Instead of replacing the nation-state, globalization makes functioning nation-states ever more important – even indispensable.

Nation-states can take many different forms. They may not need to remain the way we know them today; they will no doubt continue to evolve. There is for example the suggestion that the future belongs to city-states such as Singapore or to autonomous regions. We may also see new territorial nation-states emerge. New nation-states may be the result of breakups of once larger nation-states as it happened following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Some clarifications first:

For somebody who spent almost all his professional life in field operations, writing a book like this is a startling experience. One such startling experience is entering the haze of terminology. While I often felt it difficult to understand the real problems of conflicts in the field, I felt now puzzled by the conflicting use of so many terms in academic literature and documentation.

Everyday terms appear suddenly questionable – even inappropriate. For example, we still speak of “peacekeeping” missions and this although these missions are now sent into situations in which there is no peace to keep. At the same time, we speak of “peacebuilding” in postconflict situations. But isn't postconflict peacebuilding a contradiction? Why do we want to build peace if the conflict is over? Virtually all of today's UN peace operations are operating in armed intrastate conflicts with no peace in sight. Wouldn't it therefore be better to call today's peacekeeping missions “peacebuilding operations”? With the use of these terms, we further imply that there is a sequence in which peacebuilding follows peacekeeping even though common logic suggests that one would have to “build” a peace before one can “keep” it.

And so many other terms become ambiguous such as “fragile/failed/ failing states,” “nation building,” “state building,” and “the West.” It is not even clear what we mean when we speak of “the United Nations.” Is it a group of member states, the Security Council, the General Assembly, or the Secretary-General and his staff? Greater clarity would here be important. The meaning we give to any such terms will ultimately shape the arguments that we want to make – or is it that the arguments shape the meanings of terms used? We all have our preconceived ideas and may hence read something very different into a text, in part of how each of us understands the terminology used. All this tends to create misunderstandings and confusion between the writer and readers as well as among writers and readers. And it confuses an inexperienced writer like me.

In this Glossary, I try to explain what I mean by the various terms used in the book. This is necessary as I have, at times, deviated from their more common use. I hope this will clarify and not further spread confusion.

Today, we may be living in the most peaceful times in known human history. If the decline in civilians, soldiers, or militants being killed as a result of wars or armed conflicts around the world is an indication for greater peace, we have globally made considerable progress toward peace. Since the creation of the United Nations at the end of two devastating World Wars, the absolute numbers – and even more so the relative numbers of battle-related deaths have, with annual fluctuations, drastically declined.

Indeed, for anyone in the world living today, the risk of being killed in a war or armed conflict is only about 2% to 5% compared to the risk their parents had faced living in the 1950s. In fact, today, four to five times as many people get killed in vehicle accidents then in wars and armed conflicts. The reduction in the risks of being killed due to wars is even more pronounced if we look back at events in the first half of the twentieth century. For the ten years from 2005 to 2015 combined, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) lists a grand total of about 567,000 battle-related deaths. This ten-year accumulated figure is substantially lower than the numbers of people killed in single battles during WWI or WWII. For example, the battle of Verdun in 1916 may have cost the lives of about 714,000 men, mostly soldiers, and the battle over Stalingrad in 1942/1943 is estimated to have cost the lives of between 1.3 and 1.7 million men and women, mostly civilians.

For peace, there is a further encouraging development: Since the end of the Cold War, the number of interstate wars has constantly declined. Today, wars among nation-states in which national armies fight each other over territory or power, once a regular scourge in human history, have almost completely vanished. The 2003 Iraq War saw the last major combat between regular armies; since then, confrontations between regular armed forces have been limited to skirmishes. In 2013, 2014, and 2015, the most recent years for which we have data, the UCDP registered 34, 40, and 50 armed conflicts respectively worldwide. All except one were intrastate armed conflicts.

On 16 October 1911, a popular French magazine, Le Petit Journal, celebrated the Italian military occupation of Libya with a full front page drawing captioned: “Par l’occupation italienne la tripolitaine s’ouvre enfin à la civilisation.” It showed the Goddess Liberty holding her flame of freedom high and leading the way for smartly dressed Italian officers stepping on Libyan soil. In front of them, frightened local men in their traditional dresses run away; the sight of civilization and progress on the march appears to have stricken fear into them. As if to underline the link between advanced civilization and superior firepower, we see in the background three battleships in full steam moving toward the shores of Libya. The Goddess Liberty appears to have been inspired by Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People celebrating the 1830 French revolution. However, while Delacroix's Liberty standing on the barricades of Paris shows her bare breasts, Le Petit Journal's Liberty stepping on Muslim soil takes a more decent posture with her dress covering her entire body. Even then military occupations made some attempt to be culturally sensitive.

