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.

Any attempt to step back and survey the post-Cold War period as a whole – to single out features that set it aside from earlier eras in the history of modern international relations – would surely reveal, as one of its most striking characteristics, the widespread practice of external intervention undertaken with the express aim of building ‘sustainable peace’ within societies ravaged by war and violent conflict.

Such ‘post-conflict’ interventions have, it is true, taken a variety of forms and have involved different constellations of actors, institutional sponsors and sources of legitimising authority. They have differed sharply in terms of political context and in the degree to which local populations and elites have embraced the foreign presence. In Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, efforts to consolidate peace came in the wake of major hostilities initiated and led by Western powers. In Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, they followed the entry into force of ambitious, though still fragile and tenuous, internationally sponsored peace agreements. In yet another set of circumstances, they have grown out of what were initially more limited peacekeeping endeavours, as in the cases of Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The intensity of the commitment of the intervening authority has also varied greatly, from skeletal provision for election and humanrights monitoring in Central America in the early 1990s to fully fledged governance over large swathes of territory, as in Timor Leste and Kosovo. The practice has also been highly selective.1 Since the mid 1990s the Balkans have often been described, not without justification, as one large ‘peacebuilding laboratory’.2 From March 1992 to September 1993, a major UN mission – at the time, the most ambitious field operation in the history of the organisation – deployed to Cambodia with a mandate that spanned human-rights protection, refugee repatriation, the organisation of elections and economic reconstruction. Haiti has been host to no fewer than four UN missions since the threat of an American invasion forced the removal from power of the military junta led by General Raoul Cédras in September 1994. In contrast to these major commitments of time, resources and personnel, other regions and countries have received far less, if any, attention. For a long time one glaring example of neglect and selectivity was Burundi, a country where ‘several hundred thousand people’ are believed to have perished in ‘bloody cycles of violence and reprisal’ in the years between the murder of the country's president, Melchior Ndadaye, in 1993 and the arrival of a major UN operation in June 2004.3

When the UN eventually did deploy to Burundi, however, with a mission that at one point numbered some 6,000 military and civilian personnel, it assumed many of the new and more ambitious tasks that have become a feature of the organisation's post-Cold War activity, including human-rights monitoring, the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR)of soldiers, and security-sector reform. That very fact, in the context of the argument made here, is significant. For while the differences between the types of operation outlined above are unquestionably important, common to the post-Cold War interventions that form the subject of this book is nonetheless a level of ambition that is qualitatively different from that of UN field operations during the Cold War. Nor, it may be added, is there much in the history of the League of Nations – an organisation whose innovative aspects and activities, especially in the 1920s, have tended to be overshadowed by its ultimate demise – to compare in scale and ambition with the post-Cold War international commitment to re-engineer and reshape societies by means of an external presence.4 For all their underacknowledged variety, UN peacekeeping activities during the Cold War were limited, albeit with some significant exceptions, to the mitigation and containment of violent conflict. As a general rule, they involved the deployment of lightly equipped military and civilian personnel whose task it was to reduce and control levels of violence by means other than enforcement. In contrast, under the broad and ill-defined rubric of ‘peacebuilding’, the aim of external involvements in the post-Cold War period has been couched in far more ambitious terms: to support ‘political, institutional, and social transformations necessary to overcome deep-seated internal animosities and strife’.5 The sheer level of ambition here – specifically the transformative commitment on the part of external actors – is striking and, in important respects, the suggestion that contemporary peacebuilding has sought to ‘compress into a few years evolutions that have taken centuries’ contains more than a grain of truth.6 What has been driving this development?

