Anthony Lake, ‘Defining Missions, Setting Deadlines’, Defense Issues, vol. 11, no. 14, 6 March 1996, http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=898.

Notable exceptions are Kevin C. M. Benson and Christopher B. Thrash, ‘Declaring Victory: Planning Exit Strategies for Peace Operations’, Parameters, vol. 26, no. 3, Autumn 1996, pp. 69–80; Gideon Rose, ‘The Exit Strategy Delusion’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 1, January–February 1998, pp, 56–67; Jeffrey Record, ‘Exit Strategy Delusions’, Parameters, vol. 31, no. 4, Winter 2001–02, pp, 21–7; Frederic S. Pearson, Marie Olson Lounsbery and Loreta Costa, ‘The Search for Exit Strategies from NeoColonial Interventions’, Journal of Conflict Studies, Winter 2005, pp. 45–74; and Richard Caplan, ‘After Exit: Successor Missions and Peace Consolidation’, Civil Wars, vol. 8, nos 3–4, September–December 2006, pp. 253–67.

Stephen A. Wakefield of the US Department of the Interior announced that Phase IV controls on oil and gas were ‘intended as an exit strategy from the whole wretched, frustrating business over the free exchange of goods and services’. See ‘Exit’, Oxford English Dictionary, online version, March 2011available at http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66274. Early uses in the policy context include Richard A. Falk, A Global Approach to National Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 146, and ‘Recovering the Initiative in Lebanon’, Washington Post, 2 February 1984.

See Rose, ‘The Exit Strategy Delusion’, p. 57.

See Mats Berdal, Whither UN Peacekeeping?, Adelphi Paper no. 281 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1993), p. 73. Not wishing to be ‘doctrinaire’, Lake did acknowledge that ‘when it comes to deterring external aggression, as in the Persian Gulf or the Korean Peninsula, or fighting wars in defense of our most vital security interests, a more open-ended commitment is necessary’. Lake, ‘Defining Missions, Setting Deadlines’.

I am grateful to Marshall Worsham for this observation.

See, for example, Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Simon Chesterman, You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Frances Fukuyama, StateBuilding: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Richard Caplan, International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 2010).

David M. Edelstein, review of Kimberly Zisk Marten's Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past, in Political Studies Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 4, Winter 2005–06, p. 679.

Report of the Secretary-General, No Exit without Strategy: Security Council Decision-Making and the Closure or Transition of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, S/2001/394, 20 April 2001, para. 6.

Gregory C. Johnson, ‘Exit Strategy: Where does it fit into Operational Planning?’ unpublished report, Naval War College, 4 February 2002, p, 5. See, notably, Air–Land–Sea Application Center, Peace Ops, FM 3-07.31/MCWP 3-33.8/AFTTP 3-2.40, April 2009; US Department of the Army, Training for Full Spectrum Operations, FM 7-0, December 2008; US Department of the Army, Stability Operations, FM 3-07, October 2008; and earlier, US Department of the Army, Peace Operations, FM 100-23, December 1994.

Rose, ‘The Exit Strategy Delusion’, p. 63.

Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operation Planning, JP-5, December 2006, p. III-5. See also Peace Operations, p. 16; Peace Ops, p. I-6.

Provisional verbatim transcript of the 4223rd meeting of the UN Security Council, S/PV.4223 and S/PV 4223 (Resumption 1), 15 November 2000.

S/PV.4223, p. 12.

Letter dated 6 November 2000 from the Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, S/2000/1072, 7 November 2000, Annex, para. 1.

Measuring Peace Consolidation and Supporting Transition, Inter-Agency Briefing Paper prepared for the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (New York: United Nations, March 2008).

Quoted in William Safire, ‘On Language: Cut and Run’, New York Times, 2 May 2004.

William E. Odom, ‘Cut and Run? You Bet’, Foreign Policy, May–June 2006, pp. 60–61.

Caplan, ‘After Exit’, pp. 255–7.

For a discussion of benchmarking in the context of peace implementation, see George Downs and Stephen John Stedman, ‘Evaluation Issues in Peace Implementation’, in Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild and Elizabeth M. Cousens (eds), Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 45–7.

See Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Police Support Group, S/1998/500, 11 June 1998.

For a discussion of some of the political challenges inherent in internationally led post-conflict state building, see Mats Berdal and Richard Caplan (eds), The Politics of International Administration, special issue of Global Governance, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004.

Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, ‘Travails of the European Raj’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 14, no. 3, July 2003, pp. 60–74.

This recommendation is drawn from ‘Exit Strategies and Peace Consolidation in State-Building Operations’, Report on Wilton Park Conference 965 held on 13–15 March 2009, available at http://cis.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/WP965_report.pdf. See also John Chipman, ‘A Strategy for Afghanistan’, International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2010.

See William J. Durch, ‘Exit Strategies and Complex Peace Operations’, in Richard Caplan (ed.), Exit Strategies and State Building (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), p. 97.

Similarly in the colonial context, Tony Chafer attributes France's successful exit from Senegal in part to the fact that France and Senegal's elite (traditional and modern) had a common interest in the maintenance of good links with France. See Tony Chafer, ‘Senegal’, in Caplan, Exit Strategies and State Building.

Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Societies’, Economics of Governance, vol. 7, no. 1, 2006, pp. 89–106.

Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler and Måns Söderbom, ‘Post-Conflict Risks’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 45, no. 4, July 2008, pp. 472–3.

UNAMSIL was the first UN peacekeeping operation to employ benchmarking, but UNMIBH was the first UN field operation to do so.

Statement by the President of the Security Council, S/PRST/2005/63, 20 December 2005.

See Measuring Peace Consolidation and Supporting Transition.

Richard Caplan, ‘Managing Transitions: Exit Strategies and Peace Consolidation’, in Caty Clement and Adam C. Smith (eds), Managing Complexity: Political and Managerial Challenges in United Nations Peace Operations (New York: International Peace Institute, 2009), pp. 36–9.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, ch. 3.

Collier, Hoeffler and Söderbom, ‘PostConflict Risks’.