Introduction

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

For a treatment of this issue, see Adam Roberts and Dominik Zaum, Selective Security: War and the United Nations Security Council since 1945, Adelphi Paper 395 (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2008).

In addition to a long-standing, though now scaled down, UN presence, the Balkans ‘peacebuilding laboratory’ has housed five Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) missions, two EU Police Missions and two major military deployments by NATO. NATO's Stabilisation Force in Bosnia (SFOR), which deployed following the Dayton Peace Accord, was replaced in December 2004 by an EU military operation, EUFOR, whose troop strength, initially above 6,000, was just above 2,000 in March 2009.

Stephen Jackson, ‘The UN Operation in Burundi (ONUB) – Political and Strategic Lessons Learned’, External Study for UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations Best Practices Section, July 2006, p. 1.

League of Nations activities that would have been covered by the UN's broad definition of ‘peacebuilding’ include its role in administering the Saar and the city of Danzig following the Treaty of Versailles, its involvement in largescale refugee repatriation in Russia in 1920–21, and the efforts it made to address the consequences of continued violence between Greece and Turkey in 1922–26. The League also established a Minorities Section and undertook a series of investigations aimed at resolving disputes between states. For an overview of the League's role as a precursor to the UN in the field of peacekeeping, which persuasively argues that ‘the League deserves much more credit than it generally receives’, see Alan James, ‘The Peacekeeping Role of the League of Nations’, International Peacekeeping, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 155–60.

Michael Doyle, Ian Johnstone and Robert Orr, ‘Introduction’, in M. Doyle, I. Johnstone and R. Orr (eds), Keeping the Peace: Multinational UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2. Doyle, Johnstone and Orr made this observation in relation to the UN's Cambodia operation in 1992 and 1993, but it accurately captures the broad aims and aspirations of other missions as well.

Renata Dwan and Sharon Wiharta, ‘Multilateral Peace Missions: Challenges of Peacebuilding’, in SIPRI Yearbook 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 146.

James Mayall (ed.), The New Interventionism, 1991–94 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

For discussion of whether or not a ‘solidarist’ consensus has emerged in international relations, see Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell (eds), Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), especially the Introduction and Chapter 1.

UN General Assembly, ‘2005 World Summit Outcome’, A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005, paragraph 139. Thomas Weiss, for example, has argued that ‘with the possible exception of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than “the responsibility to protect”’. Thomas Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 1.

David Curran and Tom Woodhouse, ‘Cosmopolitan Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: What can Africa Contribute?, International Affairs, vol. 83, no. 6, November 2007, pp. 1,055–70.

Adam Roberts, ‘Humanitarian Principles in International Politics in the 1990s’, in Humanitarian Studies Unit, ECHO (ed), Reflections on Humanitarian Action: Principles, Ethics and Contradictions (London: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 23.

For an excellent assessment of contemporary patterns of intervention in world politics which strikes a careful balance between interestbased and normative motivations, see S. Neil MacFarlane, Intervention in Contemporary World Politics, Adelphi Paper 350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2002).

Dwan and Wiharta, ‘Multilateral Peace Missions: Challenges of Peacebuilding’.

See European Military Capabilities: Building Armed Forces for Modern Operations, IISS Strategic Dossier (London: IISS, 2008), pp. 13 and 117; and Nora Bensahel, ‘Organising for Nation-Building’, Survival, vol. 49, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 43–76.

Kirsten Soder, ‘Multilateral Peace Operations in 2008’, SIPRI Yearbook 2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 117. On the steady growth in peace operations since 2005, including non-UN missions, see also the annual review of global peace operations prepared by the Center for International Cooperation in New York. According to the centre's most recent survey, the ‘global peace-operations footprint’ increased by 8.7% in 2008. Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2009 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner for the Center on International Cooperation, 2009).

Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2008 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner for the Center on International Cooperation, 2008), pp. 101–2. The proposed strength of the EU force in Chad and the CAR is 3,700.

‘NATO After Istanbul’, NATO Public Diplomacy Division, no date.

‘Testimony of General John P. Abizaid, Commander, United States Central Command, before the 108^th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee’, 25 September 2003, available at GlobalSecurity.org, p. 4.

For an overview of some of these efforts, see Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown, Greater Than the Sum of its Parts? Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches to Fragile States (New York: International Peace Academy, 2007).

UN General Assembly, ‘2005 World Summit Outcome’, A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005. The origins and role of the PBC are discussed more fully in Chapter 3.

Philip Windsor, ‘The Future of Strategic Studies’, unpublished paper, no date, p. 1.

Windsor, ‘The Future of Strategic Studies’, p. 1.