Until the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, efforts to account for the ‘new interventionism’ in Western academic and policy discourse attached special significance to the decisive influence of normative developments in international relations since the end of the Cold War.7 Indeed, the prominence given to the protection of basic human rights, the establishment of the rule of law and democracy promotion as drivers of intervention were seen by some as evidence of an ever-widening commitment to the tenets of liberal internationalism.8 The declaratory endorsement by UN member states in September 2005 of the idea that they shared a ‘responsibility to protect’ populations ‘from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ should national governments or authorities ‘manifestly’ fail in their own duty to do so has been taken by some observers as further evidence of far-reaching and dramatic normative change.9 Others have actively championed the idea, and looked for evidence of new ‘cosmopolitan’ forms of peacekeeping and peacebuilding in which considerations of ‘human security’ have come to transcend those of state interest and power politics.10 For all this, while the 1990s saw a dramatic increase in external involvements precipitated by humanitarian concerns – with the NATO-led operation in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 the apotheosis of this development – to explain the pattern of post-Cold War intervention in war-torn societies solely or even primarily by reference to changes in normative context was never entirely convincing. As international-relations scholar Adam Roberts cautioned in the aftermath of NATO's Kosovo campaign, the fact that ‘humanitarian issues played a historically unprecedented role in international politics’ in the 1990s did not mean that there had also been ‘a fundamental departure from the system of sovereign states and power politics’.11 The inevitable and often uneasy coexistence of altruistic motives with the interest-based and power-political considerations of intervening powers and coalitions of states has always been there, though it has become more acute and has been brought into much sharper relief since the events of September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appreciating the admixture of motives that prompts outside involvement in war-shattered countries is essential to understanding both the diversity of interventions and their decidedly uneven record of achievement.12 It is also essential to any realistic assessment of the prospects for a more systematic, coordinated and effective international response to the challenges of peace consolidation and contemporary peacebuilding.

Whatever the complexity and shifting character of motivations, however, the general trend that this book sets out to examine is unmistakable: neither the peacekeeping failures of the early and mid 1990s, in Angola, Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, nor the changes in the strategic environment spawned by the events of 11 September and their aftermath, have weakened a trend that has seen ‘a continued increase in international peacebuilding in the face of the enormous practical and legitimacy challenges’.13 Indeed, if anything, interest in the subject – whether it is measured in terms of new missions or of the institutional provisions increasingly made for ‘post-conflict’, ‘peacebuilding’ or ‘stability’ operations within the decisionmaking machinery of states and international organisations and among armed forces – has intensified since 2003.14 According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 60 multilateral peace operations, involving a record number of nearly 190,000 military and civilian personnel, were deployed worldwide in 2008.15 The increase in the size and number of missions with a peacebuilding mandate has been particularly pronounced on the African continent since 2003, with new deployments and existing ones significantly expanded in Côte d'Ivoire, Burundi, the DRC and Sudan. In 2007, an EU military mission, established ‘in concert’ with the UN, was authorised to deploy to the Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad following the abandonment of a more ambitious plan for a large-scale UN mission.16 In Afghanistan, NATO has sought – since 2003 through its leadership of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and, in 2004 and 2005, with the establishment throughout the country of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) – to expand the reach and control of government and to ‘facilitate development and reconstruction’.17 Since May 2003, a US-led international coalition has been engaged in a violent struggle in Iraq, the declared objective of which has been framed as the creation of ‘a democratic and sovereign nation, underpinned by new and protected freedoms and a growing market economy’.18

Paralleling these developments, a large number of Western governments have either created new bodies or reorganised the machinery of central government concerned with foreign, defence and development policy to better support ‘post-conflict’ peacebuilding activities. Such processes of institutional adaptation are ongoing in many countries.19 As if to underline the trend, one of the few practical outcomes of the UN World Summit in September 2005 was the creation of the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), a move that was widely considered to be both innovative and overdue.20

The full implications for governments and international organisations of the trend towards more intrusive and ambitious post-war interventions are beyond the scope of this book. The focus here is more restricted, though the canvas is wide. Drawing on the experience of operations from Cambodia to Iraq, the book is concerned with the nature of the challenges that have confronted outside military-cum-civilian forces engaged – with limited resources and for limited periods of time – in ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’. Such a broad and ambitious focus necessarily demands further clarification. In particular, it requires some discussion of the notion of ‘postconflict peacebuilding’; a requirement that is only heightened by the acute lack of precision with which the term has tended to be employed in public as well as in academic and policy discourse. Defining and clarifying the term is not, however, merely intended as a path-clearing exercise to make an amorphous and ill-defined subject area more manageable, important as that is. It also draws attention to some of the specific issues and underlying concerns that inform this book.

