Events in the Arab world have inspired hope around the world, but much could still go wrong. Elites, even where weakened, may be able to reinvent themselves.
Peacebuilding does not build peace
The concept of peacebuilding is a buzzword ofthe development policy and practice mainstream. The recent introduction of managerial tools and the focus on measuring the ‘effectiveness’ of peacebuilding have marginalised and depoliticised critical questions about the causes of violent conflict, and have replaced them with comforting notions for donors that peace can
be built and measured without challenging Western understanding of economy, governance, and social aspirations of people
The 2011 uprisings in the Arab Middle East: political change and geopolitical implications
The Role of Social Media and User-generated Content in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
There is a growing body of practice and literature on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in preventing and responding to violence. There is also a lot of excitement and corresponding literature about the role of the internet in non-violent change and democratization. The use of mobile phones, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and user-generated content (UGC) like blogs and YouTube videos in the protests in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as throughout the wider middle-east and North Africa (MENA) region have shown how ICTs can complement and augment the exercise of rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of peaceful assembly. This literature focuses on the use of ICTs before and during conflict, for example in conflict prevention and early warning. What about the use of ICTs in post-conflict situations; after the negotiation of peace agreements? How can ICTs be used in post-conflict interventions; more specifically in post-conflict peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction and recovery? What role of can be played here by social media and user-generated content?
Votes and Violence: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria
Elections are now common in low-income societies. However, they are frequently flawed. We investigate a Nigerian election marred by violence. We designed and conducted a nationwide field experiment based on anti-violence campaigning. The campaign appealed to collective action through electoral participation, and worked through town meetings, popular theatres and door-to-door distribution of materials. We find that the campaign decreased violence perceptions and increased empowerment to counteract violence. We observe a rise in voter turnout and infer that the intimidation was dissociated from incumbents. These effects are accompanied by a reduction in the intensity of actual violence, as measured by journalists.
Power Sharing in Postconflict Societies: Implications for Peace and Governance
Israel’s Pessimistic View of the Arab Spring
Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring
Post-Mubarak Egypt: History, Collective Memory and Memorialization
CDD in post-conflict and conflict-affected areas : experiences from East Asia
Community Driven Development (CDD) projects are now a major component of World Bank assistance to many developing countries. While varying greatly in size and form, such projects aim to ensure that communities have substantive control in deciding how project funds should be used. Giving beneficiaries the power to manage project resources is believed by its proponents to lead to more efficient and effective fund use. It is also claimed that project-initiated participatory processes can have wider ‘spillover’ impacts, building local institutions and leadership, enhancing civic capacity, improving social relations and boosting state legitimacy. This paper briefly reviews the World Bank’s experience of using CDD in conflict-affected and post-conflict areas of the East Asia and Pacific region. The region has been at the forefront of developing large-scale CDD programming including high profile ‘flagships’ such as the Kecamatan Development Program (KDP) in Indonesia and the Kapitbisig Laban Sa Kahirapan-Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI-CIDSS) project in the Philippines. As of the end of 2007, CDD constituted fifteen percent of the lending portfolio in East Asia compared with ten percent globally. Many of East Asia’s CDD projects have operated consciously or not in areas affected by protracted violent conflict. CDD has also been used as an explicit mechanism for post-conflict recovery in Mindanao in the Philippines and in Timor Leste, and for conflict victim reintegration in Aceh, Indonesia. It then looks at the evidence on whether and how projects have achieved these outcomes, focusing on a range of recent and current projects in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. The analysis summarizes results, draws on comparative evidence from other projects in the region and elsewhere, and seeks to identify factors that explain variation in outcomes and project performance. The paper concludes with a short summary of what we know, what we don’t, and potential future directions for research and programming.
World Development Report 2011 : Conflict, Security, and Development
The 2011 World development report looks across disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world to offer some ideas and practical recommendations on how to move beyond conflict and fragility and secure development. The key messages are important for all countries-low, middle, and high income-as well as for regional and global institutions: first, institutional legitimacy is the key to stability. When state institutions do not adequately protect citizens, guard against corruption, or provide access to justice; when markets do not provide job opportunities; or when communities have lost social cohesion-the likelihood of violent conflict increases. Second, investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence. But there are major structural gaps in our collective capabilities to support these areas. Third, confronting this challenge effectively means that institutions need to change. International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so they can respond with agility and speed, a longer-term perspective, and greater staying power. Fourth, need to adopt a layered approach. Some problems can be addressed at the country level, but others need to be addressed at a regional level, such as developing markets that integrate insecure areas and pooling resources for building capacity Fifth, in adopting these approaches, need to be aware that the global landscape is changing. Regional institutions and middle income countries are playing a larger role. This means should pay more attention to south-south and south-north exchanges, and to the recent transition experiences of middle income countries.
Sierra Leone: Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR)
This note describes the Disarmament and Demobilization (D&D) of combatants from all warring parties in January 2002, which marked the official end of the civil war in Sierra Leone. D&D was part of a larger disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) program, implemented by the Government of Sierra Leone with the support of the World Bank, together with other international institutions and Nongovernmenal Organizations (NGOs). The experience of Sierra Leone is discussed, as well as, how the Bank can play a role in post-conflict transitions, complementing political and security efforts of client governments and the international community.
The Conflict Analysis Framework (CAF) : Identifying Conflict-Related Obstacles to Development
The Conflict Analysis Framework (CAF), developed by the CPR Unit, aims to integrate sensitivity to conflict in Bank assistance, and to help Bank teams consider factors affecting both conflict and poverty when formulating development strategies, policies, and programs. Conflict sensitive approaches that take account of problem areas and potential sources of conflict may help to prevent the onset, exacerbation, or resurgence of violent conflict.
Colombia Essays on Conflict, Peace, and Development
A purpose of this book is to present recent World Bank analytical work on the causes of violence and conflict in Colombia, highlighting pilot lending programs oriented to promote peace and development. The Bank’s international experiences in post-conflict situations in different countries and their relevance for Colombia are also examined in this volume. The identification of socio-economic determinants of conflict, violence, and reforms for peace came about as a key element of the Bank’s assistance strategy for Colombia, defined in conjunction with government authorities and representatives of civil society. This report is organized as follows: After the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a conceptual framework for understanding a broad spectrum of political, economic, and social violence issues; identifies the role played by both the country’s history and the unequal access to economic and political power in the outbreak and resilience of political violence; and examines as costs of violence the adverse impact on Colombia’s physical, natural, human, and social capital. Chapter 3 analyzes the costs of achieving peace and its fiscal implications; and indicates that exclusion and inequality rather than poverty as the main determinants of violence and armed conflict. Chapter 4 reviews the Bank’s experience in assisting countries that are experiencing, or have already overcome, domestic armed conflict. The authors illustrate the relevance of these cases for Colombia.
Civil Society and Peacebuilding Potential, Limitations and Critical Factors
This report develops and discusses a new analytical framework to understand the functions of civil society in peace building. In theory and practice, there is a wide variety of ways to categorize civil society contributions to development and peacebuilding. Donors tend to employ actor-oriented perspectives, focusing on supporting activities of different types of civil society organizations in a given situation. This report proposes to move toward a functional perspective, centered on the roles that different actors can play in conflict situations. The analysis shows that civil society can make numerous positive contributions and have unique potential to support peacebuilding and conflict mitigation. It can do so independently as actor in its own right, or in relation to peacebuilding processes and programs led by Governments or the international community. Despite many successful initiatives on the ground, however, civil society should not be considered a panacea. The existence of civil society per se cannot be equated with the existence of peacebuilding actors. Similarly, civil society strengthening and support does not automatically contribute to peacebuilding. While civil society organizations are frequently actors for peace, they equally have the potential to become actors of violence. So far, outcomes and impacts of different civil society peace interventions have not been sufficiently evaluated. Civil society and donors need to more strategically identify the objectives and demonstrate the relevance of the particular approaches they propose to engage in different phases of conflict/peacebuilding. Without greater clarity regarding objectives and intended impacts, and, without addressing existing institutional constraints and distortions, activities run the risk of being well-intentioned, but unlikely to achieve sustainable results.
The Arab Spring: Its Geostrategic Significance
The democratic uprisings and consequent turmoil in the Arab world during the last 18 months have had significant impact on the geostrategic situation in the Middle East as well as on the policies of major regional and global powers. As the upheavals continue to unfold, especially in strategically important countries such as Syria and Bahrain, they will continue to have a major impact on intraregional politics as well as great-power interests.
Gender, conflict, and peace-building: how conflict can catalyse positive change for women
After War then Peace: The US-based Liberian Diaspora as Peace-building Norm Entrepreneurs
Transnational Feminism and Norm Diffusion in Peace Processes: The Cases of Burundi and Northern Ireland
The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted
Judging by the popular press, in January 2011 Twitter and Facebook went from being simply engaging social diversions to become engines of political change that upended decades of Arab authoritarianism. It is tempting to be swept away by this narrative, which suggests that social media prompted hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of Tunisians and Egyptians to pour into the streets and peacefully demand change. Brittle authoritarian regimes had little choice but to comply, and in this way, social media irrevocably changed the future of the Middle East. Following the logic to its conclusion, it would suggest that the Middle East is on the brink of a period of democratic consolidation, as the ideals and tools of revolutionaries lead the region forward into a period of anti-sectarianism, liberalism, and hope.
Iraq since 2003: Perspectives on a Divided Society
While political accommodation and the passage of time may heal the wounds in Iraqi society, it is just as likely that the lack of real reconciliation will undermine the political process.
Southeast European NGOs for the Stability Pact
This is a conference report. In May 2000, 25 representatives of Southeast European non-governmental organizations met in Romania to discuss the impact the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe has on the region’s civil society and the potential for cross-border activities. This four-day meeting was organized by the Foundation for Democratic Change (Bucharest), and the Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management (Berlin) and took place in the picturesque mountains of Sinaia (Carpathian Mountains). During several working sessions held in a creative atmosphere the participants developed a list of recommendations concerning the support of civil society in the region.
Security, development and the nation-building agenda in East Timor
State-building has been seen as the path to both security and development in East Timor. State-building, however, has been approached as an exercise in the transfer of key liberal institutions, with relatively little attention paid by either relevant international agencies or the East Timorese government to situating these institutions within a social context. In particular, there has been little effort on the part of central institutions to engage with local, community and customary governance. Building a state in which people do not feel at home and where they do not speak the language of governance threatens to marginalise the majority of the population and is not a recipe for nationhood, democracy or security. Nation-building, by contrast, could suggest a renewed emphasis on the vital connection between central government and people, in which legitimacy is embedded and active citizenship is possible. Thus conceived, nation-building requires processes of communication and exchange that effectively include rural people, their values, practices and concerns, as a nation of citizens requires some shared language and institutions of political community.
The Future of Security Sector Reform
When States Fail: Causes and Consequences
Fragile States: Securing Development
Fragile states are the toughest development challenge of our era. But we ignore them at our peril: about one billion people live in fragile states, including a disproportionate number of the world’s extreme poor, and they account for most of today’s wars. These situations require a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and the economy. Only by securing development – bringing security and development together to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold – can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence. Currently, we face critical gaps in our international capabilities to secure development. We need to better integrate military, political, legal, developmental, financial and technical tools with a variety of actors, from states to international organisations, civil society, and the private sector. Beyond assistance, we need new networked relationships between peacekeeping forces and development practitioners, and a new approach to security, to help the people in fragile states shift from being victims to principal agents of recovery.
