A final thought Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks.

In 1965, the United States began a military occupation of the Dominican Republic to end a civil war.

Despite this, clashes intensified until civil war broke out in early May 1994.

In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either.

William Tatum Wofford (June 28, 1824 May 22, 1884) was an officer during the Mexican American War and a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

So what then distinguishes the Israeli Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia?

Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive.

Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat.

Foraker was born in rural Ohio in 1846, and enlisted at age 16 in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be.

Samuel Ryan Curtis (February 3, 1805 December 26, 1866) was an American military officer, and one of the first Republicans elected to Congress.

Gedo region's population exploded in the last twenty years reaching almost one million in the early 1990s after the civil war erupted in Mogadishu.

This action marked the commonly agreed upon beginning of the Second Sudanese Civil War, which resulted in one and half million deaths over twenty years of conflict.

To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace.

Monnet and Schuman argued that a political union similar to America s would prevent the types of conflict that had caused three major European wars an appealing idea, but one that overlooked America s horrific Civil War.

Egypt s revolutionaries understood this. When sectarian violence erupted there following the removal of Hosni Mubarak, the revolutionary coalitions adopted the slogan, You won t gloat over this, Mubarak.

He was well known for aiding Joseph Stalin in the Military Council (led by Leon Trotsky), having become closely associated with Stalin during the Red Army's 1918 defense of Tsaritsyn.

In 1974, long time mayor Lewis Easterlin and a group of concerned citizens decided to promote tourism in the town they stressed its history, redeveloping Main Street to look much as it did during the American Civil War.

Why did you kill my son? yells Fatima Khan, the grieving mother of British doctor Abbas Khan who was killed in Syria, at regime officials who were in Geneva for peace talks aimed at ending the country's civil war.

If there's no solution on the battlefield, three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war, or for sustainable peace afterwards leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.

In moments of extreme fear, the pendulum of attitudes swings toward the security end of that spectrum. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese American citizens during the early days of World War II.

Consider the muddle in the United Nations Security Council over Syria s civil war. Just two years ago, the Council approved a resolution authorizing a military intervention in Libya the first resolution to implement the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle, which the general assembly adopted unanimously in 2005.

Syria s civil war, in which a growing number of regional players have become involved, is beginning to look increasingly like a trial run for all out war between Sunni Muslims (Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, Turkey, and Egypt) and Shia Muslims (Iran and Hezbollah) for regional dominance.

Yet, not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago, but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict.

The ending of Liberia's long lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005.