Almost exactly one hundred years later, on 16 September 2011, the French newspaper Le Figaro published a large front-page picture captioned “Sarkozy and Cameron accueillis en libérateur par les Libyens.” This time, it was to celebrate the successful overthrow of Libyan long-time dictator Qaddafi with the help of the French and British air forces. Although color photographs now replaced colored drawings and President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Cameron replaced the Goddess Liberty, the underlying message is still the same: The West brings freedom to this underdeveloped Muslim country, something it would not have achieved by itself. The West, the images convey further, is still needed as a force – and this is mostly meant a military force – of goodness and progress in the world. And in this, women must not be missed. While in 1911 a goddess led men into battle, the Le Figaro image showed several young women clad in huge red scarves enthusiastically thanking the two men from the West who had led the military foray into Libya, allegedly bringing them liberty.

Much has been written about UN peacekeeping and the United Nations has conducted at least three comprehensive high-level reviews of its peacekeeping operations. Here we want to leave aside the many issues these reviews have raised: from the increasing delays in mobilizing peacekeepers to its missions being heavily underresourced, from being hampered by a growing bureaucracy to being challenged by the sexual contact of some of its peacekeeping forces.

In this annex, we want to look at a specific and a more fundamental problem for UN peacekeepers, namely, that peacekeepers no longer act as a neutral third party to a conflict but become themselves a party in the conflict they come to solve. This, we will argue, is not due to any misunderstandings or political naivety, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift in UN peacekeeping at the end of the Cold War from facilitating the end of interstate wars to finding peace in intrastate armed conflicts. To understand the vital importance of this shift, we have first to go back to the beginning of UN peacekeeping.

When in June 1945, delegates from 46 countries and 4 so-called sponsoring countries signed the UN Charter in San Francisco, nobody considered the possibility that the United Nations should have its own troops to enforce UN decisions. In its Chapter VII, the Charter outlines possible enforcement actions, but its founding fathers had in mind a pattern used during WWII. Enforcement would be done through allied forces; after all, the United Nations was created by the victorious allied forces against Nazi Germany in WWII.

The still fresh memories of two world wars during which regular armed forces had created so much death, misery, and destruction is what led to the discrediting of armed forces playing any role in this new organization charged with maintaining global peace. Chapter VII was to be applied only in exceptional cases; the main work of the United Nations would rely on Chapter VI, which dealt with the peaceful settlement of disputes through diplomacy and negotiation. The sending of a UN military force such as UN peacekeepers was nowhere mentioned in the UN Charter. The “invention” of peacekeeping was due to outstanding personalities such as Folke Bernadotte, Ralph Bunche, and Lester Pearson. The image of the United Nations today is very much that of the so-called Blue Helmets.

In 1989, it had all begun so promisingly for the United Nations. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the days of an organization being paralyzed by an all-overpowering East-West conflict appeared finally over. All signs were now on international cooperation and the United Nations was seen as the embodiment of this.

There was hardly any important politician at that time who would not refer to the United Nations. From Bush Sr. to Gorbachev, from Mitterrand to Thatcher, and from Kohl to Toshiki Kaifu; all spoke of the hope that the United Nations could now do what it had originally been created for in 1945: preserve global peace and security. The opinions of the head of governments such as those of China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil, not to speak of smaller countries, did not count – at least not then. While politicians in the West considered the end of the Cold War a victory for liberal democracy, most of these countries were still deeply subjugated by various forms of socialist or authoritarian government systems; South Africa, because of its apartheid system, was even suspended from the United Nations.

After the East-West conflict had ended in so surprisingly peaceful a manner, both sides felt it was now time to solve the many remaining problems of war and peace in the newly found spirit of cooperation. Compared to the East-West conflicts in which huge military alliances with stocks of nuclear weapons faced each other, solving these more localized conflicts seemed to be relatively easy to achieve.

Nowhere was this newly found cooperation more evident than in the revived decision-making role of the UN Security Council. Having been blocked by mostly Soviet and United States vetoes for 42 years, the Security Council suddenly sprung back into action and made decisions that had previously not been possible. But this atmosphere of cooperation within the United Nations was not to last.

