Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later:
Tradeoffs in Peacekeeping Deployment versus
“Letting Them Fight”
Duu Renn and Paul F. Diehl
Introduction
Imagine that a civil war breaks out in an African
country, a too frequent occurrence in the post-cold
war era. Would that country and the international
community at large benefit from deploying a peacekeeping operation to facilitate a peace agreement and
then assist in the implementation of such an agreement? The assumption is often made that peacekeeping is inherently good, or at least superior to taking
no action in the face of a civil war and its accompanying costs. Yet, is this really correct? In this study we
examine the tradeoffs in deciding to deploy a peace
operation into a given conflict versus the alternative of
letting the conflict continue until a victor emerges or a
peace agreement is reached and ultimately the fighting stops. Such tradeoffs raise some ethical dilemmas
about if and when to send internationa