The Norms and Politics of Exit: Ending Postconflict Transitional Administrations
While the impact of norms on post-conflict statebuilding operations has been well-explored in the literature, the ways in which the same normative frameworks affect the exit practices of such operations has so far remained unaddressed. To fill this gap, this paper examines the impact of the liberal-democratic norms governing statebuilding operations on the timing and process of exit of post-conflict international transitional administrations. To that end, it first examines the concept of exit, arguing that exit is best considered as a process rather than an event. The second section outlines the normative framework that has shaped postconflict statebuilding activities since the end of the cold war, and proposes three ways in which norms can affect exit: first, that norms act as blueprints for statebuilding and can thereby shape benchmarks for exit; second, that norms create “zones of permissibility” that explicitly commit statebuilders to a transitional presence and make exit central to the legitimacy of statebuilding operations; and third, that local actors strategically use norms, in particular those of self-determination and the taboo of permanent control of a territory, to push for an early exit of statebuilding operations. The third section explores both the scope and limitations of the three functions of norms with regard to exit in the context of a brief case study of UNMIK’s exit from Kosovo. The article concludes with some observations about the impact of the findings for exit strategies of international actors from statebuilding operations.
UN Integrated Peacekeeping Operations and NGOs: Reflections on Governmental Rationalities and Contestation in the Age of Risk
In the first decade of the new millennium, with the adoption at the UN of the ‘responsibility to protect’ as the organizing concept for intervention, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerge as increasingly important partners in international peacekeeping operations. Postmodernist analysts of liberal international security have critically addressed the growing role of international interventionism as well as NGOs. The literature, however, has overstated the effectiveness of liberal biopolitical rationalities in successfully inscribing all political actors, to include NGOs, into their script. Based upon the exploration of discourses of UN reform and integrated peacekeeping, this article argues that, while in the post-Cold-War world international security is reconceptualized in biopolitical terms and calculating rationalities are deployed, the implementation of the biopolitical liberal script is ridden with ambiguities, indecisions and stumbling blocks. International liberal mechanisms for governing disorder produce not only effects of domination and control but also spaces for political appropriation and contestation by NGOs and civil society.
Capacity-building or Capacity-taking? Legitimizing Concepts in Peace and Development Operations
This article critically analyses capacity-building and local ownership in the context of UN peace operations through interviews with UN staff and NGO representatives in Liberia and Burundi. The argument is that these concepts are left ambiguous and undefined to avoid accountability for peace operations while still functioning as value-adding and legitimizing discursive instruments for the latter. This article proves that the many paradoxes and contradictions surrounding the concepts clearly deter their operation in practice, while their positive connotations remain important, discursively, as legitimizing tools.
Engendering Peace in Africa: A Critical Inquiry Into Some Current Thinking on the Role of African Women in Peace-building
Romanticised, popular concepts of womanhood and of women’s peace-building capacities need to be critically investigated. A gendered approach is recommended as a corrective to stereotyped perspectives about women and peace, as well as to gender-blind experiments. Such an approach may be found realistic and useful, not only in everyday circumstances, but especially also in war and post-war situations. Particular attention is given to gender in post-war politics, economy and social reconstruction.
The article analyses peacebuilding theories and methods, as applied to justice system reform in post-conflict scenarios. In this respect, the international authorities involved in the reconstruction process may traditionally choose between either a ‘dirigiste’ or a consent-based approach, representing the essential terms of reference of past interventions. However, features common to most reconstruction missions, and relatively poor results, confirm the need for a change in the overall strategy. This requires international donors to focus more on the demand for justice at local levels than on the traditional supply of financial and technical aid for reforms. The article stresses the need for effectively promoting the local ownership of the reform process, without this expression being merely used by international actors as a political umbrella under which to protect themselves from potential failures.
Striking the Right Balance: How to Rebuild the Afghan National Police
A well-trained, professional police force dedicated to upholding the rule of law and trusted by the population is essential to fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan and creating stability. However, the police programmes in Afghanistan have often been dominated by different national agendas and hampered by too few resources and lack of strategic guidance. These issues pose an enormous challenge for the Afghan government and the international community in rebuilding the police. This article argues that it is imperative that the international effort strike a balance between the short-term needs of fighting an insurgency and the long-term needs of establishing an effective sustainable policing capability when building up the police force; and that the process must not be subject merely to satisfying current security challenges or traditional state-building needs.
Iraq: Reconstruction Assistance
Following years of authoritarian rule and economic sanctions, the United States and the international community agreed in the spring of 2003 that efforts should be made to rehabilitate economic infrastructure and introduce representative government to post-war Iraq, among other objectives. To meet these ends, a large-scale assistance program has been undertaken by the United States in Iraq. This program, funded through a mix of appropriations accounts, is undergoing increased scrutiny in the 110th Congress. This report describes recent developments in this assistance effort and key issues of potential interest to Congress.
Nation Building or Nation Splitting? Political Transition and the Dangers of Violence
Internationally-directed nation building combines great rhetorical promise with very mixed practical outcomes. In spite of considerable optimism on the part of international actors, and in spite of often substantial desire for a functioning government among targeted populations, it has not clearly succeeded in building states or nations. The question is why? While many authors look to the weaknesses of international efforts for explanation, the answers may lie instead in the difficult process of transition itself. Although transforming political and social interactions is often necessary in post-conflict contexts, doing so can intensify vulnerabilities and uncertainties that prevent reforming governments from establishing legitimacy. That can in turn enable the fragmentation of political authority and become a sort of worst case scenario for nation building. International actors have shown no ability to counteract fragmentation and in some cases may unwittingly aid its entrenchment. One reason for this is that nation building strategies seldom take account of the hazards of transition, particularly the ways in which international preferences and domestic needs may clash. This article examines nation building within the context of political transition to assess how and when international efforts serve to unite or splinter state authority. It argues that the capacity to improve outcomes rests in better understanding the dynamics of transition, particularly the group vulnerabilities that reform exacerbates. Where nation building cannot counteract fragmentation it cannot succeed, but will serve rather to create contexts where political violence is both easier and more likely.
Playing with Fire? The International Community’s Democratization Experiment in Afghanistan
Since the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan has become an experiment for the international community in installing democracy from outside. Externally led democratization against rushed timetables and based on formal institutions, however, was not rooted enough in the traditional institutions of Afghanistan and was conducted simultaneously with war fighting, while any benefits from reconstruction were not reaching the people. This article argues that, as a result of this lack of ‘buy-in’, the gap between democratic ideals and the lives of ordinary Afghans is widening, thereby undermining popular support, perhaps for a generation. Seeing Afghans primarily as recipients of, and not the driving force for, democracy, coupled with growing dissatisfaction with progress on economic development, may ultimately provoke popular resistance.
Conflicted Outcomes and Values: (Neo)Liberal Peace in Central Asia and Afghanistan
The implementation of liberal peace in the context of both transition economies and post-conflict situations often involves policy advice from international financial institutions for rapid opening of the economic and political systems. Experience, however, shows that the immediate outcome is increased poverty and inequality, leading to high social and human costs. Efficiency-based inquiries on externally supported state building and peacebuilding projects often use a problem solving approach which seeks ways to improve performance without questioning the validity of the liberal peace model. Inquiries based on critical theory, however, question the underlying assumptions and the legitimacy of the project itself. Using evidence from Central Asia and Afghanistan, the article argues that legitimacy depends on both how much, in the eyes of local populations, liberal peace actually improves everyday life, and how much it is valued as a goal and adheres to internal norms and values. The main proposition is that values determine how the liberal peace model is understood, while outcomes impact on how the project is accepted. High expectations of protection and welfare during crises also mean that the state can play a key role as legitimizer.
Business, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding: Contributions from the Private Sector to Address Violent Conflict
Reconstruction as Modernisation: The Post-conflict Project in Afghanistan
This paper examines the post-war reconstruction programme in Afghanistan, arguing that it contains the seeds of radical social change. The paper analyses the tensions of the present reconstruction project in light of the past experience of similar programmes launched by Afghan rulers and their foreign supporters. The central argument is that the conflation of post-war reconstruction with a broader agenda for development and modernisation has brought out a wide range of tensions associated with social change. Simultaneously the prominent foreign role in the undertaking has increasingly had negative effects. As a result, the entire project shows signs of severe contradictions that are adding to the problems caused by the growing insurgency.
The Training Process: Achieving Social Impact By Training Individuals? How to Make Sure That Training for Conflict Transformation Has an Impact On Conflict Transformation
The Failure of State Building and the Promise of State Failure: Reinterpreting the Security – Development Nexus in Haiti
This article critically examines the discourse surrounding fragile states in relation to the security-development nexus. I draw on the case of Haiti to problematise key assumptions underpinning mainstream approaches to resolving concerns of security and development through the contemporary project of state building. In contrast, I suggest that a focus on the social and political relations constitutive of social struggles provides a framework for a better analysis of the historical trajectory of development in, and of, fragile states. Through an alternative relational interpretation of Haitian social and political formations, I illustrate the way in which Haitian experiences of social change have been co-produced in a world historical context. By foregrounding these relational dynamics at key conjunctures coinciding with periods in which the state, state formation and state building, were perceived to be central to Haitian development, this analysis highlights the extent to which attempts to consolidate the modern (liberal) state, have been implicated in the production and reproduction of insecurities. The article concludes by considering the salience of this relationally conceived interpretation of the security-development nexus for gaining insight into the alternative visions of progress, peace, and prosperity that people struggle for.
NATO and Prevention of State Failure: An Idea Whose Time Will Come?
The breakdown of order and the collapse of state institutions in fragile and failed states creates situations that may pose direct security threats for foreign actors. Whether and to what degree NATO should lead international efforts to address the dangers posed by failed states, typically far out-of-area, is a major debate for alliance purpose and strategy. While the alliance has focused its energy on aspects of the problem like counterterrorism and piracy, most action on fragile and failed states has been ad hoc, mainly military interventions and post-conflict reconstruction. The problem of dysfunctional states requires a broader rethinking for the international community and especially for NATO as it revaluates strategic goals. To more effectively provide security within the territorial boundaries of its member states the alliance needs to look at security beyond the Euro-Atlantic area. Shaping the political environment means an expanded NATO role in conflict prevention and in avoiding state failure before it occurs. It is argued here that this strategic perspective will not mean more interventions for NATO, but fewer. Moving away from intervening to stress prevention of state failure involves a change of focus: the development of capacities to anticipate problems and rebuild states, and to strengthen institutional capacities in states of strategic importance to the alliance.
Conflict Transformation Through Educational and Youth Programs
Conflict Resoultion and Reconciliation in the Arab World: The Work of Civil Society Organizations in Lebanon and Morocco
A tense relationship has marked decades of interaction between Arab regimes and their civil societies in the areas of human rights, democracy, governance reform, justice and reconciliation. While the role of civil society in development, humanitarian and environmental issues has generally been tolerated more easily by Arab governments, the same cannot be said for the areas just mentioned. In recent years there has been greater awareness of the increasing importance of civil society in assisting governments to push forward the wheel of development. There exists, though, no clear assessment of the role of civil society in reform movements or the degree and seriousness of their involvement to date. This article aims to contribute to closing this gap by exploring crucial civil society functions – strengthening civic engagement and community-empowerment – in the specific context of the Arab world, and by introducing the work of a number of organisations in this region. The next section briefly discusses the role of Arab civil society organisations (CSOs) and NGOs and explains some of their functions. Section three reflects on traditional conflict resolution and reconciliation methods and their relation to the “Western field” of conflict resolution. Section four presents cases from Lebanon and Morocco, looking at concrete projects, objectives and achievements of organisations, while section five discusses common challenges. The final section identifies possible next steps in light of the current political developments in the region.
