By Alexander Costy

Nearly 20 years after the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) and the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF), the United Nations (UN) is embarking on a comprehensive review of its peacebuilding architecture[i]. This is not the first time UN peacebuilding is being reviewed, but significant geopolitical changes mean that the stakes for the UN are much higher this time around.

Peacebuilding is broadly understood as encompassing measures and practices that support societies to transition away from conflict and prevent its recurrence. Ideally, the resulting peace would be “positive” – not just an end to violence, but containing also elements of justice, democracy, equity, development and inclusion. When peacebuilding was first articulated in Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace[ii] the Cold War had just come to an end. Global defence budgets were falling rapidly as international trade expanded and democracy spread worldwide. The liberal consensus meant that it became possible (so we thought) to abstract “politics” out of the peace equation – stubborn conflicts were billed either as Cold War residuals, outliers, or “failed states” which needed simply to be “fixed” under an emerging global order.

In this context, development funding, governance support and civil society engagement came to be seen as the chief conveyors of the values and policies needed to build and sustain open, peaceful societies. In this context, building peace came to be perceived more as a matter of practical problem-solving than of complex politics[iii]. Today the return of the Taliban, of great-power confrontation in eastern Europe, of large-scale tragedy in the Middle East and of military coups and intensified geopolitical competition in Africa show us how the high, hard politics of conflict and peace can no longer be wished away.  For peacebuilding to remain a relevant and effective multilateral tool in this era of renewed realpolitik, it too needs to become more political, and arguably more geo-political.  To do this, peacebuilders might consider a number of avenues.

Adapting

The first avenue is for peacebuilders to recognise that the liberal blueprint for peacebuilding no longer carries the universal currency that it once did. In a recent volume on “adaptive peacebuilding” Cedric de Coning argues that that, in today’s context, peacebuilding initiatives need to become less dependent on broad normative prescriptions from abroad and be grounded more deeply in diverse “historical and political understandings of what constitutes peace”[iv].  In other words, although peace may be a universal aspiration, in practice the concept is increasingly a relative one.  Balancing universalist and relativist approaches will mean addressing difficult questions about the type and quality of peace to be supported – including how “positive” a peace to aim for – and will have implications for upstream decision-makers as much as for programme managers on the ground. And yet, if the peacebuilding is to retain its relevance it will be vital to reflect upon what is feasible, and on what political markets will bear in both donor capitals and in very diverse local, national, and regional power centers in volatile areas around the world.

De-linking

A more (geo-) political peacebuilding might seek to move beyond the widely held perception that there is an intrinsic, reciprocal causal connection between peace and development. This formula has offered a compelling internal logic and carried a pervasive influence over peacebuilding policy and programmes. It suggests that peace provides the conditions of stability needed for long-term development and that, in turn, development creates incentives for peace. In the case of UN, this linkage is highly institutionalised. Kofi Annan himself asserted in 1995 “the crucial importance of economic and social development as the most secure basis for lasting peace”[v], and the linkage was reconfirmed, and broadened, through two UN resolutions in 2016.[vi]  But the peace and development equation essentially implies that peace is the preserve of prosperous, developed states and societies – which, if it were ever the case in reality, is evidently not so anymore. That said, both aims (peace and development) can be important stabilisers each in their own right, and can yield derivative political outcomes over time. Peacebuilders may wish to consider how peace and development can be pursued more flexibly, and possibly independently of one another, in volatile areas. The same can be said about linkages drawn between “state-building” and peace, which have held much sway over peacebuilding in the past[vii].

Broadening analysis

Methodologies of conflict analysis which underpin many peacebuilding initiatives may themselves benefit from a deeper review.  Generally, conflict analysis is used to explain the rationale for an intervention. Yet genuine efforts to discover and to address root causes can often come down to a white-board identification of actors, factors and conflict trees that produce “narrowed-down” contextual snapshots. Because the authors of the analysis are also commonly the proponents of the intervention, this analytical narrowing down frequently supports peacebuilding strategies or project proposals, but rarely submits them to the kind of rigorous political stress-testing that might suggest their postponement, modification or even cancellation.  Broadening and deepening, rather than narrowing the range of conflict analysis – to include such aspects as the historical and political legitimacy of claims, the personality traits and perceptions of belligerent leaders, the evolution of adversarial relations and alliances, and who would stand to gain or lose from the peace – would improve the effectiveness of programmes, including when, and when not, to intervene. Arguably the protagonists of conflict or their sponsors would be approached. Their agreement or refusal to engage in peacebuilding consultations would provide an early clue as to the level of success that can be expected.

