Where international custodians have created and implemented coherent, effective strategies for protecting peace and managing spoilers, damage has been limited and peace has triumphed. The crucial difference between the success and failure of spoilers is the role played by international actors as custodians of peace. In Cambodia the peace process was able to overcome the resistance from the real Khmer Rouge, the party that has provided the sobriquet for fanatic parties elsewhere. Tion, and disarmed, thus ending a civil war that had taken 800,000 lives.

In the end, however, RENAMO joined parliamentary politics, accepted losing an elec. In Mozambique the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO), a party known as the “Khmer Rouge of Africa,” stalled in meeting its commitments to peace and threatened to boycott elections and return to war. If all spoilers succeeded, the quest for peace in civil wars would be dangerously counterproductive. When Hutu extremists in Rwanda rejected the Arusha Peace Accords in 1994 and launched a genocide, over 800,000 Rwandans died in less than three months. When Jonas Savimbi refused to accept the outcome of United Nations (UN)-monitored elections in 1992 and plunged Angola back into civil war, approximately 300,000 people died. In both cases the casualties of failed peace were infinitely higher than the casualties of war. When spoilers succeed, as they did in Angola in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994, the results are catastrophic. And most important, the risks of peace making increase the insecurity and uncertainty of average citizens who have the most to lose if war is renewed. By implementing a peace agreement, peace makers are vulnerable to attack from those who oppose their efforts.

2 By signing a peace agreement, leaders put themselves at risk from adversaries who may exploit a settlement, from disgruntled followers who see peace as a betrayal of key values, and from excluded parties who seek either to alter the process or destroy it. 1 The biggest source of risk comes from spoilers-leaders and parties who believe the emerging peace threatens their power, world view, and interests and who use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it. Peace making in civil war is a risky business.

Taken 3 spoiler