Chapter One: The Peacebuilding Environment

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

‘A Review of Peace Operations: A Case for Change’, Conflict, Security and Development Group, King's College London, 2003, p. 216.

Private communication, NATO, Brussels, June 2007.

In November 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw met informally with a group of academics at Downing Street to discuss the future of Iraq. One of the attendees, Charles Tripp, recalled later how the foreign secretary at the time appeared to believe that ‘post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia’. Ali Allawi, who has held a number of ministerial positions in post-war Iraq, including minister of trade and minister of finance, has observed how the ‘series of impractical market-inspired reforms’ initiated by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 were ‘mostly culled from the East European model of “shock therapy”, which took no account of the repercussions they engendered’. Charles Tripp, ‘Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads’, London Review of Books, 25 January 2007, p. 30; Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 125.

Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 242.

‘UNTAES: A Successful UN Mission in the Heart of Former Yugoslavia’, UNTAES Public Affairs, no date.

Private interviews with UNTAES personnel, 1998. A fair and balanced assessment of the operation's achievements, which touches on this problem of measuring success, is given in Derek Boothby, ‘The Political Challenges of Administering Eastern Slavonia’, Global Governance, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004, pp. 37–51.

The UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste, technically a ‘follow-on’ mission consisting of some 1,600 personnel, was established by UN Security Council Resolution 1706, 25 August 2006. On the origins and nature of postindependence violence in Timor Leste, see James Scambary, ‘Anatomy of a Conflict: The 2006–2007 Communal Violence in East Timor’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 265–85.

UN Security Council Resolution 1244, 10 June 1999.

‘Many Die as Kosovo Clashes Spread’, BBC News, 17 March 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3521068.stm.

‘Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process’, Human Rights Watch report, 1999, p. 4.

Tony Hodges, Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), p. 18.

Alex Vines and Bereni Oruitemeka, ‘Beyond Bullets to Ballots: The Reintegration of UNITA in Angola’, in Mats Berdal and David Ucko (eds), Reintegrating Armed Groups After Conflict: Politics, Violence and Transition (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Vines and Oruitemeka, ‘Beyond Bullets to Ballots: The Reintegration of UNITA in Angola’, p. 199.

Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 277.

‘Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone’ (Lomé Accord), Article VII (1), 3 June 1999. The January 1999 RUF and AFRC offensive – one of exceptional brutality and terror – was dubbed ‘Operation No Living Thing’ by the notorious RUF commander in charge, Sam Bockarie. For thoughtful assessments of the background to the Lomé Accord and the criticisms levelled at it at the time and since, see Funmi Olonisakin, Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone: The Story of UNAMSIL (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007), pp. 34–42; and Abiodun Alao and Comfort Ero, ‘Cut Short for Taking Short Cuts: The Lomé Peace Agreement on Sierra Leone’, Civil Wars, vol. 4, no. 3, 2001, pp. 117–34.

Adekeye Adebajo and David Keen, ‘Sierra Leone’, in Berdal and Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism, 1991–2004, p. 257.

Ibid., p. 258.

Mats Berdal, Gemma Collantes Celador and Merima Zupcevic, ‘Post-Conflict Violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995–2008’, paper prepared for conference on ‘Post-Conflict Violence’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway, 30–31 March 2009.

‘Whither Bosnia?’, International Crisis Group Report, 9 September 1998, p. 4.

Writing nearly a decade after the end of the war, David Harland, a senior official in the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, noted that although nearly $10bn had been spent in Bosnia ‘and many thousands of foreigners, military and civilian, have worked on the implementation of the Dayton Agreement … Bosnia is still far from being a self-sustaining state’. David Harland, ‘Lesson for Peacemakers: What has Not Happened in Bosnia’, International Herald Tribune, 27 January 2004.

Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Give War a Chance’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 78, no. 4, July–August 1999.

Vines and Oruitemeka, ‘Beyond Bullets to Ballots: The Reintegration of UNITA in Angola’, p. 205. Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, p. 286.

The endgame – for the time being at any rate – of Sri Lanka's civil war in 2009 brought home very clearly the potentially horrific cost of ‘giving war a chance’. See ‘UN Call for Inquiry on “Unacceptably High” Civilian Death Toll in Sri Lanka’, Guardian, 30 May 2009; ‘The Hidden Massacre’, The Times, 29 May 2009; private communication.

