Chapter 1

UNCERTAIN TIMES

Robert Kaplan’s writings (1993; 1994) in the early 1990s reveal a great deal about the concerns presented by the Cold War’s end. They also help explain why NGOs became so prevalent in post-conflict peacebuilding in the Balkans. Ostensibly a travel memoir, Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts (1993) has an important message to tell: southern Europe is “a powder keg for 21st-century cultural and religious warfare between Islamic groups and Christianity, and identity conflicts such as these will spread from Athens all the way to Muscovy.”1 His follow-up article in the Atlantic (1994) and book by the same title, The Coming Anarchy (2002), provided an even more alarming picture of how ethnic conflict, environmental degradation, and transnational crime would change our understandings of security and conflict. These ideas, deemed stunning by then President Clinton, claimed that resource scarcity and urban poverty would exacerbate ethnic tensions and become bloody, violent battles. The menacing future would not just be rife with violence but borders would be weakened and the nation-state system destroyed.2
Clearly, neither ethnic conflict nor environmental degradation was a new issue, but Kaplan’s writings (1993; 1994) exploited post–Cold War uncertainties. Kaplan and others may have exaggerated emerging threats, misrepresenting history in the process, but fears of global instability wrought by diverse and indeterminate factors demanded attention and a response. Earlier well-known scholars like Richard Ullman (1983) and Jessica Tuchman Mathews (1989) had called for the broadening of security studies to include economics, the natural environment, and other nonmilitary factors, but the debate over “redefining security” remained largely an academic one until the Soviet Union collapsed. It was not until the early 1990s, when violent internal conflicts suddenly but decisively turned states and theories on their heads, that policymakers and academics scrambled for new strategies and different partners.
It was in this context of transition and perceived chaos that Western states and international organizations looked expectantly to NGOs, submitting that these “representatives of civil society” were effective, efficient, and even legitimate actors in international relations and post-conflict peacebuilding.3 A more sober analysis of these developments is that leaders of states and international organizations wanted to do something, but they did not want to do a lot. Unwilling to invest the time and money needed to respond carefully and comprehensively to emerging crises, international actors turned desperately and naively to nonstate actors. For many reasons NGOs were an attractive solution to post–Cold War threats. Not only did Western governmental actors see them as flexible organizations that could respond quickly to situations, but many also believed that NGOs were efficient and could save governments both money and time. In truth, the motivations for engaging NGOs in post-conflict peacebuilding were never fleshed out, nor were the plans to solicit and engage these organizations. Nonetheless, it was easy to assume that NGOs belonged in peacebuilding in some seamless way and to exaggerate their ability to counter nebulous threats while bridging international and local actors. Clarifying the historical context in which NGOs were implicated is different from answering the question: What prompted the NGO turn in the early 1990s? After decades of neglect, how did these once marginalized actors suddenly become engaged in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding—issues so central to security and sovereignty?
NGOs had good timing. In the last decade of the twentieth century, not only did government leaders start to fear new threats, but they decided to address these complicated concerns differently. Given important changes in international politics, states and international actors started to look beyond peacekeeping and conflict management and commit themselves to restructuring and reengineering countries in ways that were both ambitious and wide-ranging. In other words, as Cold War threats disappeared, the liberal peace-building agenda emerged, generating different expectations for how and who would respond to the post–Cold War disorder.
Interpretive analysis based on policy statements, governmental reports, and secondary sources highlights the changing post–Cold War norms and how the reframing of states’ understandings and interests opened spaces for the growth of NGOs (Stephenson and Zanotti 2012, 4). Broadly speaking, interpretive methods seek to understand the intentions of social behavior from the language that actors use (Abdelal et al. 2009, 6). Sometimes language is used instrumentally and for other purposes, but I contend that the language of government officials and academics in the first half of the 1990s sheds light on how governments perceived and sought to counter emerging threats. In the end, ambitious but fundamentally deceptive statements about NGOs informed policies and behavior, ultimately giving rise to NGO booms, busts, and the NGO game in international peacebuilding.
Other explanations exist for the growth of NGOs in international relations that are grounded in the Cold War’s demise and the rise of neoliberal economic policies or certain structures and ideas. I do not reject these explanations entirely, but I maintain that to understand the role and importance of NGOs in post-conflict environments, three key factors need to be highlighted: the rise of violent internal conflicts, how state leaders started to think about responding to these events, and to whom governments and international actors looked for help in addressing complex humanitarian emergencies and dealing with conflict-prone states. Uncertain times mandate innovative strategies; they also call for new actors.