Definitions and scope

Definitions, it has been wisely suggested, ‘are best worked towards, not stated at the outset’ since ‘any definition involves terms which themselves have to be defined, and so on ad infinitum – and infinite tedium’.21 Certainly, the study of international relations is replete with terms and concepts that are necessarily contested, and discussions about their true meaning can all too easily acquire (and often have) an overly introspective and self-referential character. No doubt it is sometimes ‘better to establish what one is talking about by doing the talking first’.22 Even so, basic distinctions and working definitions do need to be established, if only to delineate more precisely one's focus of enquiry. Moreover, exploring the origins and widespread use of certain terms is usually also illuminating of wider trends and, crucially, may help to reveal unspoken assumptions that, on closer inspection, turn out to be questionable and problematic.23 For all three of these reasons, ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’ – a vague and all-encompassing term around which an academic industry has grown up – merits further reflection.

The term was first introduced in 1992 in ‘An Agenda for Peace’, an influential though overly optimistic effort by then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to assess the implications for the UN of the end of the Cold War. Boutros-Ghali defined the term broadly to cover ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’.24 The concept has remained closely associated with the UN, and is now treated as one of its core functions in the peace and security field. A survey of activities loosely subsumed under the term features annually in the Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, and the concept has been the subject of numerous, often interminable, General Assembly and Security Council debates.25 The UN definition of peacebuilding has remained exceedingly broad, and if anything become even broader, covering ‘integrated and coordinated actions aimed at addressing the root causes of violence, whether political, legal, institutional, military, humanitarian, human rights-related, environmental, economic and social, cultural or demographic’.26 It is a definition that certainly cannot be faulted for leaving anything out. Crucial to the UN understanding of the concept is also the insistence that actions in these widely different spheres are ‘mutually reinforcing’.

For an organisation long shackled by Cold War rivalry and with a membership that reflects global inequities and socioeconomic disparities more accurately than any other body, the UN definition conveys a profound and laudable aspiration: to shift the focus of attention and operational activity away from simply the alleviation of violent conflict to something altogether more positive and ambitious. This is an aspiration that is also implicit in much of the peacebuilding literature, especially that which has grown out of peace and conflict studies. From both an analytical and a policymaking perspective, however, this expansive understanding of ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’, and the implied challenge that it poses for those undertaking it, suffers from two weaknesses.

Firstly, as former Vice-President of the International Peace Institute Elizabeth Cousens has noted, the catch-all definition used by the UN and too often uncritically recited in the literature presents the analyst and the policymaker with a ‘melange of goals, conservative and ambitious, short- and long-term, that remain relatively undifferentiated, let alone considered in strategic relationship with one another’.27 In UN documents, the statements of government ministers and the language of many non-governmental organisations, the term is virtually synonymous with the ‘entire basket of post-war needs’ in countries and societies emerging from violent conflict.28 What is missing, in short, is any sense of priorities; any sense that the long list of desirable and, in their own right, entirely justifiable peacebuilding goals may not in fact be ‘mutually reinforcing’ in the short to medium term.

