When War Ends

Building Peace in Divided Communities

David J. Francis, David J. Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134763375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Frieden & globale Entwicklung

This volume critically examines what happens when war formally ends, the difficult and complex challenges and opportunities for winning the peace and reconciling divided communities. By reviewing a case study of the West African state of Sierra Leone, potential lessons for other parts of the world can be gained. Sierra Leone has emerged as a 'successful' model of liberal peacebuilding that is now popularly advertised and promoted by the international community as a powerful example of a country that they finally got right. Concerns about how successful a model Sierra Leone actually is, are outlined in this project. As such this volume: -

Chapter 1 Introduction:When War Ends: Building Peace in Divided Communities – Core Issues

David J. Francis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547329-1

What happens when war ends, how to build the peace and reconcile bitterly divided communities after years or decades of armed conflict? These are some of the major challenges facing war-ravaged and traumatised societies as well as the international community. The most difficult challenges that face war-torn societies are how to end war and build the peace. Ending war and building peace, though two different challenges, are inextricably linked. In fact, there is an emerging consensus that formal agreements to end wars and armed conflicts appear to be less demanding than the complex, difficult and long-term process of transition from war to peace.

Does war ever end for those who have been the victims and perpetrators of violence? After more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War (1939–45), regarded as the bloodiest war in history, the survivors (both civilians and soldiers) still find it difficult to overcome the horrors and traumas of war. Some still carry the trauma of that terrible experience and the psychological scars of the violence and brutality of the tragic events of the war. More recently, and after nearly two decades after the Rwandan genocide, both victims and perpetrators of violence and brutality still struggle to come to terms with the effects of the genocide at individual and societal levels. For these people and communities, will war ever end? It seems that the passage of time does not necessarily heal the trauma of war. People and communities only learn to cope with or develop survival strategies of dealing with the end of war, in particular, after the international community has left the conflict-torn societies. Based on extensive field work in post-conflict societies in Africa over a decade, we have found that what happens when war formally ends or when the guns fall silent is still a markedly under-researched area of study. Despite the intensity, scale and diversity of interventions to end bloody civil wars and rebuild the peace, there is still limited understanding of what actually happens when the shooting stops. Often and understandably, the military, security and humanitarian relief priorities predominate all the efforts of Postwar peacebuilding and reconciling bitterly divided communities. In fact, there is a lack of agreement in the immediate aftermath of the end of war as to when to ‘add on’, beyond the mere humanitarian relief and emergency assistance, the much-needed socio-economic and development aspects that are critical to stabilising and consolidating the fragile peace. The experience of post-conflict recovery societies across the world illustrates that the socio-economic and development dimensions (job creation, welfare and basic services provision) are critical to creating the durable foundations for winning the peace in divided communities. This creates the opportunity for people and divided communities to be committed to and invest in the fragile peace through provision, access and entitlement to socio-economic, development and human security needs. In other words, the socio-economic and development dimensions of peacebuilding are as important as the military-security aspects of Postwar peacebuilding and reconstruction.

When War Ends is primarily about understanding the problems, challenges and opportunities as well as the nature, dynamics and complexity of the process of rebuilding post-conflict and war-torn societies when the guns fall silent. This process of rebuilding failed and collapsed states and reconciling bitterly divided communities is an immensely difficult, complex and large scale task that goes beyond the usual international community's quick-fix, short-term and exit-strategy oriented Postwar peacebuilding and state reconstruction interventions. Beyond the immensity and complexity of the peacebuilding and state reconstruction processes, a major challenge is the diversity of the rebuilding interventions at individual, local community, societal, regional (provincial/sectional) and national levels. It requires not only the rebuilding and reconstruction of physical, political, governance, economic and development infrastructures and institutions, but also psychological and emotional repair at individual, societal and national levels. A major challenge is the multi-dimensional nature of post-conflict assistance involving military, security, socio-economic development, humanitarian relief, elections and human rights protection. This is further complicated by the diversity of the Postwar intervention actors and programmes, often led by external actors with diverse strategic interests, bilateral and multilateral donors, sometimes with ad hoc, uncoordinated intervention programmes. The sheer scale and complexity of the challenges of rebuilding war-torn societies as well as the diversity of the actors and agencies involved challenge even the most committed and enthusiastic actor or institution involved in the process. What is more, there is the controversy of when peacebuilding should start, whether during war, towards the end of wars or when the guns finally fall silent? The rebuilding process does not only require large scale financial and resource allocation over a long period of time, but there is also considerable disagreement about the strategy for Postwar peacebuilding and state reconstruction amongst the actors. By all indications, Postwar peacebuilding and state reconstruction are expensive enterprises that most poor, war-ravaged and underdeveloped societies can hardly afford. An analysis by the US House Budget Committee's Democratic Staff in 2003 found that the cost of the war and reconstruction in Iraq to the US by 2004 was an estimated US $178 billion. The report projected that the cost by 2008 of the war in Iraq (including cost of Postwar military presence, reconstruction costs, combat and other costs) will be US $308.9 billion.¹

