Agenda for Peace or Budget for War?

Abstract

In 1992 United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali drafted his landmark report, An agenda for peace, which boldly reasserted the role of the United Nations in the maintenance of international and security and proposed a set of recommendations on how the UN could respond to new international security threats posed by secessionism, ethnic conflict, and civil war. The report envisioned a collective international effort aimed at reducing human suffering, upholding human rights, and resolving the underlying causes of violent conflict between and within states.The mandate was vast An agenda for peace conceptualized peacebuilding as large-scale, well-financed, long-term, internationally led interventions in conflict-affected states, which may include disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting both formal and informal processes of political participation.1 Over the past two decades the international community has invested significant financial, military, and civilian resources into complex, multidimensional peacekeeping and peacebuilding initiatives designed to rescue states from internal strife and political failure.However, as I show in the case of Somalia, these international interventions can sunder the very state they seek to resurrect. In a civil war, large-scale international interventions infuse enormous sums of money into the informal economy, making local security providers stronger and more financially independent of their domestic constituencies. In this way, the introduction of significant resources into the informal economy affects the relationship between warlords and their subjects, often increasing both the level of predation against the populace and the duration of conflict. International interventions also transform the informal economy so that spoiler activity becomes more lucrative than peacebuilding. By warping the informal economy, international interventions can therefore have devastating state-destroying effects by arresting domestic processes of state formation and perpetuating internal armed conflict.Faced with the serious regional and international security threats presented by failed states, the international community has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into complex, multidimensional nationbuilding initiatives designed to centralize political power and reconstruct domestic national institutions. Though well intentioned, I argue here that this sweeping agenda can actually inadvertently undermine the domestic processes of political order-making that occur naturally within failed states, thus increasing predatory violence and prolonging civil war.Somalia provides an excellent case study of how large-scale international intervention affects the informal economy and perpetuates state failure. After the state collapsed in 1991, Somalia fell into a brutal civil war and suffered a famine that sparked international outcry and prompted a multilateral international intervention. As the United Nations operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) arrived on the beaches of the capital city of Mogadishu, Somalia became the first practical test of Boutros-Ghali's agenda for peace. From 1992-95, the UN operation in Somalia evolved from a limited humanitarian assistance mission to a heavily politicized military intervention aimed at restoring and political stability to the country. UNOSOM failed in this expanded mission. As the last of the international forces withdrew from Somalia in 1995, the UN intervention left a legacy of criminality and warlord power that perpetuated the civil war for another decade.The international operation in Somalia was a multibillion dollar initiative. According to UN department of peacekeeping operations reports, the UN spent a total of $1. …