From Bonn to London: Governance Challenges and the Future of Statebuilding in Afghanistan
Following the four-year Bonn Agreement implementation period, from December 2001 to December 2005, the London Conference on Afghanistan was convened, 31 January – 1 February, to reaffirm the commitment of world leaders to the next phase of statebuilding and reform in Afghanistan. The central document of this gathering, the Afghanistan Compact, sets forth a number of time-bound benchmarks for the next five years in the areas of security, governance and development. This article examines key aspects of the compact and what will be required for the government of Afghanistan to meet the various targets, along with the support of the international community. Policy recommendations are further advanced to facilitate reconstruction efforts and to sustain a sufficient level of international engagement to avert failure in Afghanistan.
Peace building and State-building in Afghanistan: Constructing Sovereignty for Whose Security?
In the aftermath of civil wars, international actors often worry about the incoherence, tribalism, and division of war-torn nation-states like Afghanistan. However, the problems encountered in the Afghanistan recovery and reconstruction effort illustrate that the divisions, rivalries and fragmentation of authority of the international community have constituted just as big an obstacle to what the UN now calls ‘peace building’. Sustainable stability and peace, to say nothing of democracy, require international actors to delegate some sovereign functions to a multilateral entity that can reinforce rather than undermine the institutions responsible for the reconstruction of the nation-state. The history and contemporary situation in Afghanistan makes clear that there is an important need for the peace-building mechanisms proposed by the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel. This would involve a unified international decision-making body that would act as a counterpart to the recipient national government and potentially bring order to the anarchy that invariably flows from the multiple agendas, doctrines and aid budgets of the array of external actors involved in peace building in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Third-Generation Civil-Military Relations
Corruption and Government
In countries emerging from civil war with weak governments, bribery demands will be used opportunistically by officials operating under unclear rules that allow them to invent offences or simply to extort funds from ordinary people. Furthermore, many people may engage in illegal activities, such as smuggling or illicit trade in arms, and may need the protection of public authorities to continue to operate. Peacebuilding strategies must avoid triggering vicious spirals. An economy that is jumpstarted by giving monopoly powers to a few prominent people may produce a society that is both lacking in competition and unequal. Although it may be risky and difficult to counter corruption in post-conflict peacebuilding, if the problem is allowed to fester, it can undermine other efforts to create a stable, well-functioning state with popular legitimacy. Care must be taken in starting down the road to reform. Strong leadership from the top is needed that moves towards the goal of a more legitimate and better functioning government and sidelines those who have in the past been using the state as a tool for private gain through threats and intimidation. International assistance can, in principle, help, but it needs to be tailored to avoid exacerbating the underlying problem created by the mixture of corruption and threats of violence from those inside and outside the government.
Peaceful Intervention: Structures, Processes, and Strategies for the Constructive Regulation of Ethnopolitical Conflicts
The study starts by attempting to draw up a list of the special characteristics of ethnopolitical conflicts. The list is intended to be such as to facilitate strategic reflection about whether it is possible to influence the dynamics of a conflict from outside, and if so, how (Section 2). The next section gives a schematic account of the structures of conflict regulation, embracing not only the realm of states but also the various fields of operation of the realm of societies, and also the necessity of developing initiatives at different social levels. The fourth section proceeds from the assumption that the involvement of third parties is of considerable importance in dealing with acute ethnopolitical conflicts, and this section also contains a systematized account of the functions and strategies that may be adopted by these third parties. Based on this, five process-oriented approaches to conflict regulation are presented. All of these display distinct programmatic and analytic features, though in practice they often figure in various combinations (Section 5).
Managing Civil-Military Cooperation: Experiences from the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan
From a management perspective, this article presents a process model to analyze cooperation between military and civilian actors in peace support operations. By means of multiple case study research, the article applies the model to eight partnerships between the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team and civilian actors (nongovernmental organizations, district governors, local constructors) in Baghlan, Afghanistan. These partnerships include explosives removal, power plant construction and police training courses. The article shows that civil-military cooperation processes follow six successive steps: decision to cooperate, partner selection, design, implementation, transfer of tasks and responsibilities, and evaluation. It is concluded that there is a lack of unambiguous and useful military guidelines regarding civil-military cooperation; the military are often unaware of other actors operating in the area and their programs, cooperation is frequently supplybased rather than demand-driven, and many military personnel involved in civil-military cooperation have little experience with and training in the subject.
Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace
This article discusses what an IR and peacebuilding praxis derived from the everyday might entail. It examines the insights of a number of literatures which contribute to a discussion of the dynamics of the everyday. The enervation of agency and the repoliticisation of peacebuilding is its objective. It charts how local agency has led to resistance and hybrid forms of peace despite the overwhelming weight of the liberal peace project. In some aspects this may be complementary to the latter and commensurate with the liberal state, but in other aspects the everyday points beyond the liberal peace.
Liberal Peacebuilding in Timor Leste: The Emperor’s New Clothes?
A critical examination of the effort to build a liberal peace since 1999 in East Timor illustrates that to a large degree the liberal peace model has failed the East Timorese people. There are two aspects to this: the first is the failure to construct a social contract between society and its institutions of governance. This is related to the broader issue of the social legitimacy of, and contract with, international actors derived from society and its complex groupings. The second is the failure, at least in the transitional period, to respond to the experiences of everyday life and welfare requirements of the new state’s citizens.
Liberal Hubris? Virtual Peace in Cambodia
The Role of Constitution Making and Institution Buiding in Furthering Peace, Justice and Development: South Africa’s Democratic Transition
Democratic Peacebuilding: Aiding Afghanistan and other Fragile States
Written from the dual perspective of scholar and practitioner Rich qualitative and quantitative data-set Innovative conceptual framework Democratic Peacebuilding examines the evolution of international peacebuilding since the cold war, identifying the factors that limit the progress of international actors to institutionalize democratic authority and the rule of law in war-shattered societies. It gives particular attention to Afghanistan’s Bonn Agreement process (2001-2005) and post-Bonn period (2006-2009), in which the country’s multiple, competing forms of authority (e.g., religious leaders, tribal elders, militia commanders, and technocrats) challenged efforts to create “modern” forms of political authority rooted in democratic norms and the rule of law. Despite the significant risks involved, this volume argues that the institutionalization of democratic legal authority can create the conditions and framework necessary to mediate competing domestic interests and to address the root causes of a conflict peacefully. At the same time, one overlooked problem of international peacebuilding stems from the divergent conceptions, between international officials and the local population, of authority and its sources of legitimacy. By helping a conflict-affected society reconcile the inherent tensions between competing forms of authority, international peacebuilders can contribute to improved conditions for governance and a reduction in intra-state political violence. Due to high expenditures in a period of global economic uncertainty and frustrations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, democratization as an approach to conflict management and resolution is in retreat in some influential policy circles. But it is only a deepening of democracy, rather than lowering the metrics for progress and conditions for exit, that will determine whether fragile states are placed on a viable course toward stability and greater self-sufficiency.
A Clash of Mindsets? An Insider’s Account of Provincial Reconstruction Teams
Previous analyses have provided extensive and in-depth insights into the external relations of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan, particularly the division of labour between them and the humanitarian assistance community. This article broadens and deepens this literature by focusing on the internal relations of PRTs, particularly the cooperation between military and civilian sections within them. It shows that the successes and failures of PRTs are not just on the part of individual advisers, officers or uncooperative partners, but can also be located in the organizational culture of a PRT as a whole. On the one hand, a PRT constitutes a forum in which diverging civilian expert, military and national interests may collide, producing a potential for a ‘clash of mindsets’. On the other, such a collision can lead to fruitful results and innovative policies in which different viewpoints complement each other.
Saving Liberal Peacebuilding
Liberal peacebuilding has become the target of considerable criticism. Although much of this criticism is warranted, a number of scholars and commentators have come to the opinion that liberal peacebuilding is either fundamentally destructive, or illegitimate, or both. On close analysis, however, many of these critiques appear to be exaggerated or misdirected. At a time when the future of peacebuilding is uncertain, it is important to distinguish between justified and unjustified criticisms, and to promote a more balanced debate on the meaning, shortcomings and prospects of liberal peacebuilding.
Mediation, Political Engagement, and Peacebuilding
This article argues that mediation and political engagement by third parties can contribute to peacebuilding by strengthening the political processes in countries exiting civil conflict. Third-party engagement can create the political space within which long-term reconstruction, development, and reconciliation issues can be discussed among national actors. Given that peace agreements are frequently mere cease-fires representing short-term deals among elites, mediation and political engagement can assist the transformation of these deals into long-term commitments and inclusive national politics. Specifically, mediation can contribute to peacebuilding in three ways. First, mediators contribute to peacebuilding by working toward peace agreements that serve as frameworks for the opening up of the political process as opposed to agreements that lock in detailed, long-term governance models and concentrate power in the hands of the wartime elites. Second, in the period immediately following the signing of peace agreements, mediation helps parties adhere to the agreements and settle any remaining issues. Third, mediation contributes to making transitional governments workable and, as much as possible, ensures that they gradually lead to more inclusive political processes.
Political Transitions after Peace Agreements: The Importance of Consultative and Inclusive Political Processes
This essay examines the transitional periods following peace agreements and leading to elections and new constitutions. It discusses the advantages of gradually expanding political participation during these periods, despite the arguments of several scholars that political liberalization in the absence of strong state institutions carries significant risks. The article argues that political participation in transitional periods may be expanded through inclusive elite consultations on issues such as elections, vetting of institutions and new constitutions, and through wider national dialogue efforts including civil society. The essay recognizes the risks of premature elections, but argues that the goal of reforming state institutions cannot be achieved in the absence of a national political process. This argument relies on the insights of the constitution-making literature, namely that lasting institutions tend to result from lengthy and inclusive constitution-making processes. It also relies on the civil war settlement literature according to which belligerents need credible guarantees that their interests will be protected in the post-agreement period before laying down their arms. The essay argues that guaranteed inclusion in the transitional process and influence over the outcome of the transition offers such assurances to former belligerents that their interests will be respected in the new political reality.
Building Democracy in Afghanistan: The Statebuilding Agenda and International Engagement
This article examines the international community’s commitment, since the December 2001 Bonn Agreement, to build democratic institutions and practices at national and local levels in Afghanistan. The tensions between democracy promotion activities and the statebuilding exigencies of political stabilization are identified through an examination of the 2005 elections and creation of the National Assembly, Provincial Councils, and Community Development Councils. The analysis demonstrates the existence of multiple, competing agendas in Afghanistan, embodied in contradictory elements found in those institutions. Policy recommendations are advanced for forging a coherent statebuilding agenda that can garner the legitimacy needed to complete the important transition signalled by the Interim-Afghanistan National Development Strategy and the Afghanistan Compact, concluded in January 2006 in London.