New Wars

Journalists are often the first to report on changes that are happening on the ground, but in the early 1990s they were hardly alone in drawing attention to the dramatic shift from interstate conflicts and conventional warfare to intrastate violence and complex humanitarian emergencies.4 After decades of nuclear standoff between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its bloc of socialist countries, intrastate violence was not only more likely, it was frightening and destabilizing. Initially, international relations scholars maintained that the causes and dynamics of internal conflicts were not that different from what animated interstate wars of the past. Concepts like the balance of power and the security dilemma, which were used by security studies scholars to explain interstate war, were thus still useful for explaining and predicting intrastate ethnic violence.5 The rapid and disruptive expansion of these conflicts, however, pushed scholars to rethink and revise earlier concepts and theories. No unified theory emerged to explain intrastate wars, but a cluster of variables, including ethnic composition, domestic institutions, and elite politics, were all tenuously linked to post–Cold War violence.6
Actual causes aside, so-called new wars were cast as qualitatively different from the large-scale, interstate wars of the past (Kaldor 1999). In a nutshell, post–Cold War conflicts were deemed unusually brutal, criminal, and predatory. As the title of John Mueller’s (2000) article “The Banality of Ethnic War” proposes, contemporary ethnic wars were about thugs and criminality rather than ethnicity or ideology. According to this interpretation, post–Cold War violence was driven by profit and greed and was characterized by gratuitous violence, while interstate wars of the past were depicted as ideologically driven, enjoyed broad support, and practiced controlled and disciplined violence (Kalyvas 2001, 101–2). According to Mary Kaldor (1999), who coined the term new wars, this new form of organized violence was not caused by the Cold War’s end, by colonial boundaries, or by ethnic differences. New wars were instead the result of a revolution in the social relations of warfare and the erosion of the autonomy of states. The point is that something bigger, more complex, and far nastier was generating horrific new wars, and they required a different, innovative response.
Using the Bosnian conflict as her only example of new identity-driven wars, Kaldor explains how globalization transformed both how and where wars would be waged in the twenty-first century—in living rooms and by neighbors, not on battlefields between states and soldiers. In this emerging system, interstate wars would be replaced by low-level violence within states with transnational ties and accompanied by massive human rights violations. Kaldor’s (2007) subsequent book, Human Security, develops these ideas further, linking new wars to failed states, peacebuilding, and economic development and discussing the changes in sovereignty and the rights of individuals. For her, the revolution in warfare and the erosion of states’ sovereignty shifted the focus of security away from states and national security to individuals and human security.
This reframing of threats and security advances the position that the key to preventing new wars and resolving human security dilemmas rests with civil society, which is supposedly led by nongovernmental organizations and other so-called representatives of the global community. Just who these actors would be and how they would represent “the people” is never explained or explored in much detail. But in this unfolding, uncertain world, NGOs would become crucial international actors. NGOs would not work alone but would be part of a multiactor response to internal conflicts, giving voice to marginalized interests and vulnerable groups and to concerns of “the people.” At least this is the narrative that some were peddling: international stability and peace in the twenty-first century are linked to factors and forces coming from within countries and thus depended on NGOs and other so-called “representatives of global civil society.”
Many authors tried to characterize and account for the restructuring of states, international security, and the post–Cold War world. Samuel Huntington’s (1996) clash of civilizations thesis perhaps provides the most pessimistic, if cogent, picture for how these forces came together, squarely pinning the causes of future violence on issues of identity and culture. Huntington ominously predicts that fault line wars would not only mean ruthless violence against civilians, but these civilizational conflicts would bring about the end of multiethnic states. The post–Cold War world was characterized in various ways, but there was some agreement on the central message delivered: in the era of new wars and human security, nation-states beware!
Although terms like ethnic conflict, complex humanitarian emergencies, and new wars were increasingly used to characterize messy internal conflicts, not everyone bought into the notion that these conflicts were profoundly different from wars of the past. Careful research on the history of warfare, in fact, casts serious doubt on the idea that this violence was either new or unusually brutal to civilians.7 Stathias Kalyvas (2001, 101–2), for example, does not deny the sudden rise of internal conflicts in the early 1990s, but he does take issue with the claim that they were somehow qualitatively different or somehow “more criminalized, de-politicized, and privatized” than previous wars. At best, the characterization of new wars was incomplete if not ahistorical. At worst, the term and ideas surrounding them fundamentally misrepresented reality. Claims about new wars were tenuous and largely unsubstantiated, but this was nonetheless how the post–Cold War world was being depicted by some policymakers and academics. Yet, as some suggest, international responses to emerging intrastate conflicts were less influenced by the threats themselves and their severity than they were an outgrowth of ill-prepared actors and inappropriate policies (Crawford and Lipschutz 1998).