1 Hon. J. Spratt, Jr., House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus, 23 September 2002 www.house.gov/budget_democrats. According to the US Congressional Research Service (CRS), the cost of the Iraq war as of February 2010 was an estimated US $704 billion and Joseph Stiglitz states that it amounts to an estimated US $2 billion per week to US $12 per month. See: CRS, Costs of Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 www.loc.gov/crsinfo/; L. Bilmes and J. Stiglitz, ‘The Iraq War Costs’, Washington Post 9 March 2008.

According to the World Bank, a post-conflict country is deemed to have made the transition from humanitarian emergency intervention to recovery and to stable Postwar development and reconstruction when it has fulfilled the following criteria:

1. macroeconomic stability and its sustainability;
2. recovery of private sector confidence as measured by investment ratio; and,
3. effectiveness with which reconstruction institutions and political system are coping with the tensions and conflict-drivers that led to war.²

2 World Bank, World Bank's Experience with Postwar Reconstruction, Washington, DC, Report No. 177769, 1998, p. 47.

But all of these criteria operate in a very difficult and challenging Postwar environment that determines whether they are fulfilled or not. Commenting on the scale and challenge of the multi-dimensional nature of Postwar reconstruction assistance in the context of the West African state of Sierra Leone and Africa in general, the former Foreign Affairs Minister, Zainab Bangura aptly stated that:

It has gone beyond merely supporting the rebuilding of physical infrastructure, and in many cases, now includes humanitarian relief, institution (re)building, technical assistance, elections and the development of democracy, support to local NGOs and civil society, budgetary support, debt relief, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants, removing landmines and repatriating refugees and the internally displaced. The standard post-conflict menu has become very daunting. It brings together an unusually wide-ranging group of political, economic and military actors as well as the media. The resources provided for the support of these actors flow through the weak institutions and corrupt, inefficient and ineffective government and public service bureaucracies, characterised by lack of administrative, financial and management skills.³

3 Z. Bangura, ‘Addressing Corruption and Implementing Reconstruction in postwar Sierra Leone: Institutional and Procedural Dimensions’. Speech by Minister of Foreign Affairs & International Co-operation, Mrs. Zainab Hawa Bangura www.tiri.org.

Against this background, a major challenge faced by war-torn and post-conflict societies is the ever present threat of relapse into further war and violence. This so-called ‘conflict trap’ is a major obstacle to rebuilding peace and reconciling divided communities. Paul Collier is of the view that ‘the risks of conflict relapse are very high during the first post-conflict decade – typically around 50 per cent’.⁴ In fact, the World Bank sees a positive correlation between violent conflict and underdevelopment and perceives fragile, conflict-affected and post-conflict societies as part of this problem, in particular, the regional dimensions and spillover of violence and instability beyond national borders. According to the World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, fragile and conflict-affected states are the ‘toughest development challenge of our era’ because ‘disease, outflows of desperate people, criminality and terrorism that can spawn in the vacuum of fragile states can quickly become global threats’. He argues that the most urgent priority faced by the international community is to ‘secure development by building security, legitimacy, governance and economy in fragile states to smooth the transition from conflict to peace’.⁵ But, the World Bank's excessive focus on the economic development and market economy dimensions of peacebuilding has been called into question in that the Bank in post-conflict and war-torn societies has failed to address the root causes of violent conflict and, in particular, how some of its neoliberal economic policies are instigating political and socio-economic tensions and violent conflict. Not surprising therefore that the World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, bringing an African perspective to the Bank's Postwar peacebuilding and state reconstruction approach, stated that ‘focusing on peacebuilding alone is not sufficient. Just as development cannot occur in the absence of peace, peace without development is a peace that may not last’.⁶

