Re-Examining Peacebuilding Interventions

Introduction
No two conflicts play out through one common script, and therefore no two conflicts are experienced in the same way(s). Peacebuilding is therefore a highly subjective and contextual enterprise, and the application of any aforethought framework runs the risk of administering prescriptions based on reductionist and minimalist understanding of the conflict situation that instead bring distant ‘lessons learnt’ to situations that have very specific dynamics and beg more knowledge generation than application of theories.
This essay argues that while indicative frameworks for peacebuilding in post-conflict societies have been suggested by numerous researchers, policy makers and scholars, these frameworks have predominantly been predicated upon the Wilsonian liberal peace theory which is both reductionist and minimalist in its over emphasis of democratic ideals of justice and freedom as the cornerstone of sustainable peace. The essay further supposes that the understanding of conflicts as resulting from development deficits (Mark Duffield, 2001) that took the centre stage of international peacebuilding efforts is instrumentalist and can only serve the strategic and geopolitical interests of powerful industrialised nations while undermining the emergence of legitimate and independent political authority in war affected societies. The thesis of this article is therefore that peacebuilding designs have largely failed leading to resurgences of violent conflicts because they are based on a flawed foreign model, they undermine the emergence of legitimate governance architecture in post conflict societies and they play into the hands of local powerbrokers whose interests are not served by the attainment of sustainable peace and are therefore bent on sustaining the conflict as a mutual enterprise, and a means to perpetuate and maintain their powers and hegemonies.
In demonstrating the above argument, this article shall draw on empirics from a wide range of scholars such as Peter Uvin; Eriksen Stern; Paris and Sisk; David Chandler; Stuart Gordon; Torjesen, Stina and MacFarlane; Sara Phillip and others. The essay shall also call onto a wide range of examples, including and not limited to the Middle East and Africa.
This essay shall proceed as follows. A snapshot of the liberal peace thesis shall be revisited, relating it to a review of the common messages that are both implicit and explicit in most ‘peacebuilding frameworks’. Using examples from different post-conflict interventions, I shall then demonstrate how this tenet beliefs of the liberal peace theory that informs most peacebuilding interventions have:
? Been based on a flawed model of one size fits all and incorrect assumptions that do not respond to the contexts in question.
? Undermined the emergence of competent, legitimate, and independent government architecture in post-conflict societies through the state-building approach, undermining the achievement of sustainable peace.
? Played into the hands of powerful stakeholders and parties whose interests are in sustaining the conflict status quo that harnesses their powers and positions.
This essay shall then recommend certain considerations, and consciously so, not a framework, that take account of the variant contexts that differentiates not only between conflicts, but also characterises the ebb and flow of different conflict situation over time, before offering a conclusion.
The Liberal Peace Thesis
“Democracy contributes to safety and prosperity – both in national life and in international life – it’s that simple.” – Strobe Talbott – US Deputy Secretary of State, 1997.
The above statement by Strobe Talbott in 1997 probably best captures, if poignantly, the faith that underpins the liberal peace thesis that has shaped most peacebuilding interventions of recent times.
The liberal peace thesis, also referred to as the Wilsonian approach to peace-building is premised on the belief that liberal market democracies are the forms of government best suited for the achievement of national and international peace and harmony, not least because they enjoy popular domestic support and can be held accountable by electorates; they are less likely to go to war against each other and less likely to apply excessive force against their people in the resolution of contestations (Paris S, 2009) and respects the rights of the governed. As articulated by Wilson Woodrow after the First World War, this approach to peacebuilding argues that the strength of liberal democratic states do no rest on their military might, but on the free consent of their populations.
The undercurrent that serves the liberal peace thesis is a common ground found in the works of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who both agree to the need to surrender sovereign power to govern onto an individual or a group of people who runs the state on behalf of the people, while enjoying legitimacy from the governed. Therefore, through democratic elections, the liberal peace thesis believes that the people govern themselves through representation, while the government creates the environment and institutions favourable for the free market competition in the process of liberalizing the economy, culminating into not only harmonious mutual coexistence, but also prosperity.
