Peacebuilding

From Concept to Commission

Robert Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415776431
• eBook ISBN: 9781136171390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The emergence of The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) in 2005 was the culmination of a long and contentious process. In this work Rob Jenkins provides a concise introduction that traces the origins and evolution of peacebuilding as a concept, the creation and functioning of the PBC as an institution, and the complicated relationship between these two processes.

Jenkins discusses how continued contestation over what exactly peacebuilding is, and how its objectives can most effectively be achieved, influenced the institutional design and de facto functioning of the PBC, its structure, mandate and origins. He then moves on to examine the peacebuilding architecture in action and analyses the role that the PBC has carved out for itself, reflecting on the future prospects for the organization.

The theory and practice of peacebuilding has assumed increasing importance over the last decade, and this work is essential reading for all students of conflict resolution, peace studies and international relations.

1 Peacebuilding

A contested and evolving concept

• What is peacebuilding?
• The ascendancy of peacebuilding and the illusion of convergence
• Assessing peacebuilding performance
• Conclusion

This chapter addresses three questions: What is peacebuilding? How and why has it become such a widely deployed concept? And what does existing research tell us about how, and under what conditions, peace has most effectively been built? The three questions are interrelated. How to go about building peace depends, in part, on how you define it. The ability of various actors to draw on the subtly different meanings of peacebuilding helps to account for the term’s popularity. To complicate matters further, the idea of peacebuilding continues to evolve, not least in response to actions taken by the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO). In this necessarily selective overview of a complex topic the discussion shifts between the empirical and the theoretical—between real-world events and how they are interpreted, classified, and packaged as lessons that practitioners are expected to learn.

What is peacebuilding?

For a seemingly self-evident concept, peacebuilding is used by both theorists and practitioners to convey a surprisingly wide variety of meanings. As Erin McCandless and Vanessa Wyeth note, post-conflict countries face not only many practical obstacles, but also “problems caused by confused and contested understandings of what it means to build peace in the aftermath of war.”¹ This stems partly from the ambiguity of terms with which any attempt to build peace must reckon—security, development, the state, and indeed peace itself.

Peacebuilding has been subjected to “contested understandings” since the idea was first floated in the 1970s by one of the founders of modern peace studies, Johan Galtung.² Usage of the term peacebuilding in official and academic discourse highlights four key sources of variation in meaning. These correspond to the questions of when, what, how, and who—that is, the period during which peacebuilding takes place, the type of peace sought, the methods employed to attain it, and the key actors in the peacebuilding enterprise.

Differentiation from cognate concepts

These dimensions of difference have been evident as far back as the first definitive statement on peacebuilding, through which the idea entered the official lexicon. This was 1992’s An Agenda for Peace, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s reform manifesto. It referred to “post-conflict peacebuilding” as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.”³ Boutros-Ghali was reported to have first uttered the words at 30,000 feet, en route to examine progress on various Central American peace accords, the terms of which implied large UN peace-implementation missions. This was months before of An Agenda for Peace was published.⁴ Boutros-Ghali’s broad conception—specifying neither the forms of “action” nor the types of “support”—became a feature of many subsequent approaches to peacebuilding.

This definition was refined in the “Supplement” to An Agenda for Peace, issued in 1995, which stressed that the development of national institutions and the capacity to operate them impartially were necessary for peace to withstand the disruptions that arise in the life of any society.⁵ An Agenda for Peace was influential beyond the UN system. It catalyzed efforts on many fronts to define what peacebuilding was. George F. Oliver notes that the December 1994 version of the US Army’s Field Manual “defined preventive diplomacy and peace building along the lines described in Agenda for Peace.”⁶

The new millennium occasioned two further seminal statements on peacebuilding. The first was contained in a pioneering quantitative study of the international community’s engagement in post-conflict reconstruction and development. Clearly influenced by the Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis defined peacebuilding on the basis of what they considered a realistic assessment of the challenges faced by all countries: “In plural societies, conflicts are inevitable. The aim of peacebuilding is to foster social, economic, and political institutions and attitudes that will prevent these conflicts from turning violent. In effect, peacebuilding is the front line of preventive action.”⁷

The second key statement was found in a joint report written by eminent experts tasked by Secretary-General Kofi Annan with assessing the performance of UN peace operations. The resulting Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations—what came to be known as the “Brahimi Report” (named for panel chair Lakhdar Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria and high-level UN envoy)—defined peacebuilding as “activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war.”⁸