Peacebuilding as Security in “Failing” and Conflict-Prone States
Peacebuilding activities in conflict-prone and post-conflict countries are based upon the assumption that effective, preferably liberal, states form the greatest prospect for a stable international order, and that failing or conflict-prone states represent a threat to international security. Peacebuilding is therefore a part of the security agenda. This has brought obvious benefits, most obviously much-needed resources, aid and capacity-building to conflict-prone countries in the form of international assistance, which has contributed to a decline in intrastate conflicts. However, there are a number of negative implications to the securitization of peacebuilding. This article considers the implications of this, and concludes that it is difficult to mediate between conventional and critical views of peacebuilding since they are premised upon quite different assumptions regarding what peacebuilding is and what it should be.
Bosnian Education for Security and Peacebuilding?
This article examines education as a security issue in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where some Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats have learned to hate each other and, at times, violently reinforce ethno-cultural differences through separate education systems. It further explores education as a poorly understood conflict-prevention, post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding tool mainly after the 1995 Dayton Accord. It highlights the OSCE as a significant actor in recognizing and responding to education-related security needs. And it reflects on persistent challenges and prospects for a sustainable peace aided by education. Finally the article identifies new research steps to assess reforms.
The Spoils of Peace in Iraqi Kurdistan
This paper examines transition patterns in post-Gulf war Iraqi Kurdistan as a function of external aid, and the impact of these developments on relations between the Kurdistan region and Baghdad. It argues that, despite ethnic traditions and structural legacies, the asymmetrical and changing nature of aid has created new incentives for conflict and co-operation. Since 1991 aid has strengthened the Kurdistan region’s power in relation to the state and increased leverage on the central government to accommodate Kurdish demands for autonomy. Yet it has also created an increasingly complex political,?economic order and new interdependencies between the regions. The shift from relief aid to reconstruction within a neoliberal framework has helped open the Iraqi and Kurdish political economies by encouraging trade between the Kurdistan region, regional states and foreign governments. The creation of a federal Iraqi state has also led to financial and political linkages between the Kurdistan region and Baghdad and to new requirements for negotiation.
Closing the Gap Between Peace Operations and Post-Conflict Insecurity: Towards a Violence Reduction Agenda
This article highlights how the instruments for addressing the presumed source(s) of armed violence need to be sharpened and extended to address the heterogeneous character of armed violence present in many post-conflict situations. These extensions require the development of practical armed violence prevention and reduction programmes that draw upon scholarship and practice from the criminal justice and public health sectors. The article argues that reducing organized violence and insecurity in post-conflict contexts requires responding to the wider dynamics of armed violence rather than focusing exclusively on insecurity directly connected to what are traditionally defined as armed conflict and post-conflict dynamics; and this requires attention not just to the instruments of violence, but also to the political and economic motives of agents and institutions implicated in violent exchanges at all levels of social interaction.
Peace beyond Process?
Post-Cold War peacebuilding is increasingly conflated with the smooth functioning of a range of processes associated with democracy, governance, development and securitisation. However, critiques of these approaches tend to focus on their liberal-democratic norms and to ignore their underlying processual logics. This article problematises two facets of process with regard to peacebuilding: its postulation as a basis for peace grounded in everyday human activity and its construction of violence as anti-process. Its goal is to present the critique of process as a means for understanding the complex relationship between international and local actors in the context of peacebuilding, thus enriching the liberal peace debate. Drawing on normative political theory, including that of Arendt and Deleuze and Guattari, the article demonstrates how the problems raised by these two issues can help to explain a range of concerns associated with contemporary peacebuilding and provide starting points for imagining forms of peace that are not so reliant upon processual logics or opposed to those acts which disrupt them, which may in fact be attempts to realise radically different versions of peace. In so doing, it extends and enriches the perspectives offered by existing liberal peace critiques.
Reintegration and Localised Conflict: Security Impacts Beyond Influencing Spoilers
This article investigates the effectiveness of combatant reintegration through a case study of two security-oriented programmes held in Poso, Indonesia from 2007 to 2008. Each programme aimed to prevent further attacks by addressing perceived economic difficulties experienced by youths whose main skill was perpetrating violence. The effect of such reintegration programmes on potential spoilers has typically been conceptualised in terms of programme influences on former combatants themselves. But in a localised conflict context where many combatants may have held jobs while perpetrating violence, the paper finds that the clearest contribution to sustaining peace of reintegration programming was its effect on police capacity to manage security. Police increased their levels of contact with combatants through reintegration and other informal incentives, then leveraged this contact to gather information after security incidents and to detect potential security disturbances. This pattern of achieving security outcomes through police contact with perpetrators of violence owes its conceptual lineage to the counter-terrorism strategy of the Indonesian police. The case highlights the potential for greater exchange between the fields of combatant reintegration and counter-terrorism disengagement.
Contracting for Wartime Actors: The Limits of the Contract Paradigm
Wartime contracts raise challenges to the classic contract doctrines of performance and remedies. First, privatization of numerous military and support functions (even support services such as trucking, laundry and food preparation) has placed private sector contractors in active war zones leading to difficulty in contract performance and injury or death to some contractors. Second, privatization of these functions necessitates that the government employ a functional supervisory system that ensures accountability to the government for contractor actions. How prepared is contract law to resolve disputes raised by these scenarios? This essay explores the role of contract in wartime and, in particular, reconstruction and the shortcomings of trying to use contract law in its current form to achieve the goals contemplated by the architects of the Iraq war. First, it considers the use of government contracts to privatize numerous government functions during the reconstruction and conflict in Iraq. Second, it considers the private ordering by contract done by government contractors to obtain security and related services from third parties. Both types of contracting raise complicated issues, including the proper use of force, to what extent the contracts should have government oversight, to what extent contractors should be accountable for crimes and whether contractors qualify as noncombatants in case of capture. Heavy reliance on contract law to address these problems raises complicated issues of delegation, performance, breach, assumption of risk, excuse and remedies. The general parameters of contracting with the U.S. government shall serve as a precursor to this discussion.
The Rule of Law and Its Promotion Abroad: Three Problems of Scope
At the outset of the twenty-first century, the rule of law is no longer a concept exclusively, or even primarily, defined and debated by political philosophers and constitutional lawyers, as had been the case in centuries past. Over the last decade in particular, the rule of law has become “the motherhood and apple pie of development economics.” Western democracies, their regional organizations, NGOs, and the multilateral development agencies they control, now pour billions of dollars and euros into projects designed to measure the rule of law, create it where it does not exist – in closed dictatorships, failed states, and post-conflict zones – and to strengthen it in transitional and struggling democracies around the globe. Institutionalists of different hews have come to see it as central to modern statehood, impartial economic exchange, and objective justice. Democracy scholars are pointing to it as the essential, non-electoral dimension of democratic substance. Together with human rights and democracy, the rule of law is now upheld by liberal internationalists as a central pillar in the “virtuous trilogy” upon which a legitimate international order rests, while international security experts have come to see it as indispensable to ending civil wars, building durable peace, and fighting insurgencies, transnational crime, and terrorism. Against this background – of “a venerable part of Western political philosophy” having turned into “a rising imperative of the era of globalization,” as Carothers put it – existing mainstream legal discourses about the rule of law and its promotion abroad run the risk of being outpaced, even sidelined into relative obsolescence. The fact that intellectual and policy involvement with the notion of the rule of law are no longer the exclusive purview of lawyers need not be lamented; indeed, it is to be generally welcomed. Rather, this article argues, to be of genuine relevance to one of the foremost challenges the free world is facing and is likely to face for many decades to come – the challenge of fostering self-sustaining, well-governed free societies in parts of the world where these are absent or weak – lawyers must overcome three main “problems of scope” that presently afflict the rule of law literature and policy enterprise.
The Liberal Peace and Post-War Reconstruction: Myth or Reality?
Negotiating the Right of Return
Negotiating the right of return is a central issue in post-conflict societies aiming to resolve tensions between human rights issues and security concerns. Peace proposals often fail to carefully balance these tensions or to identify incentives and linkages that enable refugee return. To address this gap, the article puts forward an alternative arrangement in negotiating refugee rights currently being considered in the bilateral negotiations in Cyprus. Previous peace plans for the reunification of the island emphasized primarily Turkish Cypriot security and stipulated a maximum number of Greek Cypriot refugees eligible to return under future Turkish Cypriot administration. The authors’ alternative suggests a minimum threshold of Greek Cypriots refugees plus self-adjustable incentives for the Turkish Cypriot community to accept the rest. The article reviews different options including linking actual numbers of returnees with naturalizations for Turkish settlers or immigrants, Turkey’s EU-accession, and territorial re-adjustments across the federal border. In this proposed formula, the Greek Cypriot side would reserve concessions until refugee return takes place, while the Turkish Cypriot community would be demographically secure under all scenarios by means of re-adjustable naturalization and immigration quotas. Drawing parallels with comparable cases, the article emphasizes the importance of making reciprocity and linkages explicit in post-conflict societies.
Changing the Rules? State-Building and Local Government in Afghanistan
This paper looks at how a certain understanding of states is affecting the types of activities emphasised in state-building agendas. It proposes an approach to understanding states and their roles, drawing on ideas of institutions and their rules as a means of mediating power, and applies this to a discussion of two state-building initiatives at the subnational level in Afghanistan. It shows how resistance to attempts to impose bureaucratic rules, coupled with the international community’s failure to understand the role of states in mediating power, has contributed to the failure to date of interventions to reform local government. This has directly affected reconstruction and stability in Afghanistan.
International Justice After Conflict: Outreach, Legacy and Accountability
This book critically examines the role of outreach within the application of international justice in post-conflict settings. The assumption that justice brings peace underpins much of the thinking, and indeed action, of international justice, yet little is known about whether this is actually the case. Significant questions surrounding the link between peace and justice remain: do trials deter would-be war criminals; is justice possible for the most heinous crimes; can international justice replace local justice? This book explores these questions in relation to recent developments in international justice that have both informed and shaped the creation of the hybrid tribunal in Sierra Leone. This was the first hybrid tribunal to be based in situ, equipped with a dedicated Outreach office. Outreach was seen as essential to ensuring that expectations were managed for what was ultimately a limited judicial mechanism. Yet, there is little evidence to support the claim that Outreach garnered wide-spread acceptance of the Special Court. This book explores the challenge and tensions in communicating the role of international justice in a post-conflict setting. The goals of international justice after conflict are clear: hold fair and transparent trials of alleged perpetrators under the strict adherence to international judicial procedures in order to establish accountability for the worst crimes against humanity. The assumption being that this will contribute to peace by firmly drawing a line under the past in order to move forward peacefully. This has been evident with the recent drive towards international judicial intervention after conflict in places such as the former Yugoslavia, Uganda and Afghanistan. But so far these assumptions remain largely untested. Few empirical studies examine how justice contributes to peace and within these instances, how the complexity of international justice mechanisms have been communicated to their respective audiences in order to foment wide-spread knowledge and understanding of the processes. This book addresses this deficit by testing these assumptions on the ground in a post-conflict setting in West Africa.