Yet the fast disappearance of the Hobbesian leviathans in many conflict-affected and fragile territories means that liberal peace thinkers are assuming away one of the most challenging and complex tasks of peacebuilding of our time, being the creating of functioning and legitimate governments, as evidenced by the spiraling number of intrastate conflicts characterised by state failure and lack of legitimate governments. This brings into question whether the liberal peace thesis offers competent remedies to the latest generation conflicts, especially with quick reversals to conflict in countries such as Angola, Rwanda and Liberia. Further, in stark contradiction to Hobbes and Locke, the human rights discourse and the deepening interconnectedness of the world making people even in far off territories stakeholders and actors in events and phenomena in other places, the governed have continued to get empowered, if only through accessibility of information from and to them. Politically, this means that everywhere is fast becoming the epicentre of political influence, and nowhere is exactly a periphery; a phenomenon that can only serve to weaken the position of the leviathan. Arguably, the increasing centres of political powers and contestations that comes with political and market liberalizations have constituted a great discomfiture to the powers of the classical powerful authoritarian state hegemony, partly accounting for the increasing cases of state failure, contestations over territorial sovereignties and increasingly failing cases of international peacebuilding efforts. Granted, developed industrialised democracies have tended to be more peaceful as proven by a myriad of empirics, not least because they have better developed institutions capable of resolving conflicts peacefully (Acemogulu, et al, 2001), and have mature democratic culture, while whether democratization and market liberalization actually builds peace in fragile post-conflict societies remains a question to be answered.
International Peacebuilding: A Tale of “Underwhelming” Outcomes
Having reflected on the fundamentals of the liberal peace thesis, I now turn my attention to the major points of my argument. I shall substantiate my thesis, stated above through three arguments, that peacebuilding interventions have not performed well with the current generation of civil conflicts because it’s based on the liberal peace thesis, which is a flawed foreign model, it undermines the emergence of competent and legitimate governments, and have played into the hands of powerful actors whose interests, powers and positions are maintained through the protraction of these conflicts.
The Liberal Peace Approach as a Flawed Model
The liberal peace is a flawed foreign model unfit for application in most non-European post-conflict societies. In his introspection over the peacebuilding attempts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eriksen Stern (2009) in his work, “The Liberal Peace is Neither: Peacebuilding, State-building and the Reproduction of Conflict in the DRC”, suggests that the efforts haven’t had much success because it’s a flawed model based of a one size fits all assumption that do not sufficiently take into account the local Congolese context and dynamics. He argues that the interest of the international community to establish a liberal democratic state in the DRC has failed due to amongst other factors a lack of local allies for the process and has in return resulted to the reproduction of state weakness. It’s also noteworthy, that cultures, behaviours and ‘history’ doesn’t exactly die. In post conflict societies such as the DRC and even the pre-genocide Rwanda, a culture of structural violence, elite reproduction and systematic exclusion of a major part of the population are so entrenched that these vices only reshape and are carried along into new institutional structures (Woolcock, et al, 2011). These continuities are pivotal in understanding the survival of conflicts and the quick return to violence that is witnessed in many post conflict and fragile states. Drawing on the example of Northern Uganda, many reports indicate that even with very vibrant campaign networks against violence, the culture of aggression has continued to infect the society at different levels, including and not limited to domestic settings, with sometimes the groups quickly labelled as the victims (women and children) becoming the culprits. At the centre of this phenomenon is the difficulty of dismantling the architecture of violence that is constructed in conflict states and societies that transcends most peacebuilding interventions with limited timeframes and place too much faith in elections and market liberalisations, which as Paris and Sisk (2009) posits are inherently conflictual themselves and fragile states do not have the institutional capacities to manage these contestations without resorting to vortexes of violence. Experience from Rwanda relays a strong correlation between international peacebuilding efforts and the reproduction of elite alienation of the masses and shaming that prepared the ground for one of the dirtiest ethnic violence of our time (Uvin, 1998). Uvin states that the international aid system was constitutive of the local politics in Rwanda and vice vasa, a relationship that was to widen the rift between the Hutus and the Tutsis, with the former feeling cheated, humiliated and excluded from national processes – a phenomenon that generated anger for the genocide of 1994.
Yet the sheer fact that the international community continued with business as usual in Rwanda until everyone woke up to such a shocking spate of ethnic cleansing demonstrates how detached the much harped liberal peace model is, and its limited potential to build sustainable peace in distant territories. In the DRC on the other hand, the emphasis on the creation of liberal democratic institutions capable of sustaining peace in an area dominated by uncooperative powerful actors has resulted to the emergence of even weaker and unpopular institutions of government that have served to further dampen the hopes of achieving sustainable peace in the region. International peacebuilding frameworks certainly provide very logical theoretic conceptions on how to build sustainable peace in conflict affected societies, yet whether it is applicable across different situations on the ground is yet to be demonstrated. From these empirical perspective and from the field experiences in the cases cited, because they are predominated with creating liberal peace models, peacebuilding interventions have not resulted to the desired self-sustaining peace. Having looked discussed my first argument, following is my second point of argument is support of my thesis.