For an idea of the variety of meanings and connotations that the term ‘peacebuilding’ has acquired, see also Michael Barnett, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O'Donnell and Laura Sitea, ‘Peacebuilding: What is in a Name?’, Global Governance, vol. 13, no. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 35–58.

United Nations, ‘An Agenda for Peace’, Report of the Secretary-General, A/47/277-S/24111, 17 June 1992, paragraph 21.

For the most recent such debate in the Security Council, held in May 2008 at the initiative of the UK, see Security Council 5895^th Meeting, UN Document S/PV.5895, 20 May 2008.

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

Elizabeth M. Cousens, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar (eds), Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 10.

Ibid., p. 13.

Mats Berdal, ‘Beyond Greed and Grievance – and not too soon…’, Review of International Studies, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 687–98.

United Nations, ‘Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations’, A/55/305, 21 August 2000, paragraph 13.

In certain areas of policy intervention – a prime example being that of DDR – the seemingly logical commitment to a sequential approach (i.e. disarmament followed by demobilisation followed by reintegration) has often run counter to the political dynamics of the postconflict environment, with destabilising consequences. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 2.

Again, this is at odds with the position found in some of the peacebuilding literature. Taisier M. Ali and Robert Matthews, for example, introduce a series of African case studies with the observation that ‘the success or failure of peacebuilding is not likely to be determined in the two to three years that follow a negotiated settlement’. The view taken here is that while success may not be determined during this period, post-Cold War experience suggests clearly that failure may. Taisier M. Ali and Robert O. Matthews (eds), Durable Peace: Challenges for Peacebuilding in Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

One aspect of the dilemma that has received much attention in the literature is the role of elections in post-conflict environments. As Nancy Bermeo reminds us, ‘elections are easily idealized as arenas in which conflicts are resolved, but they can exacerbate conflict as well’. Post-conflict or transitional justice is another area of outside policy intervention where hard choices have had to be made, for example where the provision of amnesties has sometimes been deemed necessary for peace processes to stay afloat. Bermeo, ‘What the Democratization Literature Says – or Doesn'st Say – about Postwar Democratization’, Global Governance, vol. 9, no. 2, April– June 2003, p. 165.

Phil Williams and John T. Picarelli, ‘Combating Organized Crime in Armed Conflict’, in Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke (eds), Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimensions of Civil War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p. 127.

Cindy Fazey, ‘Responding to the Opium Dilemma’, in Robert I. Rothberg (ed), Building a New Afghanistan (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007).

Private communication with government official, November 2008.

Ali A. Jalabi, ‘Legacy of War and the Challenge of Peacebuilding’, in Rothberg (ed), Building a New Afghanistan, p. 47. According to the UN's annual opium survey, some 8,200 tonnes of opium were produced in Afghanistan in 2007. This represents a 34% increase on 2006, and makes the country ‘practically the exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug’. See UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007’, August 2007.

David Spivack (ed.), ‘Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of Morphine and Other Essential Medicines’, commissioned by the Senlis Council, 3^rd edition, January 2006, p. 22. See also ‘US Policy in Afghanistan: Senlis Council Recommendations’, February 2008, http://www.icosgroup.net/documents/us_policy_recommendations.pdf. (NB the International Council on Security and Development was previously known as the Senlis Council.)

Jalabi, ‘Legacy of War and the Challenge of Peacebuilding’, p. 48.

Conversation with government official.

Fazey, ‘Responding to the Opium Dilemma’, pp. 178–204.

Leszek Kolakowski, ‘The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society’, in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 163.

Among the issues and challenges associated with ‘post-conflict’ interventions that cannot be examined in depth here, transitions from war to peace raise complex macro- and microeconomic issues relating to the reconstruction of war-torn economies. For an excellent contribution on this subject, see Gracianna del Castillo, Rebuilding War-torn States: The Challenge of Post-Conflict Economic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

This point is made by Hilary Synnott, regional coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority in southern Iraq for six months in 2003, who has argued that ‘the experience acquired by those who dealt with … Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia Sierra Leone, East Timor and Afghanistan, has much in common with that gained in Iraq’. Synnott, ‘The Coalition Provisional Authority in Southern Iraq’, unpublished paper, 2005, p. 5. The paper is an extended version of Synnott, ‘State Building in Southern Iraq’, Survival, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer 2005. See also Synnott, Bad Days in Basra (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

Ioan Lewis and James Mayall, ‘Somalia’, in Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism, 1991–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 137.

Hugh Seton-Watson, Neither War nor Peace: The Struggle for Power in the Post-War World (London: Methuen & Co, 1960), p. 13.