Secondly, approaches to peacebuilding – both in a UN context and in parts of the peacebuilding literature – have displayed a marked tendency to abstract the tasks of peacebuilding from their political, cultural and historical context. All too often, the result has been an ahistorical and static view of the challenges posed to outside intervention in war-torn societies and a consequent failure to take account of the variety of ways in which the past constrains, shapes and imposes limits on what outsiders can realistically achieve. This tendency has encouraged a social-engineering approach to the concept of peacebuilding. It also helps to explain why external actors have persistently failed to gauge the extent to which their own actions, policies and historical baggage necessarily contribute to shaping the ‘post-conflict environment’, whether through the stirring of nationalisms or through the legitimisation or delegitimisation of indigenous power structures, or by empowering or disempowering what are, for better or worse, key local actors. A particularly unfortunate aspect of this penchant for abstraction has been the recurring failure to acquire, let alone make use of, knowledge of local conditions and realities. Such knowledge, as the experience of the past two decades has shown all too clearly, is critical to a deeper understanding of the politics, society and patterns of violence characteristic of post-conflict settings. The sources of this tendency to dehistoricise and depoliticise the subject of peacebuilding are multiple and beyond the scope of this study. It is nonetheless worth noting that one effect of modern social-science methodology, specifically in its positivist, rational-choice variety, has been to reinforce the social-engineering approach that has dominated the discourse and practice of peacebuilding.29

This book may be viewed as an attempt to address these two weaknesses. In what way, then, does it attempt to do so?With respect to the focus of enquiry and the lack of precision highlighted by Cousens, the study draws a basic distinction – blurred in the peacebuilding literature, though admittedly hard to define in practice – between the critical phase that follows the end of major hostilities and/or the signature of a peace accord, and the longer-term challenges of rebuilding war-torn societies. While the Brahimi report on UN peace operations published in 2000 defined ‘peacebuilding activities’ as those ‘undertaken on the far side of conflict,’ the focus here is primarily on the other end of the spectrum: on the period when levels of insecurity are high; when violence is pervasive; when institutions are rudimentary, weak or non-existent; and when the very distinction between war and peace is blurred.30 This period may, and often does, come in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. This statement, however, requires an immediate and important qualification. The distinction between phases is not simple and clear-cut; it is broad and often hazy and, indeed, cannot be defined in purely temporal terms, with the implication this usually carries of a sequential approach to tasks to be taken by external military and civilian actors.31 Nor should the period be understood in purely negative or riskfilled terms: it is better seen as a unique kind of political space, shaped by fatigue, uncertainty and war-weariness, but also by the hope that a new political dispensation will result in rapid improvements to quality of life.

While the distinction between phases allows for a more precise focus than that captured by the term ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’, this is not the sole reason for drawing it. It is also the case that the long-term outcome of an intervention – ultimately, its success or failure – may be determined during this ‘first’ period, as it provides the crucial opportunities for getting things right or badly wrong.32 This book is concerned, in other words, with the nature of that period of external intervention during which the long-term outcome of the intervention may be said to hang in the balance, and with the policy challenges that are presented in this time. This is the period when the trade-offs and the difficult policy choices arise, when expectations are high but when the best may also be the enemy of the good. The trade-offs arise from the tension that exists in conflict-ridden and fractured societies emerging from war between, on the one hand, the requirements of security and political stability in the short term and, on the other, policy objectives vital to long-term stability and ‘sustainable peace’The latter range from issues related to the administration of post-conflict justice, the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of armed factions and combat against organised crime in zones of conflict, to the broader aims of democratisation and economic development. The former include, more narrowly, physical security, the creation and stabilisation of administrative and governance structures, and provision for the basic and life-sustaining needs of local populations, objectives all geared towards keeping peace alive or a fragile ‘peace process’ afloat.

The tension between short and long-term objectives is, of course, highly context-specific and the degree of incompatibility between immediate ‘post-conflict’ priorities and long-term peacebuilding objectives should not be overdrawn. Even in the best of circumstances, however, a perfect reconciliation of long-term objectives with the more immediate tasks of stabilisation has proved hard to achieve, and it is an underlying theme of this book that trade-offs, priority-setting and awkward compromises between these sets of objectives simply cannot be avoided, however much UN documents and government communiqués may insist on the ‘mutually reinforcing’ character of all peacebuilding objectives.33 The difficulties and risks involved in making judgements about appropriate policy choices against this reality are real, made all the more so by the limited time horizons of outside actors and the fact that the resources they bring to bear – financial, human and diplomatic – are not only finite but also reflect and are continuously subject to a complex of political pressures and constraints emanating from their own domestic contexts. The cases covered here offer examples of both the obvious dangers involved: the derailment of the whole of a mission through a failure to prioritise shortterm objectives aimed at stabilising the immediate post-conflict environment, and the risk of letting short-term objectives undermine, perhaps fatally, long-term prospects for stability founded on institutions and practices that command deep and genuine legitimacy.34