Undermining the Emergence of Legitimate Sovereign Governments
Current peacebuilding frameworks undermine the emergence of competent, legitimate and independent governments in post conflict societies. Most conflicts, especially the highly prevalent civil conflicts have been blamed on state failure or state fragility in these respective areas, with Somalia coming to mind instantly. It also follows that juxtaposing the capacity of the South Sudan government against that of most of the developed peaceful countries can only demonstrate that countries need strong, independent and legitimate governments to be able to manage societal affairs and allow for peace to flourish and sustain. Notwithstanding this view, empirics and lessons from recent peacebuilding efforts strongly suggests that international peacebuilding efforts have undercut the emergence of competent, legitimate and independent governments in societies emerging from violent conflicts. In no uncertain terms, David Chandler (2006) deplores the establishment of “phantom states” through international peacebuilding enterprises in his work, “Empire in Denial…” Chandler argues that international state-building undertakings in post-conflict societies have resulted to weak governments that are pawns in the hands of the international community and owes their existence and accountabilities not to the governed, but to the donor community on whose endorsement and resources they survive. These emerging governments lacks the legitimacy and independence that are prerequisite for representing and furthering the interests and aspirations of their citizenry. One may argue that the continued insurgency in Iraq represents the dialectics between a people feeling betrayed by their government serving foreign interests and a government caught between the aspirations of its expectant nationals and external strategic interests that are at odds with the reasons the Iraqi public accepted to stand up against the regime of Saddam Hussein. This same tenor is reverberated by Paris and Sisk (2009) who argues that international post conflict interventions are rife with debilitating contradictions and dilemmas that have potentials to leave behind counter-productive outcomes. Paris and Sisk argues that the use of external control is at odds with the emergence of local ownership, while international presence is always intrusive and have potential to overwhelm fragile states emerging from conflict. Ghani, Lockhart and Carhanan (2005) have argued that the international presence in Afghanistan have hindered the development of strong government as it has drawn qualified and competent human resource base away from low paying government positions into the international humanitarian and development organizations, and have further chocked the country with too much financial resources that have sent corruption levels soaring skywards. While still on the example of Afghanistan, reports indicate that true to the trepidation of Mary B. Anderson (1999), the peacebuilding enterprise there is fast legitimizing the positions of provincial warlords who are seen to have even greater de facto powers and legitimacy that the embryonic Afghan government (Stuart, 2011). In this same study, Stuart also found that the international resources injected into the provinces have not only further flamed inter-tribal conflicts, but have also become perverse incentives for perpetuating and protracting insecurity as a means to sustain the aid tap open. Experience from Somalia also shows this same tendencies, as it is believe that the payment of protection moneys to warlords and strong men functioned to both recognize their control rights over territories and legitimise their authority, and also prolong the conflict there by both providing the logistics to sustain the warfighting and by indirectly increasing islands of power and influence outside the emerging government in Mogadishu, hence undermining the legitimacy and sovereignty of the government. Seen from these examples, while modern peacebuilding enterprises preoccupy themselves with the quick creation or recreation of strong and legitimate governments in post conflict societies, in practice they have majorly failed and seems to have largely done just the opposite, by undermining the emergence of the state structure they favour, leading to continued fragility or even continued vortexes of violence in post conflict societies. Having looked at the hindrance to the emergence of legitimate and competent governments in post-conflict states, I now turn my attention to my third and final point of argument.
Playing into the Hands of Powerful Local Stakeholders
My final point of argument is that peacebuilding interventions have played into the hands of powerful actors whose interests and positions are advanced through the conflict situation. This is now increasingly the case with the increasing incidences of civil conflicts resulting from state-fragility and increasing distribution of powers in the hands of different competing groups and individuals within countries where the conflict has turned into a mutual enterprise. Peacebuilding efforts inevitably require dependable local stakeholders on whom the peace process can be invested. Of course since these has to be prominent and influential people capable of garnering support for the peace efforts. It also follows that some of the most prominent stakeholders in post-conflict societies are people closely associated with conflict such as warlords, former rebel leaders and politicians who thrive on the rhetoric of divisive politics. While the dangers that involving these people in peacebuilding efforts brings are apparent, excluding them from the process is simply not practical and sets the process against local power structures right from the start. Peace builders are therefore left with little option but to work with them and only hope that the system is pragmatic enough to deter them from becoming further agents of trouble.