By the end of 1991, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had dissolved and many of the formerly communist Central and Eastern European countries had begun to integrate into the West by joining the European Union and NATO. What had begun as East-West cooperation had now turned into a comprehensive victory for the West.

On the night of 25 December 1991, at 7:32 p.m. Moscow time, after President Mikhail Gorbachev left the Kremlin, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union. This, and not the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier, was the event with the greatest global significance since the end of WWII. But it passed almost unnoticed. Most people in the West will remember the day the Berlin Wall came down; however, on this Christmas Day in 1991 they had other things on their minds, unaware of an unspectacular event that would affect their lives to this day and profoundly change the course of history.

The lowering of the red Soviet banner with its golden star, hammer, and sickle on that day 25 years ago symbolizes more than just the demise of a once powerful state, the Soviet Union; it was the end of the communist system of government and ideology that had only shortly before controlled almost half of the world population. With it ended one of the most radical human experiments of forming societies along alleged social laws with the hope of bringing social justice and prosperity. Similar to the hopes we had for liberal democracy, its supporters had expected that one day communism would take over the world as a unifying political system bringing global peace. Communism ultimately failed and ended a social experiment that began with good intentions, but that had ended costing tens of millions of people their lives.

The collapse of the Soviet Union – the Warsaw Pact had dissolved a few months earlier – meant that one side in the 42-year-long Cold War, the East, had finally caved in. It left the other side of the conflict, the West, as the sole victor, even if this was more by default than by outright victory. With the lowering of the Soviet flag on 25 December 1991 began a new era under a Western-dominated global peace order. This new era, it was thought, would ultimately bring freedom and the winning Western political system of liberal democracy, peace, justice, and prosperity to all humankind. Liberal democracy would become the final stage in the development of social organization and respond to the ultimate aspirations of all people around the world irrespective of their cultural and historical backgrounds.

At the end of WWII, two events of enormous importance occurred that continue to frame our choices about peace and security to these days: the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco, California, on 26 June 1945, and the first explosion of a nuclear device in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. These were like twin events; they took place within only 20 days of each other and within a radius of only about 900 miles (or 1,500 km) within the same country, the United States, the country that would dominate world politics to this day.

By the time the UN Charter came into effect on 24 October 1945 when the first 29 member states had ratified it, the first two nuclear bombs with the bizarrely cute-sounding names of Little Boy and Fat Man had killed about a quarter of a million people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, almost all civilians. Never in human history had such a far-reaching international agreement curtailed the use of any military force as drastically as the UN Charter. And never before in human history had single weapon killed so many people in a single firestorm. Global peace became cornered between these two extremes – to these days.

Efforts to create collective security systems or to build ever more powerful weapons in the hope that this would protect from attacks and wars are nothing new in human history. Nonetheless, the global impact of both, the UN Charter and the nuclear bomb, marked a pivotal change for human society. The logic of peace and war changed after the summer of 1945. From then on, most political decisions had effects at an international level. With the UN Charter and the nuclear bomb, peace and security became irrevocably global.

The UN Charter and the nuclear bomb could hardly represent more opposite ways of wanting to maintain peace and security. While the UN Charter stands for efforts to maintain peace and security through a collective security system based on internationally accepted laws and norms, the nuclear bomb stands for keeping peace and security through the threat of force and mutually assured destruction (MAD).

It was a cold dark early morning in Kabul on 10 November 1989 when I heard the news on the BBC on the radio. At first it seemed completely unbelievable: the Berlin Wall had fallen! There it was: Alex Brody's voice speaking from Berlin and describing how thousands of people on foot or in their Trabis were pouring through, and, yes, some even climbed over the Berlin Wall. Only a few hours earlier, this Wall was one of the best-guarded and most impregnable borders in the world.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a momentous historical event that triggered huge political changes. Two years later there would no longer be a Soviet Union, no longer a communist Eastern Europe, no longer a Warsaw Pact, and, indeed, there no longer was a communist threat. Most communist parties, especially those in the West, began to disband. This was the end of the bitter nuclear East-West confrontation that, in several instances, had come close to wiping out all of mankind.

Despite the enormity of the changes, it all happened perfectly peacefully, without a shot being fired and without anyone being killed. What brought the Berlin Wall down and, with it, the communist political regime was simply people power – no Western politician or think tank, no secret service or clandestine operation had any influence on these historic developments. Indeed, Western intelligence was just as surprised by what had happened as their Eastern “counterparts.”