A stark example of the issues involved, which also makes the argument less abstract, is provided by the ‘opium dilemma’ in Afghanistan: that is, the ongoing challenge for the Afghan government and its external supporters – NATO, the UN and bilateral donors – posed by illegal opium production in wartorn and impoverished Afghanistan.35 Interestingly, how best to meet this challenge has been a source of deep policy division between the US and its principal ally, the UK.36 On the one hand, there is little doubt that illegal opium production in Afghanistan – accounting for over 90% of world production, increasingly tied to illicit regional and global networks of processing and trade, and an integral part of Afghanistan's war economy benefiting not only the Taliban but also government officials and international criminal networks – has become a fundamental ‘obstacle to long-term security and development’.37 At the same time, as the International Council on Security and Development (ICSD) has repeatedly warned, the ‘wrong sequencing in counter-narcotics strategies can severely affect the economies and stability of rural communities and lead to higher political risks for the country as a whole’.38 The fact is, as academic and former Afghan Interior Minister Ali Jalabi has plainly put it, ‘destroying one-third of Afghanistan's economy without undermining stability requires enormous resources, administrative capacity and time’.39 All three of these requirements are in short supply. Such warnings nonetheless imply that the unintended consequences of some policy options are less likely to be damaging than those of others, and forcible crop eradication in the absence of alternative livelihoods and rural development, a strategy that has been favoured by the US government, would seem particularly ill-advised in current circumstances.40 Yet all the options discussed, including the licensing of opium for medical purposes as proposed by the ICSD, are fraught with problems and costs in the short and medium term.41

The case of illegal opium production in Afghanistan draws attention to a final consideration. Highlighting what are at times complex and morally uncomfortable policy dilemmas is not to reject the values of liberalism that have provided an important impetus for the growth of peacebuilding activity since the early 1990s, nor is it to deny their crucial role in providing the regulative ideas and the broad directions of policy. What it, and this book, does, however, is to challenge what distinguished late philosopher Leszek Kolakowski described as a ‘certain innate optimism’ characteristic of liberal philosophy that has also permeated liberal discourse on peacebuilding: an optimism consisting of the tendency ‘to believe that there is a good solution for every situation and not that circumstances will arise in which the available solutions are not only bad, but very bad’.42

Argument in brief

It would be both presumptuous and impractical to seek to address the full range of issues raised by efforts to consolidate peace following violent conflict in the post-Cold War era.43 The choice of cases and themes here – as well as the balance the book seeks to strike between breadth and depth of coverage – is intended to bring out the key issues and lessons to have emerged from the experience of the past two decades. Inevitably, the choices made reflect certain judgements and priorities on the author's part, and it is useful at this stage to reiterate what is and what is not being attempted.

The primary focus, especially in Chapters 1 and 2, is on the immediate task of consolidation and stabilisation presented to an outside force in the aftermath of armed conflict. As indicated above, this phase of operations is critical to the long-term outcome of any peacebuilding intervention. At the same time, there is an underlying recognition throughout the book that the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ – much like that between ‘conflict’ and ‘post-conflict’ – is always likely to be blurred, and that it would be futile to seek to define the length of the early and critical period with any great degree of precision. Likewise, this study and its findings – as Chapter 3, which looks at the policy and organisational responses of governments and international organisations to the challenge of peacebuilding, makes clear – recognise that the decisions taken during the early phase cannot be neatly separated from many of the longer-term challenges covered in greater depth in the burgeoning literature on state-building.

