The Negotiation of Expertise by the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture in Reaction to the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa

ABSTRACT

Peacebuilding has expanded beyond its traditional purview, and now includes responses to a range of crisis situations. This article studies the reaction of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture to the outbreak of the Ebola Disease Virus in West Africa in 2014, one of such unprecedented threats to peacebuilding. Drawing on expertise studies, my argument is that the UN Peacebuilding Architecture has the potential to successfully function as bureaucratic entities without a field presence. At the same time, the reaction to the Ebola outbreak illustrates a dissonance between policy actions and the reasoning of the perceived challenges and solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• the UN
• expertise
• authority
• global governance
• Ebola

Acknowledgements

The author of this article sends a special thanks to Ole Wæver, colleagues at CRIC, Catherine Goetze, the contributing authors to this Special Section, Kirsten Larsen, and Mads Østergaard.

Disclosure statement

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNDP. The author carried out the academic research and writing prior to joining the UNDP.

Notes on contributor

Maria Stage has conducted research on peacebuilding, and human rights as research assistant at Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC), University of Copenhagen. She is now Programme Analyst with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has experience with global policy and peacebuilding from a think tank, the Danish Youth Council, and civil society platforms. She studied at University of Copenhagen and Columbia University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNDP. The author carried out the academic research and writing prior to joining the UNDP.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are meeting records, interviews and personal notes from observations. Interviews and personal notes are not available for sharing. The data was gathered as part of the research for the author's Master's programme thesis from University of Copenhagen. Meeting records are available from the United Nations Peacebuilding at: https://www.un.org/peacebuilding/

Notes

1 The UN Secretary-General's reform of the UN entail replacing Department of Political Affairs (DPA), Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) with new Departments (GA 2017) that became the Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA)(entailing DPA and PBSO) and the Department of Peace Operations (former DPKO).

2 In line with the other articles in this issue, this article understands peacebuilding as ‘a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships’ (Lederach 1997, 20). Peacebuilding is a contested term in the UN, and the UN Peacebuilding Architecture has been criticized for failing to mainstream an understanding of peacebuilding across the different UN bodies and agencies (Jenkins 2013, 11–15; de Coning and Stamnes 2016a, 3–5).

3 With a focus on the terms of governance, the analysis aims to go beyond the liberal peace and its western-dominated approaches to intervention, which is part of the problem for governance efforts to adequately address the challenges of today's conflicts. Global governance has failed to change the injustice and inequality in the world (Barnett and Duvall 2005; Kennedy 2016), interventions in conflict-affected societies have often failed to sustain peace (the Advisory Group of Experts 2015; the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations 2015; UN & WB 2018), and global health governance has failed to prevent and adequately react to disease outbreaks and health emergencies (Roemer-Mahler and Rushton 2016). To go beyond liberal peace entails recognition of differences, needs, and culture between local and liberal international peacebuilding efforts, realized as a hybrid peace (Richmond 2011).

4 Diplomats interviewed were peacebuilding experts and ambassadors of member states permanent missions to the UN, and all engaged in the work of the Peacebuilding Commission – and selected on the basis of participation in the Country-Specific Configurations (CSC) rather than the Organisational Committee (OC) or the Working Group on Lessons Learned (WGLL). UN officials interviewed were primarily employed or formerly employed at the Peacebuilding Support Office. Civil society representatives were foremost based in New York.

5 This understanding of the UN is aligned with the notion of the three UN's: the intergovernmental arena, the Secretariat, and civil society (Weiss 2008, 8–9).

6 The public is here understood as the broader population, member states and UN agencies.

7 Reprogramming entailed in the case of Guinea that some projects were reoriented to a so-called conflict-sensitive response to Ebola. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) was support in community awareness-raising, and conflict prevention programmes in affected areas (Secretary-General 2015, 9–10).

8 UNDP was tasked with the Ebola-related recovery, while the Peacebuilding Support Office was pointed out as one of the consultancy actors and contributors (UNDP 2015). Other parts of the UN were also concerned with the long-term impacts of Ebola. For example, the ECOSOC convened a meeting on December 5th 2014 with rather similar objectives (ECOSOC 2014). In addition, that the Ebola epidemic would reverse gains obtained in the countries of questions was stated in the UNSC Resolution 2177 (UNSC 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation under Grant CF14-0842, as part of the Human Rights and Peacebuilding Project at Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC); and received travel support by the International Studies Association.