Olonisakin, Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone: The Story of UNAMSIL, p. 40. Jackson at one point described RUF leader Foday Sankoh as the ‘Nelson Mandela of Sierra Leone’, and was considered by many Sierra Leoneans to be unsuited to the job of mediation in view of his ‘long-time friendship’ with Charles Taylor of Liberia. Norimitsu Onishi, ‘How the US left Sierra Leone Tangled in Curious Web’, New York Times, 4 June 2000.

Tripp, ‘After Saddam’, Survival, vol. 44, no. 4, 2002, pp. 33 and 34.

This is the central focus of Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper with Jonathan Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

Karen Ballentine, ‘Program on Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Final Report’, International Peace Institute, April 2004, p. 6.

Stephen Jackson, ‘Potential Difference: Internal Borderlands in Africa’, in Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner (eds), Critical Perspectives on Wartransformed Economies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 329. For the work of Pugh, Cooper and Goodhand on this subject, see Pugh, Cooper and Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context.

This is one of the conditions for success in peace operations identified, quite rightly, by the UN's ‘capstone’ doctrine of 2008. See UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, ‘UN Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines’, 2008.

Mats Berdal, ‘The UN Security Council and Peacekeeping’, in Vaughan Lowe, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Welsh and Dominik Zaum (eds), The Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 192–3.

Toby Dodge, Iraq's Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change, Adelphi Paper 372 (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS), p. 11; Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), pp. 13–14.

Larry Diamond, ‘What Went Wrong in Iraq’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, no. 5, September–October 2004, p. 5.

This point is well made by Ali Allawi who, for this reason, is wary of the notion of an ‘Iraqi national resistance’. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, p. 176.

On this important point in relation to the complex ‘legacy of colonialism’, see James Mayall, ‘The Legacy of Colonialism’, in Simon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur (eds), Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2005), pp. 50–51.

Tripp, ‘Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads’, p. 30.

Dodge, ‘How Iraq Was Lost’, Survival, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006–07, pp. 157–71. See also Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II – The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), especially pp. 138–63.

Journalist and author George Packer, quoted in Dodge, ‘How Iraq Was Lost’, p. 161. See also Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), especially pp. 101–5.

Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, p. 7. For a thoughtful comparison of the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s and the US experience after 2003, see Dodge, ‘Iraq: The Contradictions of Exogenous State-building in Historical Perspective’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 187–200.

Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, p. 10.

Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Company, 2007).

Lieven cites one activist of the anti-Taliban Awami National Party: ‘The problem is that most Pashtuns feel that to resist foreign occupation is part of what it is to follow the Pashtun Way.’ See Anatol Lieven, ‘The War in Afghanistan: Its Background and Future Prospects’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 9, no. 3, October 2009.

Corelli Barnett, ‘Post-conquest Civil Affairs: Comparing War's End in Iraq and in Germany’, Foreign Policy Centre, February 2005, pp. 5–6.

Isam al-Khafaji, ‘A Few Days After: State and Society in Post-Saddam Iraq’, in Toby Dodge and Steven Simon (eds), Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change, Adelphi Paper 354 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2003), p. 83.

Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 323.

Kimberly Zisk Marten, Enforcing the Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 2.

Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Bent Twig’, in Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 248.

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 550.

See Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2004); Menkhaus, ‘Governance Without Government in Somalia’, International Security, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006–07. For the difficulties that outsiders have had in dealing with Somalia on its own terms in recent times and their consequences, see also Ioan M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, 4^th edition (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), pp. 262–311.

Stephen Ellis, ‘Liberia's Warlord Insurgency’, in Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerrillas (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), p. 169.

Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), pp. xviii and 1–7.

Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 9.

Sally Healy, ‘Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: How Conflicts Connect and Peace Agreements Unravel’, Horn of Africa Group Report, Chatham House, London, 2008, p. 7.

Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Curry, 1999), p. xviii.

Dominique Jacquin-Berdal, ‘How New are Africa's “New Wars”? A Historical Sketch’, unpublished paper, 2005. See also Stephen Ellis, ‘The Old Roots of Africa's New Wars’, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 2003.

Mayall, ‘The Legacy of Colonialism’, p. 57.

Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3.

Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds), Armed Actors: Organised Violence and State Failure in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 2004), pp. 156–8.

Ginger Thompson, ‘A New Wave of Violence in Guatemala's Streets’, International Herald Tribune, 1 January 2006; Mica Rosenberg, ‘Violence Haunts Guatemala's Elections’, Time, 3 November 2007.

John-Andrew McNeish and Oscar López Rivera, ‘Tiro de Gracia: The Socio-Political Poetics of Violence in Post Accord Guatemala’, unpublished paper for project on ‘Violence in the Post-Conflict State’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, 2007, p. 4.

