Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding

Roger Mac Ginty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135082123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new Routledge Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the meanings and uses of the term 'peacebuilding', and presents cutting-edge debates on the practices conducted in the name of peacebuilding.

The term 'peacebuilding' has had remarkable staying power. Other terms, such as 'conflict resolution' have waned in popularity, while the acceptance and use of the term 'peacebuilding' has grown to the extent that it is the hegemonic and over-arching term for many forms of mediation, reconciliation and strategies to induce peace. Despite this, however, it is rarely defined and often used to mean different things to different audiences.

Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding aims to be a one-stop comprehensive resource on the literature and practices of contemporary peacebuilding. The book is organised into six key sections:

• Section 1: Reading peacebuilding
• Section 2: Approaches and cross-cutting themes
• Section 3: Disciplinary approaches to peacebuilding
• Section 4: Violence and security
• Section 5: Everyday living and peacebuilding
• Section 6: The infrastructure of peacebuilding

This new Handbook will be essential reading for students of peacebuilding, mediation and post-conflict reconstruction, and of great interest to students of statebuilding, intervention, civil wars, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

PART I

Reading peacebuilding

1
THE PROBLEM-SOLVING AND CRITICAL PARADIGMS

Michael Pugh

Introduction

The literature on peacebuilding is rich and extensive, a sign that the issue has entered the mainstream of debates on global security. In addition to in-house and think-tank briefing papers for practitioners and policymakers, academic studies have offered major insights into the practices of peacebuilding. When I first began identifying the issue in the early 1990s there were hardly any scholarly articles, let alone books, on the subject. Now my shelves are groaning with the weight of books and reports on peacebuilding. There are many ways of cutting this literature cake: case studies; thematic issues such as democratization, security sector reform and conflict resolution; and policy prescriptions. This study offers another categorization. It suggests that two broad categories of thinking about peacebuilding can be applied: problem-solving and paradigm (or foundational) critique. It is probably true to say that practitioners and policy makers are almost exclusively concerned with problem-solving, that is to say, how to make the existing systems of peacebuilding work more effectively. Academics on the other hand are more divided, and individuals often engage in thinking about both system effectiveness and the foundations on which the system is based. Foundational critique usually means questioning the assumptions that lie behind the practice of peacebuilding and the framework of ideas and implementations that make up the paradigm within which people think and act. In other words a foundational critique attempts to go beyond the limits of analysis established by hegemonic orthodoxies.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it demonstrates significant variation at the problem-solving level within the dominant peacebuilding paradigm, here identified as a ‘subparadigm’ of art of government and political economy known as neoliberalism. Second it contends that while a new focus on local ownership, ingenuity and sovereignty in war-torn societies may be replacing the concept of shared sovereignty between local and foreign peacebuilders given currency by Stephen Krasner (2005: 69–83), those in the peacebuilding industry, whether scholars, editors, policy advisers, decision makers or practitioners, neglect the import of limits on peacebuilding analysis. This contribution begins by considering the significance of foundational critique as distinguished from problem-solving. The middle section examines two discourses of problem-solving represented by the UN Secretary-General's report on Peacebuilding of 2009, and a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) commissioned report of 2008 on post-conflict economic recovery. The final section indicates the contours that mark off problem-solving from foundational critique.

The significance of critique

In a seminal essay on world order, Robert Cox (1999: 3–28) identified approaches to interpreting and coping with international relations that posited a binary and partly adversarial conceptualization of problem-solving and paradigm shifting. Perhaps a heuristic device, the classification nevertheless drew attention to a predominant mode of thinking and policy making associated with internationalism that lies in reinforcing conceptual frameworks. In the sphere of peacebuilding, refining ideas of intervention and rendering them more efficient represents a quest for perfection within defined limits. Indeed scholarly livelihoods depend in large measure on improving the status quo at the behest of political authorities — as advisers, contractors and subcontractors of research projects. Cox regarded this approach as problem-solving, which certainly allowed for critique of concepts and ways of doing things, but within a particular ideological framework. His alternative stipulated foundational critique with the promise of revolutionary emancipation. Depending on the nature of the critique, and Ken Booth (1997: 111) among others engaged in open, personal confession in this vein, it could lead to an emancipatory quest: emancipation from both orthodox knowledge framing and from the authority that comes from unchallenged power that often poses as ‘common sense’ or coping with ‘the real world’. Critique, then, required interrogation of authority, including the authority of hegemonic theories, for as Cox (1981: 128) contended, theory was always constructed for a purpose and in someone's interests. A former UK cabinet minister, Tony Benn (1998: col. 685), neatly supplied a trope of interrogation in a parliamentary debate on the EU: ‘what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you?’