Yet as Eriksen Stern (2009) demonstrated from the DRC, these local stakeholders are engaged in the conflict not to win, but to keep the state structures weak enough to create the power vacuum within which shadow economies can flourish while keeping their positions privileged enough to take advantages of locally available resources. The mutual enterprise of conflict entrepreneurship in the DRC is so deeply engrained in the conflict that any attempt to divorce it from any peace process is an effort in futility, yet this mutuality is instrumental in protracting the conflict and sustaining the powers and positions of these elusive actors (Kaldor, 1999). In her work, “Angola: Woe to the Vanquished” in “In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’”, Christine Messiant (2004) relays a hideous silence on the part of the United Nations (UN) in spite of evidenced of knowledge of very inhumane treatment of civilian populations in the rural areas of Angola, both in the hands of the rebels and government troops during the bloody conflict there. This silence, Messiant reports was nudged by the desperate need of the UN to remain operational in the country, as speaking out had earlier triggered their expulsion by the Angolan government and were keen on maintaining a face in the country and internationally. In the same wave, countries such as France among others who were competing to get their hands on Angolan rich mineral resource were reluctant to expose the war’s true human costs, as they continued to fund peace efforts through a government they were only too aware was rife with corruption, foul play and had the temerity to intimidate them with threats of expulsion. This is akin to experience from Somalia where the process of licensing aid organizations by warlords in areas away from the transitional government in Mogadishu continue to stand at odds with efforts to end the conflict and attain sustainable peace (Bradbury, 2010). In a conflict zone where international humanitarian field craft is shaped by increasing insecurity to humanitarian actors and a reduction in the humanitarian space, the result of such field shaped operations can only serve to strengthen the leverage of these separatist leaders and undermine the possibility of a united peace effort and a return to sustainable peace. Sara Phillips (2011) offers yet another practical lesson from Yemen, arguing that the US’s peacebuilding efforts there are ill-conceived by attempting to address a political problem through development funding that have helped to create a patronage system, centralization of power and disparity of income levels that are all only too distant from responding to the political roots of the Yemeni conflict. The mismatch between the required need to win local legitimacy by the Yemeni government and the reductionist understanding of the political crisis in the country have continued to build local discontent against the government, leaving a void that has been quickly filled by the Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsular (AQAP). A key requirement for establishing lasting peace in Yemen should involve the reaffirmation of the Yemeni government’s legitimacy through the dismantling of the patronage system, largely seen as unjust and representing enemy (American) interests. This might reduce and later dismember the vacuum currently being occupied by AQAP, giving chance for sustainable peace networks to emerge. Patronage systems may appear to be stable in the short run, yet their stability depends on the availability of massive amounts of resources and power, and systematic exclusion, reductions of which mostly constitutes the start of the unravelling of the otherwise stable looking systems (Torjesen et al, 2007). This situation is even made worse by the polarised nature of post conflict environments, where people may buy into divisive ethnic appeals during times of elections, paving ways for leaders who have benefited from the conflict situation to entrench their powers over affairs of society.
It’s therefore important for peace-building interventions to be attentive to their risks of playing by the rules of powerful conflict entrepreneurs and to serve the very negative interests they are trying to beat, as have been the case in the examples presented above, if sustainable peace is to be achieved in fragile post-conflict societies.
The arguments given above demonstrates that while the international community places such esteemed confidence in internationally led peace-building undertakings, these efforts have fallen far short of expectations in achieving liberal democratic governments; have undermined the emergence of independent and legitimate governments and have in many cases served to entrench the negative interests parties they seek weaken in order to create avenue for sustainable peace to emerge, mature and thrive.
