Boutros Boutros-Ghali served as the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) between 1992 and 1996. In his memoirs, reflecting on the importance of writing in his mĂ©tier, he remarked: âI knew that policy was made by the written word, that texts made things happen in the realm of high diplomacy and statecraft. Writing forces concepts into lifeâ (Boutros-Ghali 1999: 26). As a veteran diplomat, jurist and scholar of international law and politics when he took office, Boutros-Ghali was well aware of the potential power of the written word, of texts, of concepts, in shaping the reality of world politics. This book departs from one particular concept advanced by that Egyptian diplomat to investigate how peacebuilding âcame into lifeâ in the UN of the early 1990s and the implications of this process for the Organisationâs approach to societies affected by armed conflicts.
Boutros-Ghali first advanced that concept in a report titled An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping, wherein he defined peacebuilding, or more precisely âpost-conflict peacebuildingâ, as an âaction to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflictâ (UN Doc. A/47/277-S/24111: para. 21). Since the release of the document, the concept of peacebuilding has informed international initiatives in dozens of armed conflicts and post-conflict situations. In the UN, those actions have often, albeit not always, been carried out against the backdrop of peacekeeping operations.1 From El Salvador (1991â1995) and Mozambique (1992â1994), to Cambodia (1991â1992) and Yugoslavia (1992â1995), to Kosovo (1999âPresent) and Timor-Leste (2006â2012), UN-led peacebuilding initiatives included, but were not limited to: support to and management of electoral processes; reforms of institutions in the security sector; training of police, judges and other law enforcement officials; promotion of human rights; drafting of national laws, including constitutions; and, on occasions, the administration of the most basic services in countries and territories. As of writing, the UN has more than 20 missions, including multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations carrying out peacebuilding tasks and special political missions, operating all over the world. At UN headquarters in New York, the establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) and the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) in 2005â2006 represents the ultimate embodiment of the concept of peacebuilding in the UN. From the âwritten wordâ contained in Boutros-Ghaliâs An Agenda for Peace, the concept of peacebuilding has fully come into life in the UN context, that is, it has become influential to the extent of having concrete, tangible, manifestations in world politics.
My main argument in this book is that the way peacebuilding appeared and gained prominence in the context of the UN in the early 1990s had a profound and lasting influence in the Organisationâs provision of support to societies affected by armed conflict, not only influencing the core meaning underlying peacebuilding in the UN but also preventing substantial changes in that meaning. Peacebuilding has come into life via a process of simplification and politicisation of academic theories about the democratic peace thesis, which holds that democratic societies rarely fight with each other (see e.g., Russett 1993; Doyle 1983a, b). In the early 1990s, a simplified and politicised interpretation of such theories gained foothold in the UN as a strong political view about the promotion, via peacebuilding, of democracies in societies affected by armed conflict. This political view, herein dubbed the âliberal democratic peaceâ, has since been at the core of the concept of peacebuilding around the UN, providing the rationale and informing the structures whose interplay motivate, legitimate, justify and enact concrete initiatives in the field. As a result of the influence of the liberal democratic peace, UN peacebuilding initiatives in the field have been remarkably concerned with âdemocratization and marketizationâ since the early 1990s (Paris 2004: 19; see also Mac Ginty 2006: 45). At headquarters, the functioning of the PBC, PBSO and PBF, whose establishment in 2005â2006 may be seen as an attempt to solve some of the inconsistencies of the liberal democratic peace underlying the UN approach to peacebuilding, has not yet necessarily provoked deep structural changes to that meaningâthat is, changes at the ideational and material dimensions of the UN relating to peacebuilding. Rather, the three entities have often replicated and reinforced the liberal democratic peace, which attests to its profound and lasting influence in the Organisation.
