The UN Peacebuilding Commission: The Rise and Fall of a Good Idea

Abstract

When Kofi Annan, as the UN Secretary-General, initiated his ambitious reform process with a speech to the General Assembly in September 2003, he saw it as a necessary response to the tensions and fault lines running through the UN membership which the US-led invasion of Iraq had sharply exposed and exacerbated. Those very tensions, however, were always going to frustrate and complicate the reform drive itself, especially one as radical and wide-ranging as envisaged by Annan. In particular, given the climate of open mistrust and ill-concealed bitterness that had come to characterise politics at the UN by mid-2003, his insistence on substantive reform of inter-governmental bodies, notably of the Security Council, was bound only to fuel political tensions among member states. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the so-called World Summit of September 2005 — a grand meeting of heads of state and government designed as the culminating event in Annan’s reform drive — should have come so close to complete failure, with agreement on a ‘Final Outcome Document’ reached only at the very last minute (UNGA, 2005; see Traub, 2006: 381–95). One consequence of this ‘near-failure’ was that only a few of the more innovative proposals developed over the previous two years survived the deeply politicised process of pre-Summit negotiations among member states. One of those was the idea for a Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) and an associated Peacebuilding Fund (PBF), originally proposed by the ‘High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change’ (HLP) commissioned by the Secretary-General at the outset of his reform drive in 2003.1