De-localising

A broader political view would also helpfully address the issue of “localism”. Peacebuilding initiatives have overwhelmingly focused on addressing internal conflicts, at national and often at a very local level. This is due partly to an enduring legacy of peacebuilding’s early focus on civil wars,  partly to the projectized nature of many peacebuilding efforts and the exclusively national scope of UN Country Team mandates, and partly also to the added challenges of working at regional levels on peacebuilding, including with multiple, potentially recalcitrant national authorities – a “feasibility reflex” of sorts. Yet today few conflicts can be categorised as purely local or national. Increasingly they mesh into a mosaic of regional and international confrontations and proxy relationships involving outside financial and material support, and in several cases foreign fighters.  Agency for peace has become de-localized. To be effective in many conflict settings, peacebuilding will need to contend with multiple layers of political complexity, and the interactions between them. Efforts are being made by the Peacebuilding Fund to regionalise programming in several locations, including with cross-border activities. These include projects involving two or more countries in Central America, West and Central Africa, the Sahel, the Pacific and the Western Balkans. Other UN initiatives have sought to address highly sensitive interstate issues, such as transboundary water management along the Tigris and Euphrates, and support to combat transboundary crime. These initiatives show a recognition of the regional and international relations that influence conflict and peace dynamics and can provide a fertile terrain for drawing specific lessons as part of the PBA review.[viii]  It will also be useful in this connection to look at the potential contributions that can be made by the UN’s Regional Special Political Missions[ix] and the Regional Bureaux of the UN Development Coordination Office.

Anchoring

Peacebuilders may also want to consider the question of what might be called “un-anchored” peacebuilding. Very often initiatives respond to conflicts in contexts where a credible, overarching political strategy, peace agreement, or peace process is not in place or is defunct.  Such practices may be motivated by assessed needs on the ground, by localised theories of change, by resource mobilization requirements or by the reticence of donors and implementing agencies to assume sensitive political positions. But they can result in sizeable, cumulative investments that have little chance of influencing broader systemic peace dynamics.  A prominent example of this is the ill-fated Oslo peace process, where significant international resources continued to be invested over a protracted period in support of peace despite the erosion of its political terms and aims for a final status agreement. Anchoring peacebuilding initiatives more solidly to formalised peace processes could have several advantages, including legitimizing peacebuilding actions in the field, establishing incentive structures to support political agreements to move forward and conditioning peacebuilding support to tangible change.  This could also generate stronger selectivity and focus on hard choices about where and when to invest – or not invest- in peacebuilding interventions.

Leveraging the private sector

In recent years there have been an increase in peacebuilding initiatives seeking to draw public and private sector investments into fragile and conflict-affected areas. Much work is being done outside of the peacebuilding realm to engage with companies to enhance their ability to conduct business activities responsibly and effectively in conflict-affected areas.  This is partly explained by the recognition that companies have an inherent interest in stable markets, but also that the impacts of their business activities in such contexts are not neutral. The increasing interest of peacebuilding actors in this space is driven also in part by decreasing official donor support for peacebuilding.  There is an ongoing debate  as to what can be reasonably  expected of the private sector: some would like to see a focus on companies’ contributions to ‘positive peace’. Normative and legal expectations suggest, however, that companies should focus first and foremost on minimising their negative impacts on violence and conflict. To the extent that specific companies are interested in contributing to peace and stability, experience suggests the need for sequenced approaches: take measures to reduce company impacts on violence and conflict in a first instance, and then take steps to enhance company contributions to peace and stability from there onwards. Peacebuilders may wish to deepen their understanding of the role that businesses (local and international, licit and illicit) play in conflict-affected areas, and design sequenced strategies accordingly to minimise their negative impacts on the conflict, and maximise their positive impacts on peace.

Conclusion

In an increasingly fractured world, peacebuilding is arguably more critical today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And, given increasing difficulties surrounding the UN’s more established instruments, it could become a more central feature in the future global peace and security mix. To be effective in the new era, peacebuilding will need to shed some its traditional assumptions, approaches and practices and adopt new, more political ones which more closely reflect evolving realities – more sensitive to the broader contemporary dynamics of war and peace and the ambitions of its protagonists and sponsors, more discerning of the opportunities and limits for supporting international peace and security, perhaps more hard-nosed, in a word, more (geo-)political. Organizationally, the absorption in 2019 of the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office into its Department of Political Affairs, and calls to link the Peacebuilding Commission more closely with the Security Council, may represent steps in this direction. The upcoming review of the multilateral peacebuilding architecture can also provide an opportunity for difficult but necessary choices about basic assumptions and approaches to be considered by a peacebuilding community increasingly under strain.