S Stabilization Operations and Their Relationship to Liberal Peacebuilding Missions Roberto Belloni Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Introduction The concept of stabilization was first employed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1996–2004), where the organization focused on the effort to sustain the transition from a peace operation to long-term development. Stabilization required mobile and flexible forces ready for quick deployment and trained to confront both armed attacks and civilian demonstrators. Military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq since the early 2000s reinforced a view of stabilization among Western states as requiring small and flexible units engag- ing in unconventional warfare, either “asymmet- ric,” “irregular,” or involving an insurgency. At roughly the same time, the popularity of the term “stabilization” began to increase exponentially. The total number of times that “stabilization” is mentioned in United Nations (UN) Security Council meetings rose from 59 times in 2001 to 671 times in 2014 (Curran and Holtom 2015, p. 8). The attractiveness of the term was confirmed by the UN launch of at least four operations, which will be briefly discussed below, with “stability” as their main mission. Despite its popularity, stabilization has not been defined. This chapter begins with a discus- sion of the different usages of the term by the United States (US), the United Kingdom, and France which, more than any other state, have contributed to “upload” their understanding of stabilization in UN Security Council resolutions. Second, the chapter examines conceptual aspects. Stabilization is often associated to, or used as a synonymous of, other terms like peacekeeping, peace enforcement, counterterrorism, counterin- surgency, and peacebuilding. Indeed, stabilization involves all of these aspects but does not coincide with any of them. Finally, key empirical examples of UN-led stabilization operations are briefly reviewed. They reveal the importance of a “robust posture” in stabilization operations, as well as of a number of contradictions and antinomies emerg- ing in the process of implementation of stabiliza- tion’ s activities. As a whole, stabilization reflects the disappointment with earlier large-scale, trans- formative peacebuilding interventions and the related downgrading among the list of interna- tional priorities of normative issues such as the promotion of democracy and the protection of human rights. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Richmond, G. Visoka (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_10-1