See Charles T. Call, ‘The Mugging of a Success Story: Justice and Security Sector Reform in El Salvador’, in Call (ed.), Constructing Justice and Security after War (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), p. 39; William Stanley, ‘Business as Usual? Justice and Policing Reform in Postwar Guatemala’, in ibid.

Torunn Wimpelmann, ‘Patterns of Violence in Postwar Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mozambique’, draft paper prepared for project on ‘Violence in the Post-Conflict State’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, 2008, pp. 12 and 20; ‘Crime Wave Defeats Liberia Police’, BBC News, 9 July 2006, http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/5323012.stm. That said, when the period since 1992 is viewed as a whole, levels of post-conflict violence in Mozambique must be considered low in comparison to many other post-conflict settings.

UN Security Council, ‘Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti’, S/2007/503, 22 August 2007, paragraph 26.

Kieran Mitton, ‘Rearmament, Remobilisation and Disintegration in Sierra Leone’, unpublished paper for project on ‘Conflict, Security and Development’, King's College London, March 2009.

UN Security Council, ‘Second Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone’, S/2009/267, 22 May 2009, paragraph 2.

Marcus Cox, ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Limits of Liberal Imperialism’, in Call (ed.), Building States to Build Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008), p. 256.

Sorpong Peou, ‘Violence in Postconflict Cambodia’, paper prepared for conference on ‘Post-Conflict Violence’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, 30–31 March 2009, p. 7.

This phenomenon is identified in ‘Armed Violence in Burundi: Conflict and Post-Conflict Bujumbura’, in Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 221.

Susan Woodward, ‘Do the Root Causes of Civil War Matter?’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, vol. 1, no. 2, June 2007, p. 156.

Ibid., p. 156. The micro-foundations of violence have been highlighted above all in the work of Stathis N. Kalyvas. See Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

A good illustration of this tendency, as James Scambary has shown, is provided by the case of post-independence East Timor, where gang, politically motivated and communal violence overlapped during the so-called ‘Crisis’ of 2006–2007. See Scambary, ‘Anatomy of a Conflict: The 2006–2007 Communal Violence in East Timor’, pp. 282–5.

Phil Williams, ‘Organized Crime and Corruption in Iraq’, International Peacekeeping (special issue), vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, p. 116.

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire, p. 45.

David Stafford, Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution and Liberation (London: Abacus, 2008), p. 420.

Ibid., p. 420.

Edelberto Torres-Riva, ‘Insurrection and Civil War in El Salvador’, in Doyle, Johnstone and Orr (eds), Keeping the Peace: Multinational UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador, p. 209.

Alvaro de Soto and Graciana del Castillo, ‘Implementation of Comprehensive Peace Agreements: Staying the Course in El Salvador’, Global Governance, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 195–6. De Soto was special representative of the secretary-general to the Central American peace process and del Castillo was an economic adviser to the secretary-general. See also Joaquín M. Chávez, ‘Perspectives on Demobilisation, Reintegration and Weapons Control in the El Salvador Peace Process’, in Viewpoints (Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue), vol. 1, March 2008, p. 15.

De Soto and del Castillo, ‘Implementation of Comprehensive Peace Agreements: Staying the Course in El Salvador’, p. 195.

Mo Hume, ‘El Salvador: The Limits of a Violent Peace’, in Pugh, Cooper and Turner (eds), Critical Perspectives on War-transformed Economies, p. 322.

Michael J. Boyle, ‘Explaining Strategic Violence after Wars’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 32, no. 1, 2009, pp. 211–12.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid. I am grateful to Michael Boyle for also sharing with me the Introduction to his forthcoming Explaining Violence after Wars.

Dodge, Iraq's Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change, p. 15.

Chávez, ‘Perspectives on Demobilisation, Reintegration and Weapons Control in the El Salvador Peace Process’, p. 15; and William Stanley, ‘Building New Police Forces in El Salvador and Guatemala: Learning and Counter-Learning’, in Tor Tanke Holm and Espen Barth Eide (eds), Peacebuilding and Police Reform (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 118–20.

Albane Prophette, Claudia Paz, Jose Garcia Noval, Nieves Gomez, ‘Violence in Guatemala After the Armed Conflict’, paper presented to an international symposium organised by CERI, IPA and UNU, New York, June 2003, p. 7, http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/themes/re-imaginingpeace/va/country/guatemala_research.pdf.

Ibid., p. 7.

Are Knudsen and Nasser Yasin, ‘Political Violence in Post-Civil War Lebanon, 1989–2007’, paper prepared for project on ‘Violence in the Post-Conflict State’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, 2008, p. 2.

