A Perpetual (Liberal) Peace? An Empirical Assessment of an Enduring Peacebuilding Model

ABSTRACT

How has the local turn approach been translated within peacebuilding mission mandates? Novelties introduced by International and Regional Organizations’ strategic documents shape a new approach termed ‘local turn’ (LT) in the literature, which envisages a more context-sensitive peacebuilding focused on resilience and local ownership. While finding significant potential, academic debate describes LT as a strategic adaptation of the liberal peace paradigm, functional to the provision of means for a pragmatic retreat from (over)ambitious goals. The study builds on this by focusing on a rather unexplored type of primary source: mission mandates. Through automated text analysis, we trace the consistency of liberal peace and local turn features in the United Nations and European Union peacebuilding mandates over the past two decades. The results confirm a detachment between policy orientations versus goals and instruments already at the level of mandates and highlight traits of systematicity in the utilitarian use of LT as an exit strategy. This study enriches the literature on UN and EU peacebuilding and paves the way for further research on policy change in post-conflict reconstruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• local turn
• text analysis
• United Nations
• European Union

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the SISP (Italian Political Science Association) annual convention in September 2022. We would like to thank Valerio Vignoli, Fabrizio Coticchia, Marco Di Giulio, Giampiero Cama, Oscar Mateos Martín, Matteo Mazziotti di Celso, Edoardo Corradi, the editor, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions, which contributed to substantially improving the paper. All errors and omissions remain our own.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available for review in figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22122734.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Belloni and Moro, “Stability and Stability Operations.”

2 Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making Versus the Liberal Peace.”

3 Autesserre, Peaceland.

4 Chandler, “International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience.”

5 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building.”

6 Mahmoud, “How can the UN Sustaining Peace Agenda Live Up to its Potential?”; Richmond, “The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture”; de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding.”

7 Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism”; Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality”; Paffenholz, “Perpetual Peacebuilding”; Randazzo, “The Limits of Rethinking Peacebuilding”; Baldaro and Costantini, “Fragility and Resilience in the European Union’s Security Strategy”; Belloni and Costantini, “From Liberal Statebuilding to Counterinsurgency and Stabilization.”

8 Randazzo, “The Limits of Rethinking Peacebuilding.”

9 Chandler, “International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience,” 277.

10 Randazzo, “The Limits of Rethinking Peacebuilding”; de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding.”

11 Autesserre, Peaceland; Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality”; Paffenholz, “Perpetual Peacebuilding.”

12 As briefly mentioned above, the term local turn must be strictly intended as an academic label, which therefore does not characterize the official jargon of the organizations under scrutiny. The term is used to describe the push by international decision-makers for local inclusion and localisation of global peacebuilding efforts.

13 For a similar analysis of UN peacekeeping mandates see Amicarelli and Di Salvatore, “Introducing the PeaceKeeping Operations Corpus (PKOC).”

14 ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect.

15 Raineri, La crisi libica e l’ordine internazionale.

16 Cavalcante, Peacebuilding in the United Nations.

17 “An Agenda for Peace.”

18 Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”; Panebianco, Guerrieri Democratici.

19 Coticchia and Catanzaro, “The Fog of Words,” 435.

20 Hermann, “Changing Course.”

21 Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.”

22 Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism”; Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions.

23 Goodhand and Sedra, “Rethinking Liberal Peacebuilding,” 239.

24 United Nations, “In Larger Freedom.”

25 Hall, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State,” 279.

26 Coticchia and Catanzaro, “The Fog of Words.”

27 Chandler, “The Uncritical Critique of ‘Liberal Peace’.”

28 Selby, “The Myth of Liberal Peace-building.”

29 Tardy, “The European Union and UN Peace Operations.”

30 Council of the European Union, European Security Strategy, 12.

31 Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now for the Critique of the Liberal Peace?”

32 Peacebuilding Support Office, “UN Peacebuilding.”

33 Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans.

34 Raineri, La crisi libica e l’ordine internazionale.

35 Paffenholz, “Perpetual Peacebuilding.”

36 Amin, “Peace Agreement between the United States and the Taliban.”

37 Öjendal et al., “Peacebuilding Admist Violence,” 270.

38 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding.”

39 United Nations, “Uniting Our Strengths for Peace,” 8.

40 Ibid., 12.

41 High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “EU’s Global Strategy,” 19.

42 Henceforth by strategic documents we refer to the written outcome of the decision-makers' deliberation, which by matching means to ends also sets broader parameters for action, see Doyle and Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding.”

43 United Nations, “The Future of United Nations Peace Operations,” 2.

44 United Nations, “Our Common Agenda,” 59.

45 High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “EU’s Global Strategy,” 8.

46 Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-making versus the Liberal Peace.”