The critical approach was only partly adversarial because it required an appreciation of immanence. That is to say, it required critics to assert a degree of autonomy that would enable them to seek free spaces, contradictions and resistances within existing orthodoxies and trends that might identify and facilitate emancipatory goals. For new worlds always contain residues of the old. Not that it is a simple matter to detect immanence in trends of hegemony and subservience — for example whether authorities trying to protect elite and corporate interests by controlling access to the internet will overcome resistance to this form of biopower. Historically, one can identify ‘revolutions’ associated with ideologies, technological innovation and cataclysmic events (such as the First World War). Innovation in communications since the advent of computer technology forged development in a host of spheres, including in thinking about, teaching and implementing ideas of peace and peacebuilding. Movements also affect thought and behaviour subtly over decades. For example, theories of political economy which, as Michel Foucault (2010: 131 ff) explains, include neoliberal economics from the 1930s in Freiberg, and which took root in post-Second World War West Germany, did not transform into a US variety and global status for another fifty years. Its defining problematic was how to model the exercise of political power on principles of the free market, projecting them on to the art of government and demanding state activity to protect and promote capital.¹ As this survey will show, the current institutional framework of peacekeeping and peacebuilding has been deeply affected by this particular move, sustained by the dispersal of business models into public service. Obviously not all shifts can be considered emancipatory when the political dynamics result in substituting one form of unquestioned authority by another. Nor, obviously, is it to imply that the upholders of liberalization themselves conform to its values, adhere to international law or practise meaningful democracy at home. That is why scholars in their exercise of autonomy properly engage in permanent critique.

At this point it is useful to consider the relationship between problem-solving and foundational critique. The argument here, evidenced by two examples of peacebuilding discourse, is that a disaggregation of problem-solving helps distinguish immanent emancipatory analysis from debates that reproduce and buttress a particular framework. Far from abandoning the relevance of foundational critique, such distinctions can help indicate where contours might be drawn between an imagined, constructed and perhaps reified problem-solving framework, with its internal varieties, and the contemplation of alternatives. One can begin by problematizing the notion of limits and contours. Where does framing begin and end, what intellectual and conceptual territory do paradigms cover, and can competing ideologies such as Marxism, Keynesian welfarism and Friedmanite neoliberalism co-exist? Given multiple interpretations of historical development, and the constant invention, destruction and reinvention of ideologies, how can the contours of a paradigm be firmly inscribed, if at all, or are they penetrable, pliable and transitory?

Three counterpoints can be made. First, the contours of any framework can be scripted as competitive, overlapping and coexisting in tension: represented as dotted lines through uncertain territory. This allows for coincidence of interest in emancipation and the detection of immanence, as well as limitations, that can strengthen rather than weaken core concepts in foundational critique. Second, capitalist cultures of political economy, a main concern here, may be fragmented, particularist and diverse, but they have a common root and purpose in using the state and international organizations to facilitate capital accumulation. Put bluntly, ‘transnational corporations can do whatever they please’ through corruption and denial of political control, as the US political system among others amply testifies (Mészáros, 2005: 374). Third, a framework may exhibit subaltern or dependent status as a subparadigm, one that incorporates agents and epistemic communities in a specific goal but which also conforms to a broader overarching conceptualization of how things should work. Thus an epistemic community of aid and relief institutions has constructed a concept of ‘build back better’ or ‘reconstruction plus’ to respond to wars and disasters. As evident in Haiti it has been actively promoted by the World Bank, UK government and international NGOs including Oxfam, World Vision and ActionAid. It represents a western view of poverty and underdevelopment in which, as Niomi Turley (2012: chapter 5) writes, ‘disasters do not simply “interrupt” development, but provide a new platform from which to create an “improved” society based on liberal social, economic and political principles, at the expense of traditional subsistence means of living or local efforts to recuperate’. In other words, it fits into the overarching neoliberal ideology that merges security and development; ‘romanticizes the local’ as victims or illiberal; builds hollow institutions; designs economic life to reproduce assertive capitalism; equates peace with statebuilding; and assumes that interveners have privileged knowledge about peace issues. The paradigm is mobilized with a package of transformation policies — an assemblage construed by academics as the ‘liberal peace’ (Richmond 2005; Duffield 2007).