Reflections on Way Forward
I now reflect on a few way forwards. It’s vital to note that I use the terms “way forwards” deliberately, as my arguments inherently indicates that post-conflict peacebuilding interventions have largely failed because they are ill conceived, they pay little or no attention to the dynamics of the conflict/ fragility on the ground, and need to better manage the interests and involvement of local actors that have potentials to result to negative outcomes. I am therefore reluctant to suggest an alternative framework, since every conflict situation has their own dynamisms and requires humble learning first, before designing interventions in response to these dynamics. These considerations may provide skeletal guides for peacebuilding interventions to ponder at field level, creating context specific field crafts befitting for each conflict situation:
? Learning from the field. While existing frameworks have found favour in literature, results on the ground indicates that they are attempts to impose lessons that are distant from most conflict situations, both in time and geographically. They therefore are at odds with complexities on the ground and fails to pick valuable lessons from local resilience mechanisms that are not only important in keeping relevant to the particular conflict situation(s), but are also key in achieving mechanisms that can both be owned and sustained at the local levels, by the people whose experience of the conflict should define the path of action.
? Secondly, it’s very important that the emergence of government in post conflict societies are carried out in ways that foster the emergence of local accountability and legitimacy. Governments should reflect the aspirations of the governed, as opposed to the donors’ strategic interests. Democracy and self-sustaining liberalization are not ideals that can be achieved through speedy instrumental elections and opening up market spaces. It’s important to note that these ideals are cultures to be learned, practiced and managed through institutions, and this takes both time, and the space for local voiced to be heard, taken into account and institutionalised through deliberate systems (Acemogulu, ohnson and Robinson, 2001). The time required for this culture is important, not least because in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict, the major powerbrokers are likely to be individuals and groups whose positions are linked to the conflict, and so time is vital for such leaders to lose currency and mileage, while alternative centres of power and new discourses of peace emerge.
? Finally, a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of a particular conflict, and some of the violence that were tolerated by society even before the conflict is vital in building sustainable peace in any conflict affected society. In most cases, reductionist theoretical explanations of conflict are perpetuated by outsiders without understanding the particulars of a conflict situation extending right from periods before the overt conflict, through to the post-conflict situation. These bird-eye view of conflicts have led to the perpetuation of naming and labelling that informs the emergence of interventions that do not address the problems on the ground. A study conducted in the eastern DRC found some unsettling contrasts between the labelling of ‘victims’ to mean the civilian population, and culprits to be synonymous with soldiers. In their ground-breaking work, Maria Baaz and Maria Stern found this discourse problematic to the extent that it is encouraging continued victimization of people involved in the rebellion (Eriksson, Baaz and Stern, 2008). In their work, they found that the youth within the military ranks are drawn from communities that have been reduced to nothing and had no chance at all, they are treated in the most inhumane ways within the military ranks and ridiculed, shamed and excluded by society, only to be labelled as perpetuators later in peacebuilding programming. This same phenomenon is witnessed in northern Uganda too, as the children who are abducted and return from captivity continue to suffer a plethora of stigmatization, exclusion and humiliation from their own communities. Unless such legacies of violence are understood and addressed, that we arrive at long term and self-sustaining peace is but a distant illusion.
Conclusions
This essay is a re-examination of peacebuilding and its ability to achieve sustainable peace in conflict affected societies. It revisited the Wilsonian peace approach as one with long-held confidence in democracy and market liberalisation as the form of government best suited for peaceful coexistence within and without the state and general human progress.
The major argument presented by this essay is that international peacebuilding efforts have failed to achieve sustainable peace in most recent conflict affected societies resulting to quick reversal to violence and or continued conflict. This was substantiated by three arguments. Firstly, that the liberal peace model highly favoured by most internationally led peacebuilding efforts is a flawed model inapplicable across different conflict situations. Secondly, that heavy international presence in post conflict peacebuilding efforts have undermined the emergence of independent, competent and legitimate governments which are a prerequisite for sustainable peace and self-governance. Finally, that peacebuilding interventions have played into the hands of powerful local powerbrokers shoes interests are not in the achievement of peace, but rather in continued war making and state weakness as a precondition for the maintenance of their powers and interests.
Alternatively, this essay offered final reflections on some considerations to inform peacebuilding operations, privileging field learning to inform specific peacebuilding programing; emphasizing that agency should be given to local actors in shaping the future of conflict affected societies, with enough time allowed for a democratic culture and alternative non-violent power structure to emerge, and for local experiences of conflict that addresses the very specifics of the conflict, with analysis right from the pre-conflict societal relations that may define the pattern of the conflict to affect interpretations and interventions in contrast to theoretic bird-eyed explanations that may be both reductionist and minimalist.

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