Chapter Three: Organisational and Policy Responses to the Peacebuilding Challenge: The Case of the UN and its Peacebuilding Commission

Abstract

The widespread practice of intervention by outside actors aimed at building ‘sustainable peace’ within societies ravaged by war has been a striking feature of the post-Cold War era. But, at a time when more peacekeepers are deployed around the world than at any other point in history, is the international will to intervene beginning to wane? And how capable are the systems that exist for planning and deploying ‘peacebuilding’ missions of fulfilling the increasingly complex tasks set for them?

In Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal addresses these and other crucial questions, examining the record of interventions from Cambodia in the early 1990s to contemporary efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book analyses the nature of the modern peacebuilding environment, in particular the historical and psychological conditions that shape it, and addresses the key tasks faced by outside forces in the early and critical ‘post-conflict’ phase of an intervention. In doing so, it asks searching questions about the role of military force in support of peacebuilding, and the vital importance of legitimacy to any intervention.

Berdal also looks critically at the ways in which governments and international organisations, particularly the UN, have responded to these many challenges. He highlights the pivotal role of politics in planning peacebuilding operations, and offers some sober reflections on the future prospects for post-conflict intervention.

Notes

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ‘Address to the General Assembly’, 23 September 2003.

UN General Assembly, ‘2005 World Summit Outcome’, A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005 (henceforth ‘Outcome Document’). For the last-minute negotiations leading up to the summit and its near-failure, see James Traub, The Best Intentions (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), pp. 381–95.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, A/59/565, 2 December 2004. For a critical, though fundamentally sympathetic, assessment of ‘A More Secure World’ and the work of the High-Level Panel, see Berdal, ‘Reconciling the Irreconcilable?’, in Behind the Headlines, vol. 62, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–7.

See UN Security Council Resolution 1645, 20 December 2005, S/Res/1645; ‘Report of the Peacebuilding Commission on its First Session’, A/62/137-S/2007/458, 25 July 2007.

‘Report of the Peacebuilding Commission on its First Session’, Annex V.

‘Outcome Document’, paragraph 97.

‘Report of the Peacebuilding Commission on its First Session’, paragraph 32.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, paragraph 264.

For the enabling resolution creating the PBC, see UN Security Council Resolution 1645, 20 December 2005, S/Res/1645, para. 2(a).

UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, ‘Monthly Summary of Military and Police Contribution to United Nations Operations’, accessible from http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/contributors/index.shtml.

United Nations, ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’, paragraphs 10–14.

For a useful and more analytical overview of the subject, see Chandra Lekha Sriram and Karin Wermester (eds), From Promise to Practice: Strengthening UN Capacities for the Prevention of Violent Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

See, for example, the Swedish government's persistent advocacy and promotion of ‘structural conflict prevention’. ‘Preventing Violent Conflict – A Swedish Action Plan’, UN Info, no. 5:1, 1999; and private communication.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, paragraph 264.

Ibid., paragraph 267.

The need for a ‘permanent capacity’ to provide strategic-level coordination was also recognised by the Brahimi Panel, though it made no specific suggestion for remedying the deficiency. See United Nations, ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’, paragraph 47(d).

Martin Barber, ‘Humanitarian Crises and Peace Operations: A Personal View of UN Reforms During Kofi Annan's First Term’, Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, p. 389.

‘Delivering as One: Report of the Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence’, 9 November 2006, paragraph 10.

Ibid.

‘Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization 1998’, A/53/1, paragraph 65.

NATO's operation in Afghanistan since 2003 has, notwithstanding the many communiqués stressing commonality of purpose and unity of effort, been marked by underlying tensions among allies over the strategic direction and priorities of the Alliance in the country.

Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches to Fragile States, p. 10. Even where there is ‘underlying consensus’, tensions and disagreements between departments on operational matters often bedevil implementation on the ground. See for example criticism from Brigadier David Richards, commander of UK forces in Sierra Leone at the time, of the Ministry of Defence, the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office over their ‘evident differences of opinion’ during Operation Palliser in May 2000. D.J. Richards, ‘Operation Palliser’, Journal of the Royal Artillery, vol. 127, no. 2, Autumn 2000, p. 15.

Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches to Fragile States, p. 9.

Stuart Gordon, ‘Pursuing Joined-Up Government: The MOD's “Comprehensive Approach”: A New Philosopher's Stone?’, World Defence Systems, vol. 1, 2009, p. 163.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 164–5.

Ibid., p. 165.

Ibid., p. 166. As for the ‘pools’ of funding – the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool and the Global Prevention Pool – they have, as Patrick and Brown make clear, proved at best a qualified success, with the latter in particular prone to being ‘raided by other departments, particularly the FCO and the MoD, which seek flexible, unallocated funds to finance pressing contingencies’. Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches to Fragile States, p. 23; private communication.

Theo Farrell and Stuart Gordon, ‘COIN Machine: The British Military in Afghanistan’, RUSI Journal, June 2009.

Ibid., and Bensahel, ‘Organising for Nation-Building’, p. 49.

Private communication.

See the thoughtful and informative overview of the difficulties and attempts made since 2004–05 to tackle them in Bensahel, ‘Organising for Nation-Building’, pp. 43–76. In the British case, relations among the three relevant departments probably reached a nadir in connection with the Iraq conflict, during both the preparations for the invasion and the subsequent post-invasion activities in the south of the country. See Synnott, Bad Days in Basra, especially pp. 131–49.

Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches to Fragile States, p. 10. For a detailed assessment and generally candid recognition of the profound inadequacies of the United States' inter-agency process for supporting ‘overseas contingency operations’, see Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, ‘Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience’. See also ‘Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction: Quarterly Report to the US Congress’, 30 April 2009.

Bensahel, ‘Organising for State-Building’, pp. 61–2. In fact, as Bensahel recalls, relations are so poorly defined that the Commission has sued the Council in the European Court of Justice in a challenge to ‘the role of security policy in what it considers to be development activities’. See also Per M. Norheim-Martinsen, ‘Matching Ambition with Institutional Innovation: the EU's Comprehensive Approach and Civil–Military Organisation’, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Report, FFIrapport 2009/01311, 3 July 2009.

For more on this point, see Pouligny, ‘Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Ambiguities of International Programmes Aimed at Building “New” Societies’, Security Dialogue, vol. 36, no. 4, 2005. See also Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, pp. 67–81.

Pouligny, ‘Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Ambiguities of International Programmes Aimed at Building “New” Societies’, p. 496.

This problem was clearly set out, with suggestions for how it might be resolved, by the Brahimi Panel in its section on ‘Logistics Support, the Procurement Process and Expenditure Management’. See United Nations, ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’, paragraphs 151–69.

The ACABQ is a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly responsible for scrutinising budgets submitted by the secretary-general.

Thant Myint-U and Amy Scott, The UN Secretariat: A Brief History, 1945 – 2006 (New York: International Peace Academy, 2007), p. 15.

‘Putting Decisions into Practice: How Will the UN Peacebuilding Commission Fulfil its Mandate?’, Report on Wilton Park Conference WPS06/2, 9–10 February 2006, p. 2.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, paragraph 228.

‘Report of the Peacebuilding Commission on its First Session’, paragraph 29.

‘Discussion Paper on HLP Recommendation to Establish a PBC’, prepared by the Center on International Cooperation for a 17 January 2005 meeting hosted by the governments of Denmark and Tanzania (henceforth ‘CIC Discussion Paper’), p. 3.

‘CIC Discussion Paper’, p. 8. The HLP itself did not provide a figure but was clearly anxious to avoid too large and unwieldy a configuration.

UN, ‘Secretary-General Proposes Strategy for UN Reform to General Assembly’, press release, SG/SM/9770, 21 March 2005.

‘Outcome Document’, paragraph 105.