Examining how peacebuilding has come into life and the implications of this process to the UN approach to societies affected by armed conflict is both significant and interesting for two reasons. First, because it provides another illustration of the power of non-material aspects (e.g. ideas, concepts, theories, norms, worldviews) in shaping and being shaped by social reality in general and world politics in particular. Analyses on the role of ideas in world politics, at least until the mid-1990s, had been largely neglected in the field of International Relations (IR) (Woods 1995: 164). Whereas the interest of scholars on the role of ideas in world politics has since flourished (see, e.g., Chwieroth 2010; Jolly et al. 2009; Rushton 2008; Mandelbaum 2002; Philpott 2001; Emmerij et al. 2001; Brooks and Wohlforth 2000â2001; Checkel 1997; Goldstein and Keohane 1993),2 only a few have engaged comprehensively with the trajectory of the concept of peacebuilding in the specific context of the UN (see Jenkins 2013). This book thus addresses an understudied case of the influence of concepts in international organisations in general and in the UN in particular.
Second, because the analysis herein carried out presents an apparently underexplored vantage point to study the limits and shortcomings of UN peacebuilding. Scholars from different traditions and with different purposes have long highlighted the UN mixed results keeping and building peace, particularly via multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations encompassing peacebuilding tasks (e.g., Richmond and Franks 2009; Berdal and Economides 2007; Durch 1993a, 1996, 2006; MacQueen 2006; Dobbins et al. 2005; Paris 2004; Boulden 2001; Cousens et al. 2001; Doyle and Sambanis 2000). Those studies, however, have generally examined the UN approach to peacebuilding either by highlighting the mismatch between the goals and the actual implementation of specific initiatives, or by focusing on the inability of peacebuilders to create the conditions for sustainable peace. In both cases, the analyses were produced from the perspective of developments taking place in the field,3 that is, where peacebuilding initiatives were concretely carried out. This book, however, takes a step back and explores the limits and shortcomings of UN peacebuilding departing from the analysis of the underlying features associated with the conceptualisation and design of peacebuilding strategies and policies in the first place. Spatially, this book thus shifts the site of analysis from the field to UN headquarters in New York. Whereas not claiming that it is better or worse, more or less important, to focus on one place or the other, this book suggests that more complementarity is needed between analyses situated in multiple sites of relevance to contemporary peacebuilding.
This book examines how the UN has conceived and envisioned peacebuilding programmes and actions over a period of more than 20 years, looking into the interplay between concepts and practices of peacebuilding and their concrete manifestations in distinct historical contexts. This approach enables the book to uncover and expose underlying assumptions about world politics that are often replicated and/or simply taken for granted in and around the United Nations in the realm of peacebuilding, as well as to explore how such assumptions influence concrete initiatives undertaken by the Organisation at the field level. The ensuing chapters propose a theoretically informed narrative about the coming into life of peacebuilding and its implications for the development of peacebuilding policies and programmes in the Organisation from the late 1980s and early 1990s to the early 2010s, when research leading to this book was concluded. In constructing this narrative, the book explores the limits of the liberal democratic peace framework since its origins in the UN and brings its analysis straight to the site where peacebuilding policies and programmes are contemporarily envisioned in the Organisation, most particularly the PBC and PBSO. At the same time, this narrative opens the black box of international organisations by delving into the daily functioning of the UN Secretariat, thus highlighting the importance of non-material aspects, bureaucratic structures and the agency of purposive individuals in shaping the UN conceptualisation and practices in peacebuilding.
The Scholarly Contribution
This book offers two contributions to contemporary scholarship on peacebuilding. First, it sheds new light into the origins of the concept of peacebuilding in the UN, particularly as defined in An Agenda for Peace. Second, it uses insights produced by the critique of the liberal peace scholarship to examine the establishment and functioning of the PBC, PBSO and PBF from the perspective of developments taking place inside the UN.
The Origins of the Concept of Peacebuilding in the United Nations
Whereas Boutros-Ghali was responsible for bringing the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding to the political debate in the UN in 1992, the origins of the academic concept of peace...