Rethinking State-building in a Failed State
Participatory Action-Research in Post-Conflict Situations: The Example of the War-Torn Societies Project
This report provides an overview of the War-torn Societies Project (WSP). The WSP began in 1994 as an experimental project. It facilitates the active involvement of local, national and international actors in ongoing collective research and dialogue that allows societies emerging from conflict to better understand and respond to the challenges of social, economic and political reconstruction. Headquartered in Geneva and supported by almost thirty donor governments and aid agencies, WSP has been engaged in experimental field-based activities in Eritrea, Guatemala, Mozambique and Somalia over the past six years. WSP contributes to the recovery and strengthening of societies emerging from conflict by bringing together indigenous actors (including former adversaries and victims) to set priorities, build consensus and formulate responses, aided by participatory action-research, and with the help of regular consultation with external aid providers. WSP’s carefully defined methodology embodies principles of local capacity and responsibility; wide-ranging participation; better understanding of differing interests and objectives; proper use of relevant data and analysis in integrative decision-making; practical policy impact; and a catalytic rather than a dominating role by international actors. In mid-2000, the experimental pilot phase of the project evolved into the establishment of a successor body. Under the name ‘WSP International’, the project’s work will be further tested in new country projects with new variables in order to draw further lessons.
Moving Beyond Rethinking the “State of the State”: To the Challenge of Reshaping International Contributions to Peace Operations
The need for an accurate understanding of the environment into which peace- and capacity-building missions are deployed cannot be overstated. Suppositions about the mission environment inform every facet of an intervention’s design and implementation, in addition to expectations surrounding success. Yet this critical element continues to be misunderstood by those most in need of an accurate grasp, a condition which severely undermines the war to peace transition. Rather than continuing to assume that recipient states are states in the Western sense of the term, we must instead focus our energies on how best to enable sustainable peace in the hybrid political orders which do in fact constitute these troubled places. After setting out the largely unrecognised characteristics of recipient societies, the article explores alternative forms of assistance with promise to complement such realities.
Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty Years in the Field
Peacekeeping has been a significant part of Australia’s overseas military engagement since the end of the Second World War. Yet it is a part of the country’s history that has been largely neglected until the 1990s, and even since then interest has been slow to develop. In the last sixty years, between 30,000 and 40,000 Australian military personnel and police have served in more than 50 peacekeeping missions in at least 27 different conflicts. This insightful, engaging and superbly-edited volume approaches Australian peacekeeping from four angles: its history, its agencies, some personal reflections, and its future. Contributors discuss the distinction between peacekeeping and war-fighting, the importance of peacekeeping in terms of public policy, the problems of multinational command, and the specialist contributions of the military, civilian police, mine-clearers, weapons inspectors and diplomats.
Gender and Nation-Building: Family Law as Legal Architecture
Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family and the legal framework that defines it embody power relations that, in turn, help to shape the larger polity. Hence, laws governing marriage, divorce, marital property, maintenance, child custody, child support, cohabitation, inheritance, and illegitimacy define not only power and status within families, but also within civil society, the market, and the political sphere. Third, the symbolic family, and sometimes the law defining it, may figure in important ways in the struggle for national identity that often takes place contemporaneously with nation-building. In Part II of this Essay, we explore the first claim, that national boundaries are gendered through the use of family relationships to control access to citizenship and thus to the resources and the protection of the state. We suggest that the use of kinship ties in an explicitly gendered way in the United States reinforces a concept of ethnic nationalism, casting women, and especially mothers, as the symbolic protectors of national identity. In Part III, we analyze ways in which family structure is defined by and reinforces hierarchy within the larger society. Following an exploration of theoretical arguments concerning the interplay of family and social hierarchy, we offer as an example of this dynamic the historical manipulation of African customary law by colonial powers. Finally, in Part IV, we argue that the ideology of the family often figures in important ways in the development of national identity in post-colonial or post-crisis states. We then discuss the example of South Africa and show how family law can serve as a site for the intersection of nationalist politics and the legal architecture of the nation-building process, here again in ways that are highly gendered.
Space, Performance and Everyday Security in the Peacekeeping Context
Studies of peacekeeping have helped to reveal the complexities, dilemmas and challenges of operations since their inception, and almost certainly into the future. Yet, despite the empirical and theoretical breadth of this canon, the field continues to be dominated by political science, development studies, international law and military studies, whose scholars tend to draw on problem-solving, macro-level and positivist perspectives in their writings. The impact of post-structural and post-positivist epistemologies developed in sociology, human geography and cultural studies remain marginal in the field. Given this, the present article seeks to complement and develop the study of peacekeeping through its framing of blue-helmet activity as embodied, spatial-security practice that is performed ‘out front’ for the beneficiary audience. In so doing we draw on critical geopolitics, military/human geography and sociological theorizing with a focus on space and performance. Our main aim is to show how the concepts of space and performance can be used to illuminate perceptions of everyday security by recourse to a modest, illustrative empirical component based on fieldwork in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia.
Post-Conflict Tajikistan: The Politics of Peacebuilding and the Emergence of Legitimate Order
Peacebuilding as Practice: Discourses from Post-conflict Tajikistan
Peacebuilding is a contested concept which gains meaning as it is practised. While academic and policy-relevant elaboration of the concept is of interest to international experts, interpretations of peacebuilding in the Central Asian arena may depart immensely from those envisaged within the western-dominated ‘international community’. This article opens up the dimensions and contingent possibilities of “peacebuilding” through an investigation of two alternative approaches found in the context of Tajikistan. It makes the critique that peacebuilding represents one contextually grounded basic discourse. In the case of Central Asia, and in particular post-conflict Tajikistan, at least two other basic discourses have been adopted by parties to the post-Soviet setting: elite “mirostroitelstvo” (Russian: peacebuilding) and popular ‘tinji’ (Tajik: wellness/peacefulness). Based largely on fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan between 2003 and 2005, the argument here is that none of these three discourses is merely an artificial or cynical construct but that each has a certain symbolic and normative value. Consequently, a singular definition of Tajik ‘peacebuilding’ proves elusive as practices adapt to the relationships between multiple discourses and identities in context. The article concludes that ‘peacebuilding’ is a complex and intersubjective process of change entailing the legitimation of new relationships of power.
Can Peacekeepers Be Peacebuilders?
The role of UN peacekeeping missions has expanded beyond the traditional tasks of peacekeeping to include a wide range of political, economic, and humanitarian activities. While such expansion indicates an improved understanding of the complexities and challenges of post-conflict contexts, it also raises questions about whether UN peacekeeping missions are equipped to handle peacebuilding tasks. Evidence from a study of the peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone suggests they are not. This article argues that peacekeeping missions are a poor choice for peacebuilding given their limited mandates, capacity, leverage, resources and duration. Peacekeepers should focus on peacekeeping, by which they can lay the foundation for peacebuilding. Peacebuilding should be the primary task of national governments and their populations.
“Walking Together” Toward Independence? A Civil Society Perspective on the United Nations Administration in East Timor, 1999-2002
Issues surrounding legitimacy and the role of civil society are at the forefront of contemporary global governance debates. Examining the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and focusing on the specific issue areas of justice and gender, this article evaluates the effectiveness and accountability of the administration from the perspective of East Timorese civil society, whose voice is largely absent from previous analyses. Drawing on the archive of the prominent civil society group La’o Hamutuk, this study adds precision and nuance to an area of research characterized by broad-stroke assessments of the legitimacy of multinational interventions. It finds variations in the levels of overall legitimacy exhibited by particular issue areas and differences in terms of the configuration of accountability and effectiveness enjoyed by UNTAET. Although sounding a cautionary note about the degree of civil society influence in global governance, the study concludes that La’o Hamutuk nevertheless provided a more diffuse sense of discursive voice and accountability than would otherwise have been accorded the East Timorese during this crucial period in their history.
Mozambique: “The war ended 17 years ago, but we are still poor.”
Mozambique, an aid darling, poses some stark questions for development co-operation. Current economic management strategies mean that a growing group of young people are leaving school with a basic education but no economic prospects. Will marginal youth in towns and cities pose a threat of political and criminal violence? Can peace be built on poverty and rising inequality? Are elections and expanded schooling enough when there are no jobs?
(Re)Imagining Coexistence: Striving for Sustainable Return, Reintegration and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Re-Ordering Justice: Towards A New Methodological Approach to Studying Transitional Justice
Scholars and policymakers have turned increasing attention to questions of transitional justice, those legal responses to a former regime’s repressive acts following a change in political systems. Although there is a rich, interdisciplinary literature that addresses the value of various transitional justice measures, theoretical arguments for how and under what conditions we should expect to see these measures implemented tend to gravitate to intuitively appealing relative power considerations. But attempts at parsimony have tended to leave the dependent variable either overly restrictive or poorly defined, yielding theories that are difficult to test. In this article, the author proposes a “transitional justice spectrum” based on a hierarchical series of possible accountability mechanisms and designed to allow researchers to conduct more rigorous, cross-national tests of justice arguments. The objective here is not to posit a broad theory of transitional justice, but to open the debate into a methodological weakness in the transitional justice literature. The article includes seven accountability mechanisms: cessation and codification of human rights violations; condemnation of the old system; rehabilitation and compensation for victims; creation of a truth commission; purging human rights abusers from public function; criminal prosecution of executors (those lower on the chain-of-command); criminal prosecution of commanders (those higher on the chain-of-command).
Making it up as We Go Along: State-building, Critical Theory and Military Adaptation in Afghanistan
This article examines the military aspects of international state-building efforts in Afghanistan through the lens of critical theory. It outlines the conventional approach to state-building, as it has evolved in recent decades, and briefly describes the emerging reflexive critique of that approach developed by state-building scholars grounded in critical theory. It then applies the reflexive critique to the Afghan state-building project, an exercise that substantiates key aspects of the critique but also reveals a divergence between the broadly conventional approach taken in Kabul and the more adaptive approaches of many practitioners at the province and district levels. It concludes with a discussion of the potential implications of this convergence for theory and practice of state-building in Afghanistan and beyond.
Promoting the Rule of Law in Timor-Leste
The international community is eagerly promoting the concept of the rule of law in post-conflict states such as Timor-Leste in the belief that it will lead to political and social stability. To attract international legitimacy, Timorese leaders are also keen to be seen to be invoking the rule of law although the manner in which they understand and use the concept often diverges from dominant Western understandings. The concept of the rule of law assumes that the state enjoys a monopoly of law. This article examines the resonance of the rule of law at the local level in Timor-Leste in light of the fact that customary law is the type of law with which people are likely to have first and frequent contact as the state has little reach beyond the capital. It concludes by recommending that all actors promoting the rule of law in post-conflict states need to equip themselves with a strong understanding of how the population engages with legal norms in order to effectively promote the rule of law.
Community Policing and Peacekeeping
In modern industrial societies, the demand for policing services frequently exceeds the current and foreseeable availability of public policing resources. Conversely, developing nations often suffer from an inability to provide a basic level of security for their citizens. Community Policing and Peacekeeping offers a fresh overview of the challenges of community policing in advanced societies and peacekeeping in weak nations, demonstrating how going beyond traditional models of police work can provide solutions in troubled communities. Featuring contributions from world-class scholars, this volume emphasizes the importance of cultural and political sensitivities in police work. Offering comparative perspectives from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, South Africa, and China, it explores the paradigm of community policing that involves consultation with community members, responsiveness to their security needs, collective problem-solving to identify the most appropriate means of meeting these needs, and mobilization of police services. Exploring the challenges and pitfalls of these collaborative efforts, the book examines how traditional models of police work have evolved to embrace the needs of communities. The second part of the book focuses on police peacekeeping efforts in countries torn apart by civil strife. It includes chapters on police collaboration with the United Nations, Australian and Canadian efforts abroad, CIVPOL (civilian police peace operations), and programs in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia. The book shows how expanding the role of the police beyond the limits of fighting crime can help contribute to safer, more stable communities.