Ibid., p. 26. By contrast, retributive violence and ‘overt violence against civilians has been low’ in the post-war period in Lebanon. Ibid., p. 25.

David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2005), pp. 4–5.

Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 423–5. According to Francisco Salvadó, around 150,000 people were murdered after the war. Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, The Spanish Civil War: Origins, Course and Outcomes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). I am grateful to Hernan Rodriguez Velasco for drawing my attention to recent research on post-Spanish Civil War violence.

Michael Richards, ‘Violence and the Post-Conflict State in Historical Perspective: Spain, 1936–1948’, paper prepared for conference on ‘Post-Conflict Violence’, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, 30–31 March 2009, p. 9.

Ibid., p. 19.

Ibid., pp. 15–18 and 34. Even in this case, as Richards notes, ‘ideology’ did not ‘explain everything’, and ‘there was an important level of “privatisation” of violence in Spain’.

Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Civil War (London: Granta Books, 1994), p. 30.

However, as will be argued more fully in the next chapter, this is not to suggest that there is a simple or automatic relationship between high levels of unemployment and postconflict violence.

Call, ‘The Mugging of a Success Story: Justice and Security Sector Reform in El Salvador’, p. 43; and Stanley, ‘Building New Police Forces in El Salvador and Guatemala: Learning and Counter-Learning’, pp. 118–19.

David Malone and Sebastian von Einsiedel, ‘Haiti’, in Berdal and Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism, 1991–2004, p. 185; see also Sandra Beidas, Colin Granderson, Rachel Neild, ‘Justice and Security Reform after Intervention: Haiti’, in Call (ed.), Constructing Justice and Security After War, p. 74.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Transnational Organized Crime in the West African Region’, 2005, pp. 30 and 19. See also ‘10,000 Ex-Combatants Terrorise Ordinary Citizens’, Africa News Agency, 13 December 1999, http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/OCHA-64C584; ‘Liberia: Uneven Progress in Security Sector Reform’, International Crisis Group Africa Report no. 148, 13 January 2009, p. 5.

Dodge, Iraq's Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change, p. 15. See also Williams, ‘Organised Crime and Corruption in Iraq’, pp. 123–8; and Walter Pincus, ‘USAID Paper Details Security Crisis in Iraq’, Washington Post, 17 January 2006.

Dodge, ‘State Collapse and Identity Politics’, in Markus Bouillon, David Malone and Ben Roswell (eds), Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007), p. 29. See also James Glantz and Robert F. Worth, ‘Attacks on Iraq Oil Industry Aid Vast Smuggling Scheme’, New York Times, 4 June 2006.

Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 223.

Ibid., p. 64.

Ibid., pp. 64–6.

Ibid., p. 65.

Ibid., p. 64.

Wimpelmann, ‘Patterns of Violence in Postwar Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mozambique’, p. 20.

UN Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention, ‘The Drug Nexus in Africa’, monograph series, issue no. 1, 1999, pp. 100–101.

The crisis of 2000 and its consequences are discussed more fully in the next chapter.

Adedeji Ebo, ‘The Challenges and Lessons of SSR in post-Conflict Sierra Leone’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 6, no. 4, 2006, p. 497. See also Al-Hassan Kondeh, ‘Sierra Leone’, in Alan Bryden, Boubacar N'Diaye, Funmi Olonisakin (eds), Challenges of Security Sector Governance in West Africa (Zurich: LIT Verlag GmbH & Co., 2008); private communication.

Georgez Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History (London: Zed Books, 2002), pp. 154–6.

Musifiky Mwanasali, ‘The View from Below’, in Mats Berdal and David Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), p. 139.

James Cockayne and Daniel Pfister, ‘Peace Operations and Organised Crime’, Geneva Centre for Security Policy/International Peace Institute Report, 2008, p. 7.

For those assumptions, see ‘UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime’, UN General Assembly Resolution 55/25, 15 November 2000.

Cockayne and Pfister, ‘Peace Operations and Organised Crime’, pp. 4 and 17–18.

‘Haiti: Security and the Reintegration of the State’, International Crisis Group, Latin America/Caribbean Briefing no. 12, 30 October 2006, pp. 6–7; Williams, ‘Organized Crime and Corruption in Iraq’, pp. 126–8; and private communication.

UN General Assembly, ‘Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’, A/59/565, 2 December 2004, paragraph 169.

Private communication. The combination of globalisation and the collapse of communism creating perfect conditions for the growth of organised crime is a central theme of Misha Glenny, McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers (London: Bodley Head, 2008).

Peter Andreas, ‘The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 48, 2004, p. 29.