‘Putting Decisions into Practice: How Will the UN Peacebuilding Commission Fulfil its Mandate?’, paragraph 8.

‘In Larger Freedom: Towards Security, Development and Human Rights for All’, Report of the Secretary-General for Decision by Heads of State and Government in September 2005, paragraph 114.

Ibid., paragraph 115.

Muchkund Dubey, ‘Comments on the HLP’, in ‘Reforming the UN for Peace and Security: Proceedings of a Workshop to Analyze the Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change’, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, March 2005, p. 65.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, paragraph 225.

Interviews with staff of the PBSO, New York, August 2007.

See ‘Statement on Behalf of the Caucus of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Peacebuilding Commission’, 10 October 2007.

Statement of Ambassador Stafford Neil (Jamaica), Chairman of G77, at General Assembly meeting on the recommendations of the HLP, New York, 27 January 2005, p. 2, http://www.g77.org/Speeches/012705.htm.

See Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (eds), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention (Tokyo/New York: United Nations University Press, 2000), especially essays in Part IV (‘Selected International Perspectives’).

Thakur, ‘Towards a Less Imperfect World: The Gulf Between the North and South’, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Dialogue on Globalization Briefing Papers no. 4, April 2008, p. 5. Thakur's paper offers a telling and valuable insight into the strength of feeling within the global South on these and related issues, making the valid point that concerns and sentiments expressed by developing countries are often poorly understood and too often dismissed as retrograde, outmoded or irrelevant by countries in the North.

Dubey, ‘Comments on the HLP’, p. 65.

‘In Larger Freedom’, paragraph 116 (my emphasis).

Ibid.

This is very much in line with a more general and long-standing concern, voiced by the G77 in its formal response to the HLP, that the ‘location of development issues within the confines of security threats and prevention strategies would lead to an undesirable alteration in the balance of responsibilities between the various organs of the system. It would contribute to increased concentration of power in the hands of the Security Council and further undermine the role of the Economic and Social Council.’ See Neil, Chairman of G77, at General Assembly meeting on the recommendations of the HLP, New York, 27 January 2005, p. 2.

Letter from Ambassador J. Bolton on Peacebuilding Commission, 29 August 2005, http://www.reformtheun.org/index.php?module=uploads&fun c=download&fileId=810. See also John Bolton, Surrender is Not Option: Defending America at the United Nations (New York: Threshold Editions, 2007), pp. 229–30.

‘Outcome Document’, paragraph 98.

Edward Luck, ‘How Not to Reform the UN’, Global Governance, vol. 11, no. 4, 2004, p. 407.

Ibid., p. 408.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 409.

Mark Malloch Brown, ‘Can the UN be Reformed?’, speech to the annual meeting of the Academic Council on the UN System, 7 June 2007, copy at http://www.maximsnews.com/107mnunjune18markmallochbrownunitedna tionsreform.htm.

Ibid. The upshot has been that seemingly uncontroversial and sensible proposals (notably in the area of management) that had already been endorsed by leaders at the summit ‘went down in flames at once or through less dramatic, but no less lethal, attrition over time’.

For more on this see Traub, The Best Intentions, pp. 394–5.

Malloch Brown, ‘Can the UN be Reformed?’.

There is no evidence to suggest that Bolton ever departed from the views on the UN and its place in US foreign policy expressed in his article ‘The Creation, Fall, Rise, and Fall of the United Nations’ in Ted Carpenter (ed.), Delusions of Grandeur: the UN and Global Intervention (Washington DC: CATO Institute Publication, 1997). See also Bolton, Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations, Chapter 7.

For the proposals, see UN General Assembly, ‘Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Outcomes of the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic, Social and Related Fields’, A/60/692, 7 March 2006.

Laura Trevelyan, ‘The UN's Management Crisis’, BBC News, 4 May 2006, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4972490.stm.

‘Secretary-General Proposes Strategy for UN Reform to General Assembly, Giving Equal Weight to Development, Security, Human Rights’, press release, SG/SM9770, 22 March 2005.