Bribes or Bargains? Peace Conditionalities and ‘Post-Conflict’ Reconstruction in Afghanistan
This article focuses on the role of international aid donors in Afghanistan since the signing of the Bonn Agreement in 2001. Specifically, it explores the scope and utility of peace conditionalities as an instrument for peace consolidation in the context of a fragile war-to-peace transition. Geo-strategic and institutional concerns have generally led to an unconditional approach to assistance by international actors. It is argued that large inflows of unconditional aid risk re-creating the structural conditions that led to the outbreak of conflict. Aid conditionalities need to be re-conceptualized as aid-for-peace bargains rather than as bribes for security. Some forms of conditionality are necessary in order to rebuild the social contract in Afghanistan. This finding has wider relevance for aid donors and they should reconsider orthodox development models in ‘fragile state’ settings. Rather than seeing conditionalities and ownership as two ends of a policy spectrum, the former may be a necessary instrument for achieving the latter.
The Imperative to Rebuild: Assessing the Normative Case for Postconflict Reconstruction
The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of comprehensive international missions of peacebuilding and reconstruction, aimed not simply at bringing conflict to an end but also at preventing its recurrence. Recent missions, ranging from relatively modest involvement to highly complex international administrations, have generated a debate about the rights and duties of international actors to reconstruct postconflict states. In view of the recent growth of such missions, and the serious challenges and crises that have plagued them, we seek in this article to address some of the gaps in the current literature and engage in a critical analysis of the moral purposes and dilemmas of reconstruction. More specifically, we construct a map for understanding and evaluating the different ethical imperatives advanced by those who attempt to rebuild war-torn societies. In our view, such a mapping exercise is a necessary step in any attempt to build a normative defence of postconflict reconstruction. The article proceeds in two stages: first, we present the various rationales for reconstruction offered by international actors, and systematize these into four different “logics”; second, we evaluate the implications and normative dilemmas generated by each logic.
Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World
The international community has struggled without much success to remedy the problem of failed states. Meanwhile, 40 or 50 countries around the world — from Sudan and Somalia to Kosovo and East Timor — remain in a crisis of governance. In this impressive book, Ghani, a former Afghan finance minister, and Lockhart, who has worked at the World Bank and the United Nations, assess the missteps and offer a new framework for coordinated action. They argue that international responses have failed because they have been piecemeal and have proceeded with little understanding of what states need to do in the modern world system to connect citizens to global flows. They advocate a “citizen-based approach.” State-building strategies would be organized around a “double compact”: between country leaders and the international community, on the one hand, and country leaders and citizens, on the other. The book also proposes methods for the generation of comparative data on state capacity — a “sovereignty index” — to be annually reported to the UN and the World Bank. Ultimately, this study offers a surprisingly optimistic vision. The fact that so many disadvantaged countries have made dramatic economic and political transitions over the last decade suggests that developmental pathways do exist — if only the lessons and practical knowledge of local circumstances can be matched to coordinated and sustained international efforts. The authors provide a practical framework for achieving these ends, supporting their case with first-hand examples of struggling territories such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo and Nepal as well as the world’s success stories–Singapore, Ireland, and even the American South.
Africa’s Development Beyond Aid: Getting Out of the Box
Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
Fukuyama brings together esteemed academics, political analysts, and practitioners to reflect on the U.S. experience with nation-building, from its historical underpinnings to its modern-day consequences. The United States has sought on repeated occasions to reconstruct states damaged by conflict, from Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War to Japan and Germany after World War II, to the ongoing rebuilding of Iraq. Despite this rich experience, there has been remarkably little systematic effort to learn lessons on how outside powers can assist in the building of strong and self-sufficient states in post-conflict situations. The contributors dissect mistakes, false starts, and lessons learned from the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq within the broader context of reconstruction efforts in other parts of the world, including Latin America, Japan, and the Balkans. Examining the contrasting models in Afghanistan and Iraq, they highlight the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as a cautionary example of inadequate planning.
Civil Society in Conflict Transformation: Ambivalence, Potentials and Challenges
Recovering From Violent Conflict: Regeneration and (Re-)Integration as Elements of Peacebuilding
In the last decade of the 20th century 43 countries have been considered as countries emerging from violent conflicts. Most of them were affected by intra-state wars and civil wars, and most of these belong to the category of the poorest (“less developed countries” according to criteria of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). An extraordinary high percentage was located in the African continent. The international community pledged more than one hundred billion dollars in aid to war-torn societies. These were designed to build up infrastructure, to persuade formerly warring parties to resolve conflict in a non-violent way and to contribute to economic development and participatory governance. Experts and political actors have stated that international agencies often used too narrowminded a concept in the past, reducing their activities to technical reconstruction after the end of violent conflict. A broader conceptualisation is needed to support the difficult long-term process of transformation from war to peace. This chapter gives an overview of the variety of tasks required to make post-conflict recovery successful in the sense of preventing further conflict and some tensions and dilemmas are identified and discussed.
The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq
This report analyzes the political dimensions of Iraqi displacement, beginning with a short description of the present situation and its historical background. It then analyzes the implications of the large-scale internal displacement on the security of both Iraq and its two neighbors who host the largest number of Iraqi refugees. A discussion of U.S. policy, European concerns, and the response of the United Nations is followed by analysis of returns of the displaced, with particular attention to the burning issue of property compensation. The study concludes with recommendations to the U.S. government and to the broader international community.
A Bottom-Up Approach to Transformative Justice in Northern Ireland
This article explores community-based restorative justice projects run by political exprisoners and former combatants in Northern Ireland, initiatives which are dealing with everyday crime and conflict in local communities in a period of transition. It is argued that restorative justice can act as a facilitator, both for individuals within the community and between communities and the state, when violence-supporting norms are expected to be replaced by nonviolent approaches to conflict and its resolution. The article also argues for a greater role for criminological approaches to crime, punishment and justice within transitions, recognising the strengths of criminology to address underlying causes of continued violence in postconflict settings. In particular, this article investigates attempts by these initiatives to build bridges between historically estranged communities and the police, and argues for the possibility of restorative justice becoming a catalyst for transformative justice during times of rapid social change.
The Liberal Peace Is Neither: Peacebuilding, State building and the Reproduction of Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
This article discusses the attempts at state-building by international actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It uses this experience to discuss some of the obstacles and dilemmas facing external state-builders. I argue that attempts at state-building by foreign actors in the DRC have not had much success, and point out four reasons. First, insufficient resources have been provided. Second, donors have used a standardized approach that does not take local context sufficiently into account. Third, domestic power relations have been such that state-building has not served the interests of key actors. Finally, the policy has been based on a fixed, non-negotiable conception of what the state eventually should look like. Although all these factors have contributed to the failure to create a liberal state in the DRC, the last two appear to be more fundamental than the first and the second.
Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States
Undercutting the Political Economy of Conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Transnational Justice Approach to Prosecuting Systemic Economic Crimes
While transitional justice scholarship has begun to recognize that engaging with the economic forces driving particular conflicts is a crucial part of dealing with the legacy of those conflicts, the international community has been slow to implement mechanisms to address those forces in any meaningful way in postconflict societies. One notable exception, however, has been the section of the internationalized state court in Bosnia and Herzegovina dedicated to prosecuting the most serious cases of organized crime, economic crime and corruption. Although generally overlooked by the transitional justice community, the model it established for a hybrid tribunal targeting systemic economic crimes is ideal for tackling many of the forces that contribute to continued instability in Bosnia and other post-conflict societies. Through the framework of recent scholarship on the political economy of conflict, this Note first identifies several economic structures that have promoted and facilitated conflict in Bosnia, including pervasive corruption and an extensive shadow economy tied to organized crime. The Note then explains how the internationalized court was designed to effectively target those phenomena in the post-combat economy. Finally, the Note argues that international involvement in prosecuting economic crimes can be justified under international law where narrowly tailored to address the systemic crimes underpinning conflict.
Surviving the Peace: Challenges of War-to-Peace Transitions for Civil Society Organisations
This report seeks to address the question “what happens to protagonists for change once that change has been achieved?” by analysing the transformations of peace/human rights civil society organisations (CSOs) during peace processes and democratic transitions in South Africa and Guatemala. Section one clarifies the analytical ground by exploring the conceptual roots, definitional boundaries, organisational and functional characteristics, and normative understanding of CSOs, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Section two adopts a more dynamic approach, assessing the organisational and functional shifts undergone by CSOs during and in the aftermath of peace processes and democratic transitions. This literature survey is then followed, in sections three and four, by two empirical studies on CSOs in South Africa and Guatemala, where interviews were collected in April 2007 with current and former members of relevant organisations. The conclusion, finally, draws a brief comparative summary of the main findings in both case studies, and derives a few conceptual and practical implications for the research, CSO and international donor communities.
Nation-Building Unraveled? Aid, Peace and Justice in Afghanistan
Using Afghanistan as a pivot, this book illustrates how emerging international “ordering” practices affect the role and policy of international actors such as United Nations agencies and international NGOs, their interaction with national authorities and local communities, and their ability to generate just and social outcomes.
Local Perceptions of Assistance to Afghanistan
Local perceptions of aid in crisis contexts is an under-researched area. This article, which is based on extensive interviewing of affected individuals and communities in Afghanistan, sets out key issues affecting the provision of international assistance and in particular analyses the ‘perceptions gap’ between outsiders and local communities and its implications for the aid community. Humanitarian action is seen by local people as part of a ‘northern enterprise.’ Even if the universalist values of the enterprise do not clash with local views of the world, the baggage, modus operandi, technique and personal behaviour of aid workers often do. Suggestions on how this gap could be addressed are also put forward.
Iraq: The Contradictions of Exogenous State-building in Historical Perspective
This article compares Britain’s failed attempt at building a stable, liberal state in Iraq from 1914 to 1932 with the USA’s struggle to stabilise the country after regime change in April 2003. It sets out a template for endogenous state-building based on the evolution of the European state system. It then compares this to exogenous extra-European state-building after both World War I and the Cold War. It focuses on three key stages: the imposition of order, the move from coercive to administrative capacity and finally the evolution of a collective civic identity linked to the state. It is this process against which Iraqi state-building by the British in the 1920s and by the USA from 2003 onwards can be accurately judged to have failed. For both the British and American occupations, troop numbers were one of the central problems undermining the stability of Iraq. British colonial officials never had the resources to transform the despotic power deployed by the state into sustainable infrastructural capacity. Instead they relied on hakumat al tayarra (government by aircraft). The dependence upon air power led to the neglect of other state institutions, stunting the growth of infrastructural power and hence state legitimacy. The US occupation has never managed to impose despotic power, having failed to obtain a monopoly over the collective deployment of violence. Instead it has relied on ‘indigenisation,’ the hurried creation of a new Iraqi army. The result has been the security vacuum that dominates the south and centre of the country. The article concludes by suggesting that unsuccessful military occupations usually end after a change of government in the intervening country. This was the case for the British in May 1929 and may well be the case for the USA after the next presidential election in 2008.
Towards a More Professional Approach to Nation-building
This article describes the slow and uneven movement towards a more professional approach to nation-building. The post-cold war era is replete with instances where the United States found itself burdened by the challenges of nation-building in the wake of a successful military operation. American performance in the conduct of such missions improved slowly through the 1990s, but this trend was not sustained into the decade beginning in 2000. The article outlines what a more professional approach to peacebuilding would require, highlighting a hierarchy of tasks that flow in the following order: security, humanitarian relief, governance, economic stabilization, democratization and development.