Two problem-solving modes in peacebuilding debates

The analysis now turns to the two examples of problem-solving in peacebuilding, a framework deeply affected by the overarching neoliberalism of corporate governance and development. They have been chosen because they can also be said to represent extremes within the conceptualization of liberal peacebuilding. The first appeared in 2009 as a report under the imprimatur of the UN Secretary-General, Ban-ki Moon (UNSG 2009). The second appeared in 2008 commissioned by the UN Development Programme (UNDP).² They are taken in reverse chronological order because the UN report bears the hallmark of orthodoxy, reinforced by corporate governance, in contrast to the earlier UNDP-sponsored report, which had a more emancipatory and intersubjective approach. The latter arose from collaboration between the UNDP's Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery and a team of independent academic researchers. It carried the disclaimer that it did not represent the views of the UNDP or its member states. For ease of reference, however, they will be referred to here as the Secretary-General's Report and the UNDP Report respectively.

Te Secretary-General's Report on peacebuilding

The Secretary-General's Report certainly presented some rethinking about peacebuilding. Perhaps this indicated that academic critiques from the late 1990s had filtered into debates, for there were echoes of work by academic critics of the liberal peace, of liberal imperialism in peacebuilding and of the neglect of local agency.³ The Report announced the critical need for building local capacities and national ownership to provide motivation and accord legitimacy to peacebuilding processes. It affirmed that international assistance should mobilize existing capacities and not undermine them (§V: 49). It recognized that ‘[l]ocal and traditional authorities as well as civil society actors, including marginalized groups, have a role to play in bringing multiple voices to the table for early priority-setting and to broaden the sense of ownership around a common vision for the country's future’, including women ‘as victims of conflict and drivers of recovery’ (§III: 12). The Report noted the legacy of war economies, because ‘[f]ailure to restore State authority, particularly in remote border areas, may create new sources of threat or permit wartime practices of smuggling or illegal trade in natural resources to persist or even expand, undermining State revenue’ (§II: 8). Protecting livelihoods and generating employment were also mentioned. But all these were passing nods in the direction of an emancipatory repositioning. The thrust of the Report concerned interventionist efficiency.

Acknowledging a crisis in peacebuilding, the authors noted that it took several years for interested external agencies to align their strategies and provide sufficient resources to implement a common strategic vision. The host authorities, the UN and its international partners could have ‘a much greater and earlier collective impact if we agree on an early strategy with defined and sequenced priorities, and align action and resources behind that strategy’ (§I: 6). This necessitated preset institutional reconfiguration and central planning. It represents the first of four discernible contradictions in the liberal paradigm.

First, national ownership is incompatible with the centralizing, institutionalist approach that comprised two-thirds of the Report — the ‘Agenda for Action’ (§V). The Agenda undertook to: create coherence through ‘integrated missions’; enhance UN leadership through the Resident Co-ordinator with leadership teams ‘that can be rapidly supplemented by additional pre-identified expertise’; and to build ‘strategic partnerships’ with others such as NATO, the EU and the World Bank. Solidifying UN bureaucracy and institutionalization — from the Peacebuilding Commission to the expert planning teams at UN headquarters — reinforces integrated, centralized and unaccountable bases of finance, firepower, knowledge and industry well beyond the reach of those most affected. For inhabitants it offered a peace owned nationally (or at least by a compliant government), but determined with self-replicating certitude and increasing clout by others. The structure would be protected by:

the development of mutual accountability measures whereby my senior representative is both empowered and held accountable for his or her performance by the system and at the same time he or she ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• A Tribute to John Darby
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Reading peacebuilding
• Part II Approaches and cross-cutting themes
• Part III Disciplinary approaches to peacebuilding
• Part IV Violence and security
• Part V Everyday living and peacebuilding
• Part VI The infrastructure of peacebuilding
• Conclusion
• Index