The Need to Act

The Coming Anarchy argument (Kaplan 1994) may have been exaggerated and based on incomplete information, but emerging threats and the expanding number of failing states were difficult challenges that required a global response (Helman and Ratner 1992, 3). Statements and policies early in the decade clearly endorsed perceptions that the post–Cold War world was not only dangerous for civilians but threatening to states and world order. According to Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis (2006, 1), the United Nations grasped the fragility of the moment, adopting a “strikingly interventionist tone” starting in 1990, because of the threats and the “perceived need for a coherent international response.” From 1990 to 1993 alone the United Nations’ Department for Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) took on fourteen new operations—even though it had not taken on a single operation in the ten years prior. With no obvious actor or overriding strategy equipped to respond to the growth of internal conflicts, the United Nations needed to take the initiative and respond to the problems as well as the opportunities presented by the Cold War’s end.
The Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992) lays out the rationale for fundamental changes in the UN’s structure and the institutions and strategies it needs to both prevent and respond to emerging international threats. This and subsequent UN documents describe the changing nature of war in the post–Cold War era and assess what this implies for international action (Diehl and Druckman 2010). The United Nations’ post–Cold War message was strong and focused on the threats to the world system: “This is a time of global transition” that is marked by “uniquely contradictory trends,” where cooperation between Western states and international organizations is evolving while “primitive, brutal rivalries threaten world order.”8 Paradoxically, and despite the Soviet Union’s peaceful demise, a menacing international environment was unfurling. On the one hand, long-standing ideological barriers had collapsed, making cooperation and peace more likely, especially among Western states. On the other hand, fierce new assertions of nationalism and ethnic identity were reemerging, threatening the stability that took decades to foster.
New wars were not just horrific and bloody for those living within these countries, but they “fundamentally impact the cohesion of States.” The nation-state system was directly “threatened by brutal ethnic, religious, social, cultural or linguistic strife.”9 Moreover, because these wars did not tend to involve powerful states, the United Nations, or other international organizations, the actors involved lacked the military might needed to incorporate new resources and strategies to push things back on track. Consequently, the Supplement to an Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1995) elaborates on the new and varied sources of internal conflicts while it reaffirms the need for comprehensive, multileveled responses. As events in the former Soviet Union in particular demonstrated, for many, “Today’s conflicts are within States rather than between States.”10 For the United Nations, the single most important international concern was not militarily powerful states; it was weak and failing states, because these states engaged in human rights abuses and provoked humanitarian disasters, threatening the security of all states in the system (Fukuyama 2004, 93–94).
During this same period, U.S. leaders also acknowledged the surprising and unfortunate turn of events that accompanied the Cold War’s end. As President Clinton’s 1993 inaugural ...