47 Donais, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership.

48 Chadwick, Debiel, and Gadinger, “Relational Sensibility and the ‘Turn to the Local’.”

49 Autesserre, Peaceland.

50 Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building.”

51 Lederach, Preparing for Peace; Lederach, Building Peace.

52 Richmond, “The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture.”

53 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding,” 304.

54 United Nations, “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace.”

55 United Nations, “Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace”.

56 Ibid., 1.

57 High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “EU’s Global Strategy,” 16.

58 European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “EU’s Contribution to Rules-based Multilateralism,” 4.

59 Saul, “Local Ownership of Post-conflict Reconstruction in International Law.”

60 European Commission, “The EU Approach to Resilience.”

61 Baldaro and Costantini, “Fragility and Resilience in the European Union’s Security Strategy.”

62 Hellmüller, “The Ambiguities of Local Ownership.”

63 Daugbjerg and Kay, “Policy Feedback and Pathways.”

64 For a review of (foreign) policy change theories, see Brummer et al., Foreign Policy as Public Policy?

65 Mahmoud, “How can the UN Sustaining Peace Agenda Live Up to its Potential?”

66 Richmond, “The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture.”

67 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding.”

68 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power.

69 Autesserre, “The Crisis of Peacekeeping: Why the UN can’t End Wars.”

70 Paffenholz, “Perpetual Peacebuilding,” 377.

71 Torrent, “Scrutinising UN Peacebuilding,” 212.

72 Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality,” 38.

73 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding.”

74 Muggah, Stabilization Operations, Security and Development.

75 Belloni and Costantini, “From Liberal Statebuilding to Counterinsurgency and Stabilization.”

76 Tholens, “Practices of Intervention.”

77 Karlsrud, “From Liberal Peacebuilding to Stabilization and Counterterrorism.”

78 Muggah, Stabilization Operations, Security and Development, 244.

79 de Coning, “Adaptive Peacebuilding”; Randazzo, “The Limits of Rethinking Peacebuilding.”

80 Autesserre, Peaceland; Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality”; Paffenholz, “Perpetual Peacebuilding”; Karlsrud, “From Liberal Peacebuilding to Stabilization and Counterterrorism.”

81 Hellmüller, Tan, and Bara, “What is in a Mandate?”

82 Hanania, “The Humanitarian Turn at the UNSC,” 667.

83 Autesserre, “International Peacebuilding and Local Success.”

84 Boulden, “Mandates Matter,” 150.

85 Security Council Report, “Is Christmas Really Over?” 2.

86 Autesserre, Peaceland, 25.

87 Ibid., 278.

88 Boulden, “Mandates Matter”; Sharland, “How Peacekeeping Policy Gets Made.”

89 Blair, Di Salvatore, and Smidt, “When do UN Peacekeeping Operations Implement their Mandates?”

90 Sharland, “How Peacekeeping Policy Gets Made,” 19.

91 Di Salvatore and Ruggeri, “Effectiveness of Peacekeeping Operations.”

92 Baldaro and Costantini, “Fragility and Resilience in the European Union’s Security Strategy.”

93 United Nations, “Our Common Agenda.”

94 NATO, “NATO 2022 Strategic Concept.”

95 Council of the European Union, “Strategic Compass.”

96 The complete list of mandates is available in Table 5 (for UN), and Table 8 (for EU) in Appendix.

97 Biscop, “The EU Global Strategy.”

98 Coticchia and Davidson, “The Limits of Radical Parties in Coalition Foreign Policy.”

99 Baturo, Dasandi, and Mikhaylov, “Understanding State Preferences with Text as Data.”

100 Hanania, “The Humanitarian Turn at the UNSC.”

101 Hellmüller, Tan, and Bara, “What is in a Mandate?”

102 Vignoli, “Text as Data.”

103 Laver, “Measuring Policy Positions in Political Space,” 218.

104 Curini and Vignoli, “Committed Moderates and Uncommitted Extremists,” 8.

105 Benoit, “Text as Data,” 475–6.

106 Grimmer and Stewart, “Text as Data,” 284.

107 Benoit, “Text as Data,” 476.

108 Hanania, “The Humanitarian Turn at the UNSC.”

109 Watanabe and Zhou, “Theory-driven Analysis of Large Corpora.”

110 We use the package “seededlda” for the software R, by Watanabe and Zhou.,based on the package by Benoit et al., “Quanteda.” and the library by Xuan-Hieu and Cam-Tu, “GibbsLDA++: A C/C++ Implementation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).”, for semi-supervised topic modeling.