4 P. Collier, 2004, ‘Development and Conflict’, Oxford, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford. http://www.un.org/esa/documents/Development.and.Conflict2.pdf. See also, P. Collier et al, 2003, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. A World Bank Policy Research Report, Washington, DC: World Bank. The World Bank World Development Report 2011 finds that transition countries with repeated cycles of human rights violations, political repression, weak governance institutions, rampant corruption and lack of rule of law have the potential of 30–45 per cent risk of civil war. In addition, that 90 per cent of civil wars in the twenty-first century occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the previous 30 years. But these are highly controversial claims made by the Bank's report because the case studies of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, to name only but a few, do not support this conclusion because these countries never had civil wars before the outbreak of the bloody internal war and state collapse in Liberia (1989), Sierra Leone (1991) and Cote d’Ivoire (2002). 5 World Bank, News and Broadcast – Fragile States: ‘Toughest Development Challenge of our Era’ http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/O. 6 United Nations Security Council, 2011, Statement at UN Security Council Debate on ‘Post-conflict Peacebuilding: A Comprehensive Peacebuilding Strategy to Prevent the Recurrence of Conflict’, 16th April, 2011, New York.

But building peace, in particular sustaining long-term peace and stability after end of war, has proved far more difficult and challenging for both national and international actors and agencies. Boutros Ghali's An Agenda for Peace (1992) was one of the first to call for a fundamental shift in the international community's approach from simply peacekeeping and peacemaking to peacebuilding by focusing on ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’.⁷ But what type of peacebuilding are we talking about? In fact, peacebuilding for whom, by whom and for what purpose? In effect, there is lack of consensus on the definition, approaches and practice of peacebuilding. There are two contrasting but linked definitions of peacebuilding: a narrow and broad definition. According to the UN, one of the main actors in Postwar peacebuilding and state reconstruction since the 1990s, peacebuilding embraces programmes and intervention efforts at capacity building, state reconstruction, reconciliation and societal transformation. From this perspective, peacebuilding is seen as a long-term process that begins after violent conflict or war has reduced due to ceasefire or peace agreement or when war formally ends. To the contrary, some development co-operation partners view peacebuilding as security, political, economic, social, development and military programmes and interventions geared towards strengthening political settlements and to addressing the cause of conflict. This broad definition of peacebuilding accepts the fact that peacebuilding efforts and interventions may take place or commence during on-going conflict as well as before the end of war. According to the Tswalu Protocol (2008) this type of peacebuilding is synonymous with ‘stabilisation’ and is specifically aimed to support war-torn societies emerging from war to prevent relapse into further violence, reduce violence, protect civilians, properties and main institutions, promote political processes which create the conditions for enhanced security and stability as well as long-term, non-violent politics and development.⁸ The different interpretations of the concept of peacebuilding have to do with the approaches and priorities of agencies, institutions, actors and countries involved in building peace and Postwar state reconstruction. As Barnet et al. aptly state, ‘when the Bush Administration thinks of peacebuilding it imagines building market-oriented democracies, while UNDP imagines creating economic development and strong civil societies committed to a culture of non-violent dispute resolution’.⁹ In effect, though peacebuilding has a normative orientation, i.e. reconstructing a secure, peaceful and developed society, it is a largely value-laden project that apportions disproportionate powers to those who prescribe, fund and implement peacebuilding programmes.

7 B. Boutros-Ghali (1992) ‘An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping’, A/47/277–S/2411, 31 January 1992. New York: United Nations. Available at: http://www.un.org/docs/SG/agpeace.html. The ‘Supplement to Agenda for Peace’ (1995) emphasised the ‘institutionalisation of peace’. 8 The Tswalu Protocol was derived from the Tswalu Process in 2007 on Comprehensive Peacebuilding Dialogue www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org. 9 M. Barnet et al. (2007) ‘Peacebuilding: What's in a Name?’, Global Governance, 13:1, 35–58.

It is important to stress that despite the diversity, large scope and range of peacebuilding activities and interventions, there is a predominant emphasis on neoliberal political and economic policies including free market and private enterprise, elections and democratisation and public institutions rebuilding – hence the label ‘liberal peacebuilding’. This is based on the assumption that a liberally reconstructed state will be more peaceful and developed with the capacity to reduce violence and prevent relapse into further war as well as support international order, peace and security.¹⁰

10 For more detailed outline of definition and debates on peacebuilding see E. Newman, 2009, ‘“Libera...