Michael Pugh, ‘Rubbing Salt Into War Wounds: Shadow Economies and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Kosovo’, Problems of Post-Communism, May–June 2004 (special issue), p. 54; Radoslava Stefanova, ‘Fighting Organised Crime in a UN Protectorate: Difficult, Possible, Necessary’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 259–69; and private communication.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Transnational Organized Crime in the West African Region’, pp. 26 and 30.

See Marko Hajdinjak, ‘Smuggling in Southeast Europe: The Yugoslav Wars and the Development of Regional Criminal Networks in the Balkans’, Center for the Study of Democracy, 2002; Thomas Köppel and Agnes Székely, ‘Transnational Organised Crime and Conflict in the Balkans’, in Mats Berdal and Monica Serrano (eds), Business as Usual? Transnational Organised Crime and International Security (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, June 2002), pp. 129–40.

Mark Bishop, Jon Shilland, Rob Wintercross, ‘Key Drug Routes for Cocaine, Heroin and the Precursor Chemicals Used in Their Manufacture: A UK Perspective’, unpublished paper, King's College London, 18 March 2009, p. 10.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Crime and its Impact on the Balkans and Affected Countries’, March 2008, p. 11.

Andreas, ‘Criminalized Legacies of War: The Clandestine Political Economy of the Western Balkans’, Problems of Post-Communism, May–June 2004 (special issue), p. 3.

Roy Godson, ‘Transnational Crime, Corruption and Security’, in Michael Brown (ed.), Grave New World (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), p. 260. The murder in March 2003 of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindi? indicated just how close and violent those links can become.

Bishop, Shilland, Wintercross, ‘Key Drug Routes for Cocaine, Heroin and the Precursor Chemicals Used in Their Manufacture: A UK Perspective’, p. 17.

Antonio L. Mazzitelli, ‘Transnational Organised Crime in West Africa’, International Affairs, vol. 83, no. 6, November 2007, p. 1,074.

UN, ‘Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, S/2002/1146, 16 October 2002, p. 33.

See Cockayne, ‘Transnational Organised Crime: Multilateral Responses to a Rising Threat’, International Peace Academy, Coping with Crisis Working Paper, April 2007, p. 7, fn. 46. According to one senior lawenforcement official with experience in post-conflict settings, where there is ‘lack of financial regulation, oversight and management, combined … with a prevalent traditional, underground banking system, aid money can [also] be an accelerant to corruption’. This has clearly been the case in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Private communication.

Glenny, McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, p. 55.

‘Haiti: Security and the Reintegration of the State’, p. 5.

Private communication.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Transnational Organized Crime in the West African Region’, p. 19; UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Cocaine Trafficking in West Africa’, 2007, p. 11.

Private communication. Bout was eventually arrested in Bangkok in 2008. For a profile, see ‘Flying Anything to Anybody’, Economist, 20 December 2008.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Crime and its Impact on the Balkans and Affected Countries’, p. 48.

Ibid.

‘Organised Crime in Bulgaria: Markets and Trends’, Center for the Study of Democracy, 2007, p. 14. A number of post-communist countries in Eastern Europe have passed so-called ‘lustration laws’ designed to remove from their posts officials who had been members of, or had collaborated with, the communist security services. The scope of these laws (and the controversy they have provoked) has varied from country to country.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime, ‘Crime and its Impact on the Balkans and Affected Countries’, p. 49. See also Center for the Study of Democracy, ‘Partners in Crime: The Risks of Symbiosis Between the Security Sector and Organised Crime in Southeast Europe’, 2007, pp. 1–13.

UN Security Council, ‘Report of the Panel of Experts on Violations of Security Council Sanctions Against UNITA’, S/2000/203, 10 March 2000. This report specifically draws attention to the role of Ukrainian and Bulgarian nationals, but also alludes to the role of Russian and Belarusian actors in supplying arms to UNITA.

For a survey of how the role of arms brokers and trafficking agents changed after the end of the Cold War, in part as a result of the ‘privatisation’ of security services and the new opportunities offered by globalisation, see Brian Wood and Johan Peleman, ‘The Arms Fixers: Controlling the Brokers and Shipping Agents’, International Peace Research Institute, 1999; and, more recently, Hugh Griffiths and Mark Bromley, ‘Air Transport and Destabilising Commodity Flows’, SIPRI Policy Paper 24, May 2009.

For a detailed analysis of the relationship between the wars of Yugoslav succession and the rise of regionwide criminal networks, see Hajdinjak, ‘Smuggling in Southeast Europe: The Yugoslav Wars and the Development of Regional Criminal Networks in the Balkans’.