Luck, ‘How Not to Reform the UN’, p. 409.

James S. Sutterlin, ‘Some Thoughts – Mostly Cautionary – on the Recommendations of the HLP’, in Reforming the UN for Peace and Security, p. 180.

Statement by H.R. Nirupam Sen, Permanent Mission of India to the UN, to the UN General Assembly on Agenda Item 149, New York, February 2007. This sense of drift and limited progress on substance is confirmed by the author's private communications.

Sen, ‘Statement on the Report of the Peacebuilding Commission and the Report of the Secretary-General on the Peacebuilding Fund at the 62^nd Session of the UN General Assembly’, 10 October 2007, http://www.un.int/india/2007/ind1347.pdf.

Sen, Statement on the Report of the Peacebuilding Commission, 9 October 2008.

The formula for membership of the Organisational Committee eventually arrived at was: seven Security Council members (including the P5), seven members elected by ECOSOC, seven members elected by the General Assembly, five top providers of assessed and voluntary contributions to UN budgets and funds, programmes and agencies, and five top providers of civilian and military personnel to UN missions.

See ‘The UN Peacebuilding Commission: Getting Down to Work’, Quaker UN Office Briefing Papers, vol.26, no. 3, May–July 2007.

Jayantha Dhanapala, address to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 17 July 2006.

Luck, ‘Power, Reform, and the Future of the UN’, Vanguardia Dossier, no. 14, February–March 2005, p. 10.

‘A More Secure World – Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, paragraph 241.

Ibid.

UN Peacebuilding Commission, ‘Peacebuilding Support Office’, http://www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding/pbso.shtml.

‘Peacebuilding Commission’, Special Research Report, Security Council Report, no. 3, 23 June 2006.

In this context, as international-relations analyst Dominik Zaum has observed, it is significant that ‘some countries and other parts of the UN system have been very uneasy about engaging with the PBC’. This has notably been the case in regard to Timor Leste, where both the government and the UN peacekeeping mission ‘fought tooth and claw to prevent Timor from being put onto the PBC agenda … fearing it might lead to a premature closure of UNMIT, and were wary of the added reporting arrangements and bureaucracy that it would have involved’. Author correspondence with Zaum, 3 August 2009.

Carolyn McAskie, ‘The International Peacebuilding Challenge’, the Lloyd Shaw Lecture in Public Affairs, Dalhousie University, 22 November 2007, p. 12. McAskie was succeeded by Jane Holl Lute in August 2008, though she left, after a brief spell, for a position in the Obama administration. Adding to the existing problems, this left the PBSO leaderless, some would say rudderless, at a critical time in its consolidation process. Judy Cheng-Hopkins was appointed her successor on 17 August 2009.

‘Officials Hail “Historic” Inaugural Session of UN Peacebuilding Commission’, UN News Center, 23 June 2006.

‘Peacebuilding Commission’, Security Council Report, no. 5, 17 October 2008, p. 13.

For a useful overview of the problems as seen from the field, see ‘Command From the Saddle: Managing UN Peacebuilding Missions’, Recommendations Report of the Forum on the SRSG: Shaping the UN's Role in Peace Implementation, FAFO, Oslo, January 1999, pp. 42–5.

‘Peacebuilding Fund Terms of Reference’, A/60/984, 22 August 2006.

‘PBF Emergency Window: Guidelines’, Peacebuilding Support Office, 2007. It should be added that the funds approved under the ‘emergency window’ to date (just over $10 million) are very modest indeed.

See UN Peacebuilding Fund, ‘UN Peacebuilding Fund: Bridging the Gap Between Conflict and Recovery’, http://www.unpbf.org/index.shtml for a detailed breakdown of pledges and commitments made.

‘Peacebuilding Commission’, Security Council Report, no. 5, 17 October 2008, p. 13.

See the US Department of Defense definition of ‘operational level of war’, available at http://usmilitary.about.com/od/glossarytermso/g/o4531.htm.