In 2003 a further definition emerged when a consortium of donor governments formed a task force known as the Utstein Group, which assembled an analytical inventory of approaches to peacebuilding. The Utstein Group’s report defined peacebuilding as efforts to create “the structural conditions, attitudes and modes of political behavior that may permit peaceful, stable and ultimately prosperous social and economic development.”⁹ The focus here on “development” and the inclusion of “attitudes”—among both holders of state power and social actors more generally—reflects a significant strain of thinking about peacebuilding that seeks to move beyond objective conditions and institutional variables.

In 2008 Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens defined peacebuilding as “actions undertaken by international or national actors to institutionalize peace, understood as the absence of armed conflict and a modicum of participatory politics.”¹⁰ The oblique reference to democratic legitimacy echoes a number of other earlier conceptions, such as Eva Bertram’s 1995 study, which regarded peacebuilding as establishing “the political conditions for sustainable, democratic peace.”¹¹

Peacebuilding is frequently defined in relation to various cognate concepts. Peacemaking refers to diplomatic efforts (including UN-mediated peace talks) to resolve conflicts already underway or those that threaten to break beyond fixed bounds. This is distinct from peacekeeping, which involves the deployment of military forces to monitor a ceasefire or to oversee other agreements between parties to a conflict. Peace enforcement is a term sometimes employed to denote peacekeeping that involves more robust military engagement by international forces, in some cases undertaken without the consent of the parties to a conflict.

Peacebuilding can be situated amidst these concepts in a variety of ways. Like peacemaking, peacebuilding is about resolving conflicts, but generally attempts to do so either before they erupt into widespread violence, or before those that have erupted recur. Peacebuilding seeks, in other words, to prevent conflicts, and to do so systematically, rather than simply through negotiation, by addressing the “root causes” of conflict—economic, political, social, and psychological.

Like peacekeeping, certain varieties of peacebuilding occur after peace agreements have been concluded. Both peacekeeping and peacebuilding constitute forms of “peace implementation.” Peacebuilding, however, draws on a much wider range of instruments, beyond military action, including humanitarian relief, the restoration of public services, economic development initiatives, inter-ethnic reconciliation programs, transitional justice mechanisms, and so forth. Doing so requires wide-ranging expertise, and was thus for a time referred to as “multidimensional peacekeeping.” Madalene O’Donnell states that if peacekeeping concerns “the maintenance of a secure environment,” then peacebuilding encompasses “all other tasks undertaken to implement a peace accord or sustain peace.”¹² Cedric de Coning states that while peacekeeping is “about maintaining the status quo,” peacebuilding “has to do with managing change.”¹³

Peacebuilding can also be distinguished from state-building and nationbuilding, though in some quarters the three terms are used interchangeably. A 2008 policy paper commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) declared emphatically that “state building is not peacebuilding.” It conceded, however, that “state building is likely to be a central element of [efforts] … to institutionalise peace,” where the notion of institutionalizing peace is more or less equivalent to peacebuilding.¹⁴ Restoring state authority and creating effective government bureaucracies are seen as necessary but not sufficient preconditions for lasting peace. It is unclear whether peacebuilding or state-building is the more encompassing task. Peacebuilding, in a sense, is the larger set—state-building constituting a subset—because peace must continuously be built, even after state-building finishes. However, one could argue that state-building is a task beyond peacebuilding. Benjamin Reilly, for instance, claims that “the focus of most UN missions has shifted from one of pure peace-building to one of state rebuilding.”¹⁵ Like other analyses, the OECD paper also distinguishes state-building, and by extension the peacebuilding domain of which state-building is but one element, from “nation-building,” a term that can convey at least two distinct meanings. In American political discourse, nation-building sometimes refers to the array of external interventions—military and civilian—required to create political systems that will neither descend into internal violence nor be prone to external aggression.¹⁶ This usage, which corresponds to certain non-technical definitions of both peacebuilding and state-building, found utterance most famously in former US President George W. Bush’s statement, in a 2000 campaign debate against then-Vice President Al Gore, that America should not engage in nation-building.¹⁷