For me, lying in a bed under a heavy blanket to protect myself against the morning cold on a mattress that had seen better days, and waiting for Ahmed, who spoke German with a heavy Bavarian accent, to light the little wood stove in my room, this was not only a momentous, but also a very emotional, event. And it had an unreal feeling. I was the only guest at what had once been the German guesthouse in Kabul, in a country in which the East-West conflict was still fought over with weapons delivered by the East and West. Kabul was still controlled by the procommunist Najibullah government and came under regular rocket attacks from mujahedeen forces in the surrounding mountains.

In today's world, building global peace and security means increasingly preserving and up-holding the institution of the nation-state.

The book's core argument is that today's main threats to global peace and security come no longer primarily from conflicts among nation-states, but increasingly from conflicts within individual nation-states in which weak and dysfunctional governments battle increasingly powerful belligerent nonstate actors. As a result, intrastate armed conflicts have replaced interstate wars as the main “scourge of mankind.” Failing nation-states, especially those with intrastate armed conflicts, not only produce today's great humanitarian tragedies but, more importantly, they are now the main source for global instability. They risk endangering a global system security order that continues to be built on individual but interconnected nation-states that cooperate within a system of international laws, conventions, treaties, and organizations. Such a global security order would need functioning and responsible nation-states. Without this, none of today's global problems can be solved. The breakdown of this order could bring global chaos and, with it, greater human suffering; it could ultimately even lead to renewed interstate wars.

Peacebuilding, the book asserts, is the international response to the threats posed by failing, conflict-ridden nation-states. The book defines peacebuilding therefore as the collective international effort to rescue failing, conflict-ridden nation-states from collapse and to rebuild them into responsible, sovereign members in the global community of nation-states.

For diplomacy, peacebuilding opens an entirely new frontier: the nationstate. While traditionally diplomacy was the art of dealing with international relations, a new diplomacy would instead have to focus its attention on intrastate relations. This would be a major departure from traditional diplomacy. When focusing on intrastate conflicts, a new diplomacy would have to abandon many of its often century-old principles and face previously unknown challenges, many of them wrought with ambiguities and even contradictions:

• i The challenge of defining national sovereignty: Traditional diplomacy is based on the Westphalian principles of national sovereignty and the noninterference in the internal affairs of other nation-states. The UN Charter also explicitly rules out any interference in the internal affairs of member states. However, peacebuilding is exactly this: a deliberate, target-oriented, and time-bound interference in the internal affairs of another nation-state that is unable – or deemed unable – to solve its internal violent conflicts without outside assistance.

At the end of 2014, the United Nations had launched two important reviews by groups of eminent external experts, diplomats, and political personalities to look more comprehensively at its core business: preventing wars and maintaining global peace and security. The first was a review of the United Nations’ peacebuilding architecture by an Advisory Group of Experts (AGE); the second was the even more ambitious review of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations and special political missions through a High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO). While the first review was mandated by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council, the second was undertaken at the initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Both the AGE and the HIPPO presented their respective reports at about the same time, the first on 29 June 2015 and the second a few days earlier, on 16 June 2015. On 2 September 2015, the Secretary-General followed the reviews up by issuing his own report to the UN General Assembly on UN peace operations. All three reports were meant to trigger a strategic discussion among member states about the future of the United Nations to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of its creation in 1945. They were seen as continuations of previous UN strategy reports, in particular Boutros-Ghali's 1992 “Agenda for Peace,” Lakhdar Brahimi's 2000 Report on United Nations Peace Operations and Kofi Annan's sponsored 2005 Outlook Document. However, the 2015 reports lack the strategic depths of their predecessor reports.

The 2015 reports were obviously written with the intent not to cause any political controversy with member states and to circumvent possible institutional sensitivities among UN departments. Although the reports make plenty of references to the great dangers facing the world (a use of language that is typical of so many UN reports), they rarely go beyond analyzing organizational, managerial, and petty bureaucratic issues. At times, the reports read as narrow wish lists of individual member states, UN departments, and their organizational units. The focus is on improving what is and does not to go much beyond this. Not surprisingly, instead of presenting sharp and provocative strategic options for the future of collective security, member states are now confronted with three different and, in many parts, incongruent reports, with a combined total of over 180 pages and almost as many recommendations and new initiatives.