Private communication.

Private communication.

These are well laid out in Cockayne and Pfister, ‘Peace Operations and Organised Crime’, p. 16.

Phil Williams and John T. Picarelli, ‘Combating Organized Crime in Armed Conflict’, in Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimensions of Civil War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p. 12.

Ibid., p. 12.

Cockayne and Pfister, ‘Peace Operations and Organised Crime’, p. 17.

Ibid., p. 17.

Andreas, ‘The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia’, p. 31; interviews with peacekeepers returning from operations in Kosovo, Würzburg, Germany, 2000.

I am indebted to James Cockayne for sharing his insights on this important point.

Bishop, Shilland, Wintercross, ‘Key Drug Routes for Cocaine, Heroin and the Precursor Chemicals Used in Their Manufacture: A UK Perspective’, p. 16.

Cockayne and Pfister, ‘Peace Operations and Organised Crime’, p. 18.

Williams and Picarelli, ‘Combating Organized Crime in Armed Conflict’, p. 127.

Private communication.

James Cockayne and Adam Lupel, ‘Introduction’, International Peacekeeping (special issue), vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 4–19. See also the ‘Conclusion’ in the same issue.

Stephen Ellis, ‘Interpreting Violence: Reflections on West African Wars’, in Neil L. Whitehead (ed.), Violence (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), p. 109.

Nadje Al-Ali, ‘The Perils of Forgetting History’, Survival, vol. 50, no. 3, 2008, p. 151.

Paul Richards, ‘New War: An Ethnographic Approach’, in Richards (ed.), No War, No Peace: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005) p. 11.

Neil Whitehead, ‘Terrorism, Ethnic Conflict and the Culture of Violence’, Communiqué, vol. 11, Spring 2002. For a fuller exploration of the notion that ‘violent practice might be integral or fundamental to cultural practice’, see essays in Whitehead (ed.), Violence. See also Ellis, ‘Violence and History: A Response to Thandika Mkandawari’, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2003, pp. 457–75.

Ellis, ‘Interpreting Violence: Reflections on West African Wars’, p. 120.

Luis Martinez, The Algerian Civil War (London: Hurst and Co., 2000), pp. 7–14.

Angelina S. Godoy, ‘Lynchings and the Democratisation of Terror in Postwar Guatemala: Implications for Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 24, 2002, p. 658.

Ibid., p. 648.

Richards, ‘New War: An Ethnographic Approach’, p. 14.

Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 6–7.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, p. 156.

Zoë Marriage, ‘Flip-flop Rebel, Dollar Soldier: Demobilisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, in Berdal and Ucko (eds), Reintegrating Armed Groups After Conflict: Politics, Violence and Transition, p. 122.

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Collins, 1998).

Kieran Mitton, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Approaches to Understanding Violence in Civil Conflict’, unpublished MRes dissertation, King's College London, 2008.

Michael Burleigh, ‘The Realm of Shadows: Recent Writing on the Holocaust’, in Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on the Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 203.

Pugh, Cooper and Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context, p. 97.

Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, p. 46.

See David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 1998), p. 32; Berdal and Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War; and Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

Ballentine, ‘Introduction’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 1. It should however be stressed that while the increase in combatant self-financing is indeed a feature some post-Cold War conflicts, the view that conflict economies generally simply transitioned from ‘patronage to self-financing’ after the Cold War is too crude and requires important qualifications. See Achim Wennmann, ‘Conflict Financing and the Recurrence of Intra-state Conflict’, PhD dissertation, University of Geneva, June 2007, pp. 85–8.

Paul Collier, ‘Doing Well out of War’, in Berdal and Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War, p. 96. For the issues involved in the ‘greed and grievance’ debate see Berdal, ‘Beyond Greed and Grievance – and not too soon…’.

Collier, ‘The Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy’, in Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001), p. 146.

Collier, ‘Doing Well out of War’, p. 110.

See Charlie Cater, ‘The Political Economy of Conflict and UN Intervention: Rethinking the Critical Cases of Africa’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, pp. 19–47.

Collier, ‘Doing Well out of War’, pp. 91 and 96.

See in particular Laurie Nathan, ‘“The Frightful Inadequacy of Most of the Statistics”: A Critique of Collier and Hoeffler on Causes of Civil War’, Track Two, vol. 12, no. 5, December 2005, Centre for Conflict Resolution. See also Astri Suhrke, S. Woodward, E. Villanger, ‘Economic Aid to Post-Conflict Countries: A Methodological Critique of Collier and Hoeffler’, Conflict, Security and Development, vol. 5, no. 3, 2005, pp. 329–63.

Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Nora Lustig, Ken Rogoff, ‘An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 1998–2005’, 24 September 2006, p. 64, available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/84797-1109362238001/726454-1164121166494/RESEARCH-EVALUATION-2006-Main-Report.pdf.

Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 33.

Nathan, ‘“The Frightful Inadequacy of Most Statistics”: A Critique of Collier and Hoeffler on Causes of Civil Wars’, p. 2. For a sophisticated critique of rational-choice theories of conflict, emphasising how they ‘typically lay waste to specificity and contingency … [and] violate the complexity of individual motivation, razing the individual (and key groups) down to monolithic maximising agents’, see Chris Cramer, ‘Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War’, World Development, vol. 30, no. 11, 2002, p. 1,846.

In the 2003 World Bank report ‘Breaking the Conflict Trap’, Collier and his team of researchers acknowledge as much. ‘While … greed cannot be entirely discounted’, the report notes, ‘it does not appear to be the powerful force behind rebellion that economic theorists have assumed’. ‘Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy’, World Bank Policy Research Report, May 2003, p. 64.

Ballentine, ‘Reconsidering the Economic Dynamics of Armed Conflict’, in Ballentine and Sherman (eds), The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, p. 260.

Malone and Nitzschke, ‘Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: What We Know, What We Need to Know’, World Institute for Development Economics Research, Discussion Paper no. 2005/07, 2005, p. 6.

Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, p. 32.

Berdal and Keen, ‘Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Some Policy Implications’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, 1997, p. 797.

Stephen Jackson, ‘Making a Killing: Criminality and Coping in the Kivu War Economy’, African Review of Political Economy, vol. 29, no. 93/94, 2002, p. 527.

Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘The Power of Protection: Governance and Transborder Trade on the Congo–Ugandan Frontier’, PhD dissertation, University of Ghent, 2006, p. 192. This study shows in compelling detail how violent conflict, while costly and destructive in many ways, can also produce new ‘social orders’ and a degree of ‘governance’ at the local level in the absence of properly functioning state institutions.

See Jackson, ‘Protecting Livelihoods in Violent Economies’, in Ballentine and Nitzschke (eds), Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimensions of Civil War, pp. 160–5. A corresponding distinction has been drawn between ‘combat’, ‘shadow’ and ‘coping’ war economies. Pugh, Cooper and Goodhand, War Economies in a Regional Context, pp. 8–9.

The term ‘elite networks’ is used by the 2002 UN Panel of Experts in its report on the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC to denote the groups of people who active benefit from war. UN, ‘Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, p. 6.

For the role of transnational resource corporations and their often intimate links to war economies – a subject that remains under-researched – see Cater, ‘Corporations, Resources and War: Angola 1992–2002’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2008.

I discuss these tendencies in greater detail in Berdal, ‘How “New” are “New Wars”? Global Economic Change and the Study of Civil War’, Global Governance, vol. 9, no. 3, 2003, pp. 483–9.

Abiodun Alao, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: The Tragedy of Endowment (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), p. 7.

Douglas MacArthur quoted in Fred Iklé, Every War Must End, 2^nd revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 1.

Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, p. 12. For a similar conclusion drawn with specific regard to the DRC between 1998 and 2002, see Ingrid Samset, ‘Conflict of Interests or Interest in Conflict? Diamonds and War in the DRC’, African Review of Political Economy, vol. 29, no. 93/94, September/ December 2002, p. 477.

Jackson, ‘Making a Killing: Criminality and Coping in the Kivu War Economy’, p. 528.

Anthony Clayton, Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa Since 1950 (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 195.

‘The Kivus: The Forgotten Crucible of the Congo Conflict’, International Crisis Group Africa Report no. 56, 24 January 2003, p. 7. See also the MONUC effort to map different armed groups in the DRC in response to a request from the Security Council in 2002. UN Security Council, ‘First Assessment of Armed Groups Operating in the DRC’, S/2002/341, 5 April 2002.

‘Congo: Bringing Peace to North Kivu’, International Crisis Group Report no. 133, 31 October 2007, p. 27; Steven Spittaels and Filip Hilgert, ‘Mapping Conflict Motives: Eastern DRC’, IPIS/ Fatal Transactions report, March 2008.

Laurent Kabila, whose career as a rebel operating in the east of the country went back to the early 1960s, was assassinated in January 2001. He was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila, who has served as president ever since.

UN Security Council Resolution 1279, 30 November 1999. In addition to the DRC, the regional signatories to the 1999 July ceasefire were Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Rwanda and Uganda.