At a meeting of the Organisational Committee in early September 2009 it was observed that ‘the Commission had yet to develop its own rules of procedure and working methods which would contribute to the efficacy of its work’. See ‘Peacebuilding Commission's Organisational Committee Adopts Draft Report for Third Session’, UN press release, 4 September 2009.

Organisational Committee, Second Session, Summary Record of the Second Part of the 7^th Meeting, General Assembly/Security Council, PBC/2/OC/SR.7/Add.1, 12 August 2008, p. 5.

‘Peacebuilding Commission’, Security Council Report, no. 5, 17 October 2008, p. 12.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, The United Nations: Sacred Drama (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 14.

‘Strengthening the strategic focus of PBF funding’ was also a principal recommendation of a comprehensive donor-commissioned evaluation of the Peacebuilding Fund released in June 2009. Nicole Ball and Mariska van Beijnum, ‘Review of Peacebuilding Fund’, 4 June 2009, http://www.unpbf.org/docs/PBF_Review.pdf.

‘IPI Task Forces on Strengthening Multilateral Security Capacity’, report of International Peace Academy, Task Force II, June 2008.

UN Peacebuilding Fund, ‘Priority Plan for the UN Peacebuilding Fund – Guinea–Bissau’, 24 June 2008, http://www.unpbf.org/docs/PBF_Guinea_Bissau_Priority_Plan_(English_24Jun2008).pdf.

Private communications.

‘Central African Republic: Anatomy of a Phantom State’, International Crisis Group Report no. 136, 13 December 2007. For the priorities, see General Assembly, ‘PBC Endorses Integrated Strategy for Long-Term Development’, PBC/49, 6 May 2009.

General Assembly, ‘Peacebuilding Commission CAR Configuration 3^rd Meeting’, PBC/49, 6 May 2009.

Private communication.

Helander, ‘Civilians, Security and Social Services in North-East Somalia’, p. 202.

‘Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, at the Opening of the Ministerial Meeting of the Nonaligned Movement Coordinating Bureau’, 29 May 2006.

See for example the telling opening remarks by the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, ‘At the Opening of the Thematic Dialogue of the General Assembly on the Responsibility to Protect’, UN, New York, 23 July 2009, http://www0.un.org/ga/president/63/statements/openingr2p230709.shtml. See also ‘Responsibility to Protect: An Idea whose Time has Come – and Gone?’, Economist, 23 July 2009.

Thakur, ‘Towards a Less Imperfect World: The Gulf Between the North and South’, p. 2.

See statements made by China and Russia in January 2007 explaining their use of the veto to prevent Security Council censure of Myanmar's military junta, and similar statements made in July 2008 when vetoing a draft resolution calling for sanctions against Zimbabwe. See also their position in the Human Rights Council's special session on Sri Lanka in May 2009. See ‘Provisional Verbatim Record, Security Council, 5619 Meeting’, S/PV.5619, 12 January 2007; ‘China and Russia Veto Zimbabwe Sanctions’, Guardian, 12 July 2008.

S. Neil Macfarlane, ‘The “R” in BRICs: is Russia an Emerging Power?’, International Affairs, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006, p. 56.

As Rana Mitter, writing in 2003, has argued: ‘China signs up to the current consensus in large part on an instrumentalist basis, calculating that there are concrete and symbolic benefits to be gained from doing so, rather than from any widespread conversion to solidarist values within the policy-making classes. As long as the maintenance of a party state is paramount, there will always be a significant barrier in the way of internalisation of those values’. Rana Mitter, ‘An Uneasy Engagement: Chinese Idea of Global Order and Justice in a Historical Perspective’, in Foot, Gaddis and Hurrell (eds), Order and Justice in International Relations, p. 225.

‘Kosovo's Fragile Transition’, International Crisis Group Report, 25 September 2008. See also Zaum, ‘Lessons from State-Building in Kosovo’, Institute for Public Policy Research, September 2009.