Peace enforcement

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Peace enforcement is a practice of ensuring peace in an area or region. Part of a three part scale between peacekeeping and peacemaking, it is sometimes considered to be the midpoint. Peace enforcement is different from peacemaking where options, possibly including force, are used to bring conflicting parties to negotiations. While it is an approach to maintaining an existing peace, and can thus only be done by an outside party which is recognized as neutral, this is differentiated from peacekeeping largely in the level of force the outside group is willing to use in response to violations of the established peace.

While peace enforcement has largely been avoided in the past the level of violence with which peacekeeping operations in many areas, including the 1994 events in Rwanda where several Belgian soldiers were forced to watch the ongoing massacres and were ultimately killed without being allowed to engage, have shocked the international community and lead to crisis where willingness to enter peacekeeping operations without the ability to use force is juxtaposed with an unwillingness of nations to enter their forces in potentially "hot" conflicts which would not otherwise involve them.