Building National Armies After Civil War: Lessons from Bosnia, El Salvador, and Lebanon

THE RECENT LITERATURE ON CIVIL WARS IS WIDE and deep; a number of major studies compel us to rethink what we know about this important subject. One of the areas that has eluded concerted scholarly attention has been the question of how national armies can be developed that satisfy the imperatives of post-civil war reconciliation and democratic consolidation. This issue is at the center of this article. Civil wars are fought for different reasons in very different settings and are resolved differently. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw valuable lessons of building national armies from even highly disparate attempts in very different post-civil war environments. The principal goal of this article is to highlight, through their contrasting achievements and shortcomings, lessons we can learn from three cases. Because the objective of this article is best served by a “most different systems design,” it features cases that could hardly be more dissimilar: Bosnia, El Salvador, and Lebanon.1 The opposing sides of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter BiH or Bosnia, 1992–95) were set apart primarily by their religion (Muslim Bosniaks, Roman Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs) and the regions they have traditionally inhabited. The antagonists of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) were also differentiated by ethnicity, region, clan membership, and religion (Shia and Sunni Muslims, Maronite Christians, and Druze) and political factionalism. In contrast, the civil war in El Salvador (1979–1992) was based chiefly on socioeconomic class identity. This was a conflict in the Marxist sense, a fight between marginalized and dominant social classes.