Preparing for Nation-building
Preparation for nation-building requires that responsible political leaders consult both with regional and functional experts, those who know why the society in question descended into conflict and those who know from experience elsewhere how to put such societies back together. Goals must be established which transcend the most immediate and normally negative purposes of the inter vention, e.g. halting conflict, stopping genocide or turning back aggression. These positive goals must be commensurate with the scale of military manpower and economic assistance likely to be committed. The larger the social transformation envisaged, the greater the resistance likely to be encountered. The most common cause for the failure of nation-building endeavours is a mismatch between objectives and commitments.
Wartime Sexual Violence: Assessing a Human Security Response to War-Affected Girls in Sierra Leone
Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding: Moving from Violence to Sustainable Peace
This book seeks to examine the causes of escalation and de-escalation in intrastate conflicts. Specifically, the volume seeks to map the processes and dynamics that lead groups challenging existing power structures to engage in violent struggle; the processes and dynamics that contribute to the de-escalation of violent struggle and the participation of challengers in peaceful political activities; and the processes and dynamics that sustain and nurture this transformation. By integrating the latest ideas with richly presented case studies, this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the forces that lead to moderation and constructive engagement in the context of violent, intrastate conflicts.
Development Co-operation and Conflict in Sierra Leone
This article examines the role of development co-operation in the 1991-2001 civil war in Sierra Leone. British military intervention, sanctions against Liberia for supporting the rebellion and the deployment of UN peacekeepers were key, albeit belated, initiatives that helped resolve the conflict. The lessons are that, first, domestic forces alone may be incapable of resolving large-scale violent conflicts in Africa. Second, conflict tends to spread from one country to another, calling for strong regional conflict resolution mechanisms and deeper regional integration to promote peace. Third, donor policies need to address the root causes of state fragility, especially the political and security dimensions, which they tend to ignore. Fourth, a critical analysis is required to determine circumstances in which elections could undermine peace: the conduct of donor-supported elections under an unpopular military government in Sierra Leone culminated in an escalation of the conflict. Finally, a united international community is crucial to resolve a complex conflict and it should be accompanied by strong and timely measures informed by a full understanding of local conditions.
Challenges to Peace: Conflict Resolution in the Great Lakes Region of Africa
Efforts to bring peace and reconstruction to the Central African region have been fashioned by contemporary conflict resolution models that have a standard formula of peace negotiations, with a trajectory of ceasefire agreements, transitional governments, demilitarization, constitutional reform and ending with democratic elections. Local dynamics and the historical and multifaceted nature of the conflicts are rarely addressed. Furthermore, participants in the peace process are restricted to representatives of political parties, the state and rebel movements, to the exclusion of civil society. Using as examples the conflicts and peace processes in three Great Lakes countries-Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo-the paper contends that contemporary global frameworks for peacemaking and peace building that rest on the acceptance of neoliberal political and economic models cannot lay the foundations for the conditions necessary for sustainable peace. This necessitates the utilisation of a more inclusive concept of peace, the starting point of which has to be the emancipation of African humanity.
Peacebuilding in the Pacific: The Australian Military Experience
The Role of Women in Stabilization and Reconstruction
Introduction: Rethinking the Relationship Between Peace Operations and Organized Crime
Peace operations are increasingly on the front line in the international community’s fight against organized crime. In venues as diverse as Afghanistan, the Balkans, Haiti, Iraq and West Africa, multiple international interventions have struggled with a variety of protection rackets, corruption and trafficking in a wide range of licit and illicit commodities: guns, drugs, oil, cars, diamonds, timber – and human beings. This introduction to the Special Issue on peace operations and organized crime discusses the concept of ‘organized crime’ as a label, and suggests ways of differentiating organized crime groups on the basis of their social governance roles, resources and strategies towards authority structures – such as peace operations.
The Limits of Retributive Justice: Findings of an Empirical Study in Bosnia and Hercegovina
From Negative to Positive Peace: The Case of Bosnia and Hercegovina
This article, which is grounded in qualitative interview data, takes as its starting point the contention that war crimes tribunals can aid reconciliation, and more specifically the claim made by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that its work is contributing to reconciliation in the region. Focusing on Bosnia and Hercegovina (BiH), the first question that it seeks to answer is not whether the ICTY has positively impacted on reconciliation, but rather the more immediate question of whether reconciliation actually exists in BiH. Defining reconciliation as the restoration and repair of relationships and as the acknowledgement of war crimes and responsibility, it argues that there is no reconciliation in present-day BiH. There is only negative peace an absence of conflict. The second crucial question that this article explores, therefore, is whether and how this negative peace can be developed into positive peace characterized by reconciliation. Emphasizing two critical obstacles to any reconciliation process in BiH, namely insufficient contact between interethnic groups and the existence of denial and competing truths, it identifies three important measures to address these. These are the abolition of the divisive ‘two schools under one roof’ education system, the replacement of the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) with a constitutional structure that encourages interethnic contact rather than separation, and the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC). On the issue of whether the ICTY can itself contribute to reconciliation in BiH, the article concludes that while retributive justice is an important mechanism in postconflict societies, the difficulties and challenges that the ICTY faces in BiH underscore the limitations of criminal trials and the imperative of a multifaceted approach to reconciliation combining different transitional justice elements.
Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A Lexicon
Post-Conflict Peacebuilding comes at a critical time for post-conflict peacebuilding. Its rapid move towards the top of the international political agenda has been accompanied by added scrutiny, as the international community seeks to meet the multi-dimensional challenges of building a just and sustainable peace in societies ravaged by war. Beyond the strictly operational dimension, there is considerable ambiguity in the concepts and terminology used to discuss post-conflict peacebuilding. This ambiguity undermines efforts to agree on common understandings of how peace can be most effectively ‘built’, thereby impeding swift, coherent action. Accordingly, this lexicon aims to clarify and illuminate the multiple facets of post-conflict peacebuilding, by presenting its major themes and trends from an analytical perspective. To this end, the book opens with a general introduction on the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding, followed by twenty-six essays on its key elements (including capacity-building, conflict transformation, reconciliation, recovery, rule of law, security sector reform, and transitional justice). Written by international experts from a range of disciplines, including political science and international relations, international law, economics, and sociology, these essays cover the whole spectrum of post-conflict peacebuilding. In reflecting a diversity of perspectives the lexicon sheds light on many different challenges associated with post-conflict peacebuilding. For each key concept a generic definition is proposed, which is then expanded through discussion of three main areas: the meaning and origin of the concept; its content and essential components; and its means of implementation, including lessons learned from past practice.
Race, Culture and Civil Society: Peacebuilding Discourse and the Understanding of Difference
This article seeks to draw out an understanding of the role of narratives and discourses of race, culture and civil society within international peacebuilding, through the location of the discourse of culture as a transitional stage between interventionist and regulatory discourses of race and civil society. It particularly seeks to highlight that the discourse of culture is key to understanding the peacebuilding discourses of intervention and regulation that have developed in the last decade. This is all the more important as the discourse of culture has in many respects been displaced by the discourse of civil society. In drawing out the links between the framings of race, culture and civil society, the article seeks to explain how the discourse of civil society intervention has been reinvented on the basis of the moral divide established and made coherent through the discourse of culture, and how the discourse of civil society contains a strong apologetic content, capable of legitimizing and explaining the persistence of social and economic problems or political fragmentation while simultaneously offering potential policy programmes on the basis of highly ambitious goals of social transformation.
How Liberal Peacebuilding May be Failing Sierra Leone
The concept of security is the driver for peacebuilding and development, as well as social and political change in post-conflict countries. A review and analysis of three key government documents indicates that, in Sierra Leone, securitisation discourse is embedded in both the political economy discourse of the state and in the popular imagination. The Security Sector Review equates security and peace while the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper sees security as a driver for change. The 2006 Work Plan of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security illustrates the extent to which the work of ministries is security-based. Sierra Leone’s political economy of post-conflict peacebuilding favours macro-economic security that is to trickle down into social and political peace. Discourse analysis shows that, framed within security parameters, post-conflict peacebuilding is meant to have an effect of ‘trickle-down peace’ that in effect constrains transformation with the potential for facilitating conditions for a return to conflict.
(Dis)integration, Incoherence and Complexity in UN Post-conflict Interventions
The UN has developed a series of internal ‘integration reforms’ that aim to increase its capacity to integrate its post-conflict efforts through a single coherent strategy, and ultimately to support sustainable war-to-peace transitions. This article argues that these reforms could be redesigned to take into account the causes of the (dis)integration, incoherence and complexity of UN post-conflict interventions, to make them more comprehensive and more realistic. While some degree of both strategic coherence and operational integration may be necessary to improve the effectiveness of UN post-conflict interventions, these are inadequate without an increased conflict-sensitivity in each UN entity involved in post-conflict interventions. For the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts, the parts must make a significant contribution to the whole.
American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction: Comparing Japan and Iraq
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, President G.W. Bush argued that if setting up democracy in Japan and Germany after WW II was successful, then it should also be successful in Iraq. This book provides a detailed comparison of the reconstruction of Japan from 1945 to 1952 with the current reconstruction of Iraq, evaluating the key factors affecting the success or failure of such projects. The book seeks to understand why American officials believed that extensive social reengineering aiming at seeding democracy and economic development is replicable, through identifying factors explaining the outcome of U.S.-led post-conflict reconstruction projects. The analysis reveals that in addition to the effective use of material resources of power, the outcome of reconstruction projects depends on a variety of other intertwined factors, and Bridoux provides a new analytical framework relying on a Gramscian concept of power to develop a greater understanding of these factors, and the ultimate success or failure of these reconstruction projects.
The Role of Private Sector Actors in Post-conflict Recovery
Countries need active, equitable and profitable private sectors if they are to graduate from conflict and from post-conflict aid-dependency. However, in the immediate aftermath of war, both domestic and international investment tends to be slower than might be hoped. Moreover, there are complex inter-linkages between economic development and conflict: in the worst case private sector activity may exacerbate the risks of conflict rather than alleviating them. This paper calls for a nuanced view of the many different kinds of private sector actor, including their approaches to risk, the ways that they interact and their various contributions to economic recovery. Policy-makers need to understand how different kinds of companies assess risk and opportunity. At the same time, business leaders should take a broader view of risk. Rather than focusing solely on commercial risks and external threats such as terrorism, they also need to take greater account of their own impacts on host societies. Meanwhile, all parties require a hard sense of realism. Skilful economic initiatives can support-but not replace-the political process.
Agriculture, Poverty, and Postwar Reconstruction: Micro-Level Evidence from Northern Mozambique
This article analyzes the effects of household-level activity choices on farm household welfare in a developing country affected by mass violent armed conflict. The study uses household survey data from postwar Nampula and Cabo Delgado provinces in Northern Mozambique capturing many activity choices, including market participation, risk and activity diversification, cotton adoption, and social exchange, as well as income-and consumption-based measures of welfare. The study advances the literature on postwar coping and rural poverty at the micro level by estimating potentially endogenous activity choices and welfare outcomes using instrumental variables. The study finds that increasing the cultivated area and on-farm activities enhances postwar welfare of smallholders exploiting wartime survival techniques. Subsistence farming reduces income but does not affect consumption, while market participation has positive welfare effects. This suggests that postwar reconstruction policies should encourage the wartime crop mix but offer enhanced marketing opportunities for such crops. Cotton adoption, which was promoted by aid agencies in the postwar period, reduces household welfare per capita by between 16% and 31%, controlling for market access. This contradicts previous studies of postwar rural development that did not control for the war-related endogeneity. Hence, addressing the potential endogeneity of activity choices is important because the standard regression approach may lead to biased estimates of the impact of activity choice on welfare, which in turn may lead to biased policy advice. The article discusses and contextualizes these findings, concluding with a discussion of suitable pro-poor reconstruction policies for national governments and donors.