The second meaning of “nation-building” is of older vintage, and refers to conscious efforts by leaders of newly decolonized territories, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, to construct national identities in ethnically diverse polities. To create a sense of “Nigerian-ness” among the Hausa, the Igbo, the Yoruba, and the myriad other groups across that part of British West Africa was to engage in nation-building. The term “national integration” was invoked more frequently in places like India, and referred to the goal of inventing, or recapturing, a sense of nationhood that transcended language, region, religion and other social cleavages.¹⁸ Something like nation-building continues in many countries, whether this term is used or not. The construction of effective and accountable states may require this sort of nation-building to succeed.¹⁹ Analytically, however, this usage of nation-building is distinct from most contemporary conceptions of peacebuilding, and as a practical matter, the latter term has become predominant in discussions of international efforts to rebuild post-conflict countries.

The where, what, how, and who

As noted above, there are four key axes along which various conceptions of peacebuilding diverge: with regard to the time period under consideration (the when), the goals pursued (the what), the actions undertaken (the how), and the actors involved (the who). These are inter-related. How peacebuilding is pursued will inevitably affect who (i.e., which set of actors) plays a central role. When peacebuilding takes place will, likewise, have a bearing on what kind of peace is sought.

As we have seen, even the most basic effort to distinguish peacebuilding from similar terms raises the questions of time and purpose (the when and the what). The conventional sequence is: peacemaking (to reach agreement among the parties to a conflict), leading to peacekeeping (to ensure that commitments contained in peace accords are honored), followed by peacebuilding (to prevent the cycle of violence from repeating itself). However, throughout the nearly 20 years that the term has been in use, repeated attempts have been made to question the validity of such fixed ideas about when peacebuilding begins and ends.

Actions following the termination of armed conflict fall within the category of “post-conflict peacebuilding,” implying the existence of a separate category of “pre-conflict peacebuilding.” Call and Cousens invoke this distinction explicitly.²⁰ William Durch observes that “[c]onflict prevention comes in two flavors: long-term (or strategic) and shortterm (or crisis-related).”²¹ Post-conflict peacebuilding attempts to prevent the recurrence of violence, whereas pre-conflict peacebuilding seeks to forestall its initial outbreak. When the term peacebuilding is used without a temporal qualifier, it is sometimes difficult to discern which variety of peacebuilding is being discussed.

A 2001 study found that humanitarian actors were increasingly aware that how they conducted their work during conflicts had profound effects on later, post-emergency phases of international action. The authors concluded that “a broadening of humanitarian mandates to include developmental and peacebuilding objectives is necessary.”²² These actors wanted to expand their “downstream” mandate. A 2003 review of trends in peacebuilding found not only that the idea had “broadened” in scope, and “deepened” in terms of the degree to which external actors penetrated into local societies, but also that peacebuilding had “lengthened in terms of stages of conflict when it operates.”²³ In addition to extending further downstream along the timeline of reconstruction, peacebuilding had migrated “upstream” to include various forms of conflict prevention.²⁴ A 2005 attempt by the OECD to provide a working definition of peacebuilding for practitioners referred to “a broad range of measures implemented in the context of emerging, current or postconflict situations,” a conceptualization that further undercut the notion that peacebuilding could be precisely fixed in time.²⁵

In general, however, contemporary usage equates peacebuilding with actions undertaken in the aftermath of conflict. Even so, associating peacebuilding—explicitly or implicitly—with post-conflict activity does not specify the point in the post-conflict period when peacebuilding begins. Is it after a de facto cessation of hostilities? Or after the arrival of peacekeeping forces? Following the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement? Or after the departure of peacekeepers? A 2008 review of gaps in the international community’s approach to rebuilding failed states acknowledged a continued lack of clarity as to the period covered by post-conflict peacebuilding: “[t]he term … is used in two ways—either to refer to the entire post-conflict exercise, or to refer to the post-peacekeeping phase,” after external military forces had departed. The report recommended that this ambiguity be overcome by using the term “early recovery” and “late recovery” to refer to different phases of the post-conflict period.²⁶

Attempts to establish causal relationships between modes of peacemaking and suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Peacebuilding: A contested and evolving concept
• 2. The UN peacebuilding architecture: Structure, mandate, and origins
• 3. Institutional survival: The peacebuilding architecture in action, 2006–08
• 4. Institutional revival: The peacebuilding architecture in action, 2008–10
• 5. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index