111 Curini and Vignoli, “Committed Moderates and Uncommitted Extremists,” 8.

112 Tardy, “The European Union and UN Peace Operations.”

113 Pre-processing of the corpora, including seed words’ selection, is described in depth in Appendix.

114 The seed words are presented and has been used stemmed to address word variation in text data and to enhance the analysis and interpretation of the topics generated.

115 United Nations, “An Agenda for Peace.”

116 United Nations, “In Larger Freedom.”

117 Council of the European Union, European Security Strategy.

118 United Nations, “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace.”

119 United Nations, “Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace.”

120 High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “EU’s Global Strategy.”

121 The lists of topic words for both corpora, see Table 1 and Table 2 in Appendix.

122 For mission-level detail data, see Table 7 and Figures from 1 to 24 in Appendix.

123 Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance.

124 Such distinction is in part assimilable to the one proposed by Hellmüller, Tan, and Bara, “What is in a Mandate?” between maximalist and moderate missions.

125 See SG Report S/278 (2002), art.98 on the situation in Afghanistan, as recalled by S/RES/1401 (2002).

126 See S/RES/1483 (2003), art.1. which set out the role of UN in Iraq, as recalled by S/RES/1500 (2003), authorizing UN mission in Iraq.

127 United Nations (2010). The New Horizon Initiative: Progress Report No. 1, 46. Available at http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/newhorizon_update01.pdf.

128 S/RES/2102 (2013), art.2.

129 S/RES/2524 (2020), art.3.

130 S/RES/2005 (2011), art.2.

131 S/RES/1959 (2010), art.6.

132 Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality.”

133 S/RES/1662 (2006), art.8.

134 London Conference on Afghanistan, “The Afghanistan Compact.”

135 S/RES/1974 (2011), 3.

136 A description of the Transition (Inteqal) Process is available at: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_87183.htm.

137 A description of the Transformation Decade is available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/bonn-ii-transition-transformation-afghanistan.

138 S/RES/2145 (2014), 1.

139 S/RES/2596 (2021), 1.

140 Lemay-Hébert and Visoka, “Normal Peace”; Maekawa, “Strategic Deployment of UN Political Missions to Replace UN Peacekeeping Operations.”

141 S/279 (2007), par.3.

142 S/103(2014), par.(d).

143 S/1128 (2016), Annex 1.

144 See minimalist missions in Hellmüller, Tan, and Bara, “What is in a Mandate?”

145 See also Table 11 and Figure 49 in Appendix.

146 Lipson, “Peacekeeping.”

147 “Reflexive Peacebuilding,” 487.

148 March and Olsen, “The Logic of Appropriateness,” 3.

149 Lipson, “Peacekeeping.”

150 Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism.”

151 Hannan and Freeman, “Structural Inertia and Organizational Change,” 149.

152 Biscop, “The EU Global Strategy.”

153 Belloni, The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans.

154 The 2003 European Council summit in Thessaloniki set the integration of the Western Balkans as a priority of EU expansion.

155 2005/190/CFSP, para.3.

156 2007/369/CFSP, para.9.

157 2005/355/CFSP, art.1.

158 EU Concept for ESDP Support to Security Sector Reform (SSR), 12566/4/04 (2005); 11.

159 Joseph, “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism.”

160 Mission-level data is available in Table 10 and Figures from 25 to 48 in Appendix.

161 Biscop, “The EU Global Strategy.”

162 2013/355/CFSP, art.2

163 2017/1869 (CFSP), art.2–3.

164 European Commission, “Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries 2013–2020,” 1.

165 Ejdus, “Local Ownership as International Governmentality,” 38.

166 Autesserre, Peaceland.

167 UN mandates incorporate changes, even when minimal, to the text of the original mandate, which is therefore always reproduced in its entirety.

168 See Table 12 and Figure 50 in the Appendix.

169 Barnett and Finnemore, “The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations.”

170 Biscop, “The EU Global Strategy.”

171 Goetschel and Hagmann, “Civilian Peacebuilding.”

172 “Theoretical Challenges for Assessing Socio-cultural Sensitivity.”

173 Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock, Building State Capability; Autesserre, Peaceland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giulio Levorato

Giulio Levorato is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Genoa, Italy, and visiting research fellow at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding of the Geneva Graduate Institute. His research focuses on the role of bureaucracies in peacebuilding and potential alternatives to liberal peace.

Mattia Sguazzini

Mattia Sguazzini is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Genoa, Italy, in the curriculum of Security & Strategic Studies of the PhD Program in Security, Risk and Vulnerability. His research interest is in cybersecurity policy, cyberspace governance, and text as data methods in political science.