Building Peace and Political Community in Hybrid Political Orders
Peacebuilding supports the emergence of stable political community in states and regions struggling with a legacy of violent conflict. This then raises the question of what political community might mean in the state in question. International peacebuilding operations have answered that question in terms of the promotion of conventional state-building along the lines of the Western Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) model as the best path out of post-conflict state fragility and towards sustainable development and peace. This article argues for peacebuilding beyond notions of the liberal peace and constructions of the liberal state. Rather than thinking in terms of fragile states, it might be theoretically and practically more fruitful to think in terms of hybrid political orders, drawing on the resilience embedded in the communal life of societies within so-called fragile regions of the global South. This re-conceptualization opens new options for peacebuilding and for state formation as building political community.
Security Sector Reform in Liberia: An Uneven Partnership without Local Ownership
The security situation in Liberia is currently quite good, and at a glance the peacebuilding process seems to be moving ahead. However, the root causes of the conflict have not been adequately addressed, but have in fact become more interlinked in the aftermath of the civil war. Instead of addressing local perceptions of insecurity the international community made plans for Liberia without considering the context in which reforms were to be implemented. The peace in post-conflict Liberia is therefore still fragile and the international presence is regarded as what secures the peace. Still, the UN is supposed to start its full withdrawal in 2010, indicating that the international community will leave the country without addressing the root causes of conflict.
Making Plans for Liberia – A Trusteeship Approach to Good Governance?
Since the end of the Liberian civil war in August 2003 the international community has been “making plans” for Liberia. However, it rarely questioned whether these plans were in accordance with the political and economic logic of the peace agreement and the subsequent transitional government. The consequence was that corruption continued and a much more intrusive economic management plan was established. The Governance and Economic Management Assistance Programme is supposed to combat corruption and facilitate good governance, but it also limits the range of policy options for the new democratically elected government of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The irony is that the best and most legitimate government that Liberia has ever had is subject to stronger external control than any of its predecessors. The probability that this scheme will remain sustainable when donor interest shifts elsewhere is low, and what is needed is a more pragmatic approach that draws a wider segment of Liberian society into anti-corruption management and creates checks and balances between them.
Introduction: The Limits of Statebuilding and the Analysis of State-Formation
The “international community” is not the only actor engaged in statebuilding processes; contemporaneously with external intervention, at national and local levels of non-Western societies other actors are also engaged in struggles to establish their own visions of a state. The results are ambiguous: the states built tend to be hybrid, combining formal modern state facades with informal ways of functioning. This essay introduces the Special Issue by outlining the importance of the analysis of the dynamics of state-formation: the deformation that statebuilding undergoes in the process of its implementation. This framework can provide new insights into the limits of statebuilding by highlighting how the negotiation processes accompanying any attempt at statebuilding are shaped to a great extent by non-Western states’ and societies’ specific embeddedness in global structures. These states are currently subject to deepening dynamics of internationalization and informalization which, despite a growing formal convergence of state institutions with Western models, structurally limit the probabilities of ensuing liberal-democratic state-formation.
The Future of the Mujahideen: Legitimacy, Legacy and Demobilization in Post-Bonn Afghanistan
Contemporary Afghan politics is marked by a debate over the “mujahideen.” This contest involves the mythologizing, demythologizing and appropriation of the term by a wide variety of actors, from warlords, tribal combatants, the Taliban and Anti-Coalition Forces to rights activists and journalists. This struggle is a competition for legitimacy over the “right to rule” and the “right to conduct violence”; and it is critical to understanding the dilemmas of statebuilding in Afghanistan. Through such an examination, policy lessons are acquired concerning the role of the Afghan government and members of the international community in confronting armed groups.
Afghan Women and the Democratic Reconstruction of Afghanistan. Findings and Interviews from a Journalist’s Field Trip
Since the end of the Taliban regime the question has arisen how Afghan women, after years of exclusion from political life, can be helped to get involved in the democratic reconstruction of their country.This report attempts to make suggestions and to point out obstacles to this by dealing with various areas of social life in Afghanistan relevant to women. It is based on a field trip to Afghanistan and the Pakistani border town of Peshawar in February and March 2002 as well as numerous conversations with exiled Afghan women, mainly in Germany. Around 80 Afghan women were interviewed in all.
The Evolution of Post-conflict Recovery
Recent history has been marked by the rise of post-conflict intervention as a component of military and foreign policy, as a form of humanitarianism and as a challenge to Westphalian notions of state sovereignty. The terms of debate, the history of the discipline and the evolution of scholarship and practice remain relatively under-examined, particularly in the post-9/11 period in which post-conflict recovery came to be construed as an extension of conflict and as a domain concerned principally with the national security of predominantly Western countries. The subsequent politicisation of post-conflict recovery and entry of post-conflict assistance into the political economy of conflict have fundamentally changed policy making and practice. The authors argue that research into post-conflict recovery, which must become increasingly rigorous and theoretically grounded, should detach itself from the myriad political agendas which have sought to impose themselves upon war-torn countries. The de-politicisation of post-conflict recovery, the authors conclude, may benefit from an increasingly structured “architecture of integrated, directed recovery.”
State Building and Post-Conflict Demilitarization: Military Downsizing in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Access to Justice in a Post-conflict State: Donor-supported Multidimensional Peacekeeping in Southern Sudan
Post-conflict governments and donors prioritize rebuilding the justice sector through state delivered rule of law and access to justice programmes. Misunderstanding the nature of the post-colonial state, such programmes make questionable assumptions. First, that a lack of access to state justice is the same as an overall absence of justice. Second, that the state system that is being built is what people want. Third, that the state system of justice that is being built could provide a sustainable nationwide network in the foreseeable future. Based on interviews conducted with policy designers, practitioners, local people and chiefs at three sites in southern Sudan 2007, this article calls for a rethinking of donor-supported justice and police development and advocates an approach that recognizes the importance of local justice.
On Living with Negative Peace and a Half-Built State: Gender and Human Rights
This article examines the double standards associated with a precarious international peacebuilding strategy in Afghanistan based on impunity and half-truths rather than accountability and transitional justice. Many international organizations have turned a blind eye to past and current human rights atrocities through forms of rationalization based on an empowerment of cultural differences, relativization of progress and “policy reductionism.” Consequently, and in the absence of consistently applied rights instruments, societal divisions along gender, ethnic and other lines have intensified Afghanistan’s culture of intolerance to human rights, thereby violating the very principles the international community purports to uphold. Drawing on first-hand experiences, personal interviews and a sober analysis of trends, this article challenges some of the conventional assumptions held about the perception and knowledge of human rights among Afghans. It concludes by identifying possible areas of future study to better understand both the prospects for transitional justice and how ordinary Afghans continue to cope with widespread injustice and inequality.
The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding
Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International Intervention
Why do international peacebuilders fail to address the local causes of peace process failures? The existing explanations of peacebuilding failures, which focus on constraints and vested interests, do not explain the international neglect of local conflict. In this article, I show how discursive frames shape international intervention and preclude international action on local violence. Drawing on more than 330 interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and document analysis, I develop a case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s transition from war to peace and democracy (2003-2006) I demonstrate that local agendas played a decisive role in sustaining local, national, and regional violence. However, a postconflict peacebuilding frame shaped the international understanding of violence and intervention in such a way that local conflict resolution appeared irrelevant and illegitimate. This frame included four key elements: international actors labeled the Congo a “postconflict” situation; they believed that violence there was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime; they conceptualized international intervention as exclusively concerned with the national and international realms; and they saw holding elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as a workable, appropriate, and effective tool for state- and peacebuilding. This frame authorized and justified specific practices and policies while precluding others, notably local conflict resolution, ultimately dooming the peacebuilding efforts. In conclusion, I contend that analyzing discursive frames is a fruitful approach to the puzzle of international peacebuilding failures beyond the Congo.
Views on the Ground: The Local Perception of International Criminal Tribunals in the Former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone
Civil-Military Cooperation in Post-Conflict Operations
Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) is the relationship between militaries and humanitarians. Largely conducted in post-conflict environments, CIMIC has become a key characteristic of military operations in the twenty-first century. However, the field is mostly understood through stereotype rather than clear, comprehensive analysis. The range and scope of activities which fall under the wider rubric of CIMIC is huge, as are the number of differing approaches, across situations and national armed forces. This book demonstrates the wide variety of national approaches to CIMIC activities, introducing some theoretical and ethical considerations into a field that has largely been bereft of this type of debate. Containing several case studies of recent CIMIC (in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq) along with theoretical analyses, it will assist scholars, practitioners, and decision-makers become more aware of the ‘state of the art’ in this field.
Civilizing Peacebuilding: Transitional Justice, Civil Society and the Liberal Paradigm
Symbiosis Between Peace Operations and Illicit Business in Bosnia
The illicit business side of armed conflict can involve clandestine exports to fund combatants, reselling looted goods on the black market, smuggling weapons and other supplies, sanctions evasion and embargo busting, theft and diversion of humanitarian aid, and covert ‘trading with the enemy’. How does such illicit business affect peace operations in conflict zones, and how do such peace operations, in turn, affect illicit business? This article provides a preliminary answer in the case of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Instead of reinforcing the common tendency simply to ignore or condemn the illicit business side of conflict and its relationship to peace operations, it stresses the more ambiguous and double-edged nature of the issue. Peace operations in Bosnia contributed to illicit business activities, but in some respects illicit business also contributed to a number of peace operation goals, including helping to sustain the civilian population and even bringing an end to the conflict. The end result was actually more of a symbiotic rather than exclusively predatory relationship between peace operations and illicit business activities.
Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War
After the ceasefire, a group of architects and planners from the American University of Beirut formed the Reconstruction Unit to help in the recovery process and in rebuilding the lives of those affected by the 2006 war in Lebanon. Here, a series of case studies documenting the work of the Unit discusses the lessons to be learned from the experiences of Lebanon after the July War, and suggests how those lessons might be applied elsewhere. The cases are diverse in terms of scale, type of intervention, methods, and approaches to the situation on the ground. Critical issues such as community participation, heritage protection, damage assessment and compensation policies, the role of the state, and capacity building are explored and the success and failures assessed.
Learning to Live Together: Transitional Justice and Intergroup Reconciliation in Northern Ireland
Managing Armed Conflicts in the 21st Century
The unification of Germany extended the economic and political system of the west to the east. The system transfer led to a “problematic normalisation” as East Germans have tried to adjust to uncertainties they had never known: in employment, education and training, family life, immigration. A decade on, the book examines what kind of civil society has emerged, how East Germans fared in th social transformation and how processes of transformation in the new Germany relate to European policy agendas for analysing social transformation and its two key tenants: the transformation process affecting advanced industrial societies generally, and the process of post-communist transformation pertaining to Germany. The book addresses this “dual transformation”, firstly, by placing the developments in eastern Germany in a comparative European perspective and, subsequently, by considering in key areas of east German society and through personal responses, to what extent state-socialist legacies continue to matter.