The book begins by exploring the nature and characteristics of the ‘peacebuilding’ environment. The range and variety of operational settings covered is vast, and an underlying theme is that simple generalisations and direct comparisons between environments are both problematic and risky. That said, international efforts to consolidate peace from Cambodia to Iraq do point to certain cross-cutting categories of issues through which the history and experience of different interventions may be approached, and it is important to scrutinise these, as each has served to shape and constrain the activities of outsiders.

Three priority tasks, all intimately connected, stand out for outside forces in the critical post-war phase in each of the diverse environments examined: the establishment of a secure environment, the stabilisation of governing structures, and provision for the uninterrupted flow of basic, life-sustaining services. Driving activities in support of these aims should be an overriding concern with the building of legitimacy, both for the intervening force itself and for the administrative and governance structures on whose proper functioning the consolidation of peace depends. Building legitimacy in turn requires a deep understanding of the contextual categories alluded to above, and the way in which these come together to shape and define the ‘post-conflict’ environment. It is the lack of such understanding that has too often doomed peacebuilding endeavours to ineffectiveness.

With these issues in mind, the final section of the book examines the organisational and policy responses to peacebuilding challenges. In addressing the ways in which governments and international organisations have responded to these challenges, the analysis moves beyond immediate ‘post-conflict’ tasks to look at the relationship of these to longer-term objectives and priorities. The UN, in particular its Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) and the associated peacebuilding ‘architecture’, is an important case study here, primarily because the UN is, and is likely to remain, a dominant actor in the peacebuilding field, and because the challenges that the PBC was designed to address – how to improve strategic coordination, enhance efficiency in the marshalling and delivery of resources, and increase responsiveness to local needs – raise broader issues of policy in relation to peacebuilding. These are issues that also face individual governments and other international organisations. Fashioning policy and creating organisational structures to support peacebuilding is not a mere technocratic exercise; actual outcomes are inescapably marked by bureaucratic and international politics, that is, by competition over resources, priorities and policies among bureaucracies and member states. The history and functioning of the PBC illustrate this clearly, and thus the commission serves as a microcosm of wider challenges facing international peacebuilding efforts.

Drawing lessons from ‘post-conflict’ interventions

The ‘post-conflict’ interventions of the post-Cold War era have assumed a variety of forms and their legal and moral bases have often been the subject of controversy, in many cases passionately so. This does not invalidate the attempt to compare cases and draw wider lessons from efforts to consolidate peace after hostilities. Comparisons can be highly instructive in pointing to larger issues and problems when intervening in societies ravaged by war and violent conflict. Thus, the challenges facing American forces in Iraq since the spring of 2003 – high levels and multiple sources of insecurity, the struggle to imbue the intervention with political legitimacy, the difficulties of providing local communities with essential services – are present, while obviously not to the same degree, in all post-conflict settings.44 Iraq provides here, as in many other instances, an extreme example of some basic and recurring challenges. Likewise, the experience of international involvement in Somalia over the past two decades, while unique in key respects, highlights the vital importance of understanding the ‘local political culture’ within an area of operation.45 It may be objected that the efforts over the past ten years to stabilise and bring peace to the DRC relate to an unrepresentative case from which it is difficult to draw wider lessons. Again, however, the value of that country as a case study is precisely that it presents in heightened form aspects of the ‘peacebuilding challenge’ also evident in other cases: the need to understand how the political economy of an armed conflict shapes its ‘post-conflict’ environment, how wars mutate and acquire long-lasting regional and transnational dimensions, how the resources and political commitments of those assuming peacebuilding responsibilities help define what can and cannot realistically be achieved.

It should be evident already that the use of the term ‘postconflict’ to describe the kinds of operational settings and challenges explored in this book is strictly misleading. The term appears destined to stay, however, and this is in part why no attempt has been made to replace it here. That said, a degree of terminological inexactitude is unavoidable in dealing with this subject, and historian Hugh Seton-Watson's exculpatory plea in the introduction to one of his works seems appropriate here as well. Acknowledging that the effort to make sense of his chosen subject ‘undoubtedly lacks neatness’, he adds that this is ‘inevitable because the subject itself is not neat’.46

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.