Spittaels and Hilgert, ‘Mapping Conflict Motives: Eastern DRC’, p. 24.

Private communication.

Koen Vlassenroot and Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘Briefing: Kivu's Intractable Security Conundrum’, African Affairs, vol. 108, no. 432, July 2009. pp. 1–10; ‘DR Congo: Massive Increase in Attacks on Civilians’, Human Rights Watch, 2 July 2009, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/07/02/dr-congomassive-increase-attacks-civilians. According to the UN, reporting in June 2009, 1.7 million people are displaced in the eastern DRC. UN Security Council, ‘Twenty-Eighth Report of the Secretary-General on the UN Mission in the DRC’, S/2009/335, 30 June 2009, paragraph 23.

See International Rescue Committee, ‘special Report: Congo’, http://www.theirc.org/special-reports/ special-report-congo for the relevant documents.

Jackson, ‘Making a Killing: Criminality and Coping in the Kivu War Economy’, p. 528.

Ibid.

UN, ‘Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, p. 5.

Private communication.

‘Special Report on Bisiye Mine’, MONUC Kinshasa Natural Resources and Human Rights Unit, April 2008.

Ibid.

The report, which was based on fieldwork undertaken in late March 2008, focused on the southern part of North Kivu known as ‘Petit Nord’ (specifically the territories of Walikale, Masisi, Rutshuru, Nyiragongo and Goma). ‘Natural Resource Economy in North Kivu’, Report of Joint Military Analysis Cell (JMAC) and Human Rights (Natural Resources and Human Rights Unit), MONUC Kinshasa, no date. The top five resources in this region in terms of monetary value – gold, timber, wolfram, cassiterite and charcoal – give an indication of the range and diversity of resources exploited.

Ibid. My emphases.

For a detailed discussion of the relationship between war and the distinctive characteristics of natural resources, see Philippe Le Billon, Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflict, Adelphi Paper 373 (Abingdon: Routledge for the IISS, 2005), pp. 31–50.

These are now organised into the FDLR, which was formed in 2000 out of the Armée de Libération du Rwanda, which consisted of ex-Rwandan Armed Forces soldiers and members of the interahamwe. According to Spittaels and Hilgert, ‘a powerful core group of the FDLR movement still consists of Hutus implicated in the 1994 genocide’. Spittaels and Hilgert, ‘Mapping Conflict Motives: Eastern DRC’, p. 8. For a profile of the movement that stands accused of some of the worst atrocities and humanrights violations in the DRC, see Chris McGreal, ‘Genocide's Children: The New Hutu Generation Raised to Kill’, Guardian, 16 May 2008, pp. 8–11.

Raeymaekers, ‘The Power of Protection: Governance and Transborder Trade on the Congo-Ugandan Frontier’, pp. 95–104.

A justly celebrated effort to account for these many ‘layers of explanations’ and their interaction has now been provided by Gérard Prunier in Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.

Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, ‘The Formation of Centres of Profit, Power and Protection: Conflict and Social Transformation in Eastern DR Congo’, University of Copenhagen Centre of African Studies, occasional paper, January 2005, p. 5. See also Michael Nest, ‘The Political Economy of the Congo War’, in Michael Nest, with François Grignon and Emizet Kisangani, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Economic Dimension of War and Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), p. 54.

Tripp, ‘After Saddam’, p. 26. It was precisely the ‘networks of the “shadow” state’, Tripp notes, that benefited from the sanctions on Saddam's Iraq in the 1990s.

For a discussion of these dangers see Keen, ‘Incentives and Disincentives for Violence’, in Berdal and Malone (eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil War, pp. 19–41.

See Tripp, ‘Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads’, p. 30; Andreas, ‘Criminalising Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and Its Legacy’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 23, 2005, pp. 335–60.

Jackson, ‘Protecting Livelihoods in Violent Economies’, pp. 153–4.

Cockayne, ‘Winning Haiti's Protection Competition: Organized Crime and Peace Operations Past, Present and Future’, International Peacekeeping (special issue), vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 82–3.

Ballentine, ‘Program on Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Final Report’, p. 6.

Ibid. See also Ballentine, ‘Peace Before Profit: The Challenges of Governance’, in Ballentine and Nitzschke, Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimensions of Civil War, pp. 447–84.

Woodward, ‘Do the Root Causes of Civil War Matter?’, p. 155.

Raeymaekers, ‘Sharing the Spoils: the Reinvigoration of Congo's Political System’, Politorbis, no. 42, 1/2007, p. 28.

Ibid.