Peacebuilding Policies Research Articles

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

The fragmentation of the security-development nexus: the UK government’s approach to security and development 2015-2022

ABSTRACT The security-development nexus – the belief that security and development policy goals are closely connected and should be aligned – became a core feature of global peacebuilding policy in the 1990s. Over the last decade, however, the continued relevance of the nexus has been questioned. Drawing on analysis of key policy documents, ministerial speeches, aid flows, and key informant interviews, this article examines how the nexus has been articulated and practised in UK policy. We find that the security-development nexus has become less prominent and more fragmented. The ‘mechanistic’ approach to the nexus that existed until 2015, where broad causal links between poverty and (in)security were emphasised, has been replaced by a more diffuse and fractured approach. While this shift is an outcome of the unusually high degree of turbulence in UK politics since 2015, it also reflects international trends in security and development policy.

Hiroshima’s ongoing peacebuilding and beyond: how does this local initiative seek to extend to world peace?

War-torn or post-conflict countries face challenging, complex, and varied tasks related to security, development, and justice to meet the immediate needs of state-building and peacebuilding. Hiroshima, having overcome post-war reconstruction, has remained in the peacebuilding phase by advocating world peace through the value of ‘No more Hiroshimas’. Peacebuilding studies and mainstream debates emphasising the local perspective have not, however, touched upon this historical moment, when the Hiroshima Prefectural Government enacted ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’, pursuing peacebuilding through a nuclear-free world. In this context, this article analyses how Hiroshima’s provincial government policy demonstrates ongoing peacebuilding in pursuit of world peace. Considering local-global relations, it examines how local policy connects the shared values of a nuclear-free world. Second, it shows how local-state relations highlight Japan’s peacebuilding policy, which includes security cooperation, by sharing the vision of Hiroshima as a symbol of world peace.

The Islamic State (IS): Threat of terrorism and policy issues in relation to sectarianism

Following years of unrest in Iraq and Syria, the rise of the Islamic State (IS) posed a grave threat to international security. Syria and Iraq are still home to the group's primary leadership and affiliates. IS’s apocalyptic philosophy and its extremist goal are nevertheless a concern. Based on current terrorism and security issues, this article investigates IS’s roots and how it has spread Islamic extremism in order to develop and expand its territory. A descriptive research design based on secondary and primary data sources was used to conduct a qualitative study. Sectarianism may have been prevented with a coherent post-Iraq war peacebuilding policy. Aside from military action, IS’s activities must be curtailed through the closure of financial and economic channels.

The gender-resilience nexus in peacebuilding: the quest for sustainable peace.

Resilience and gender have become new buzzwords for expressing renewal in peacebuilding. This article unpacks the gender-resilience nexus in theory and analyses global trends and variation in peacebuilding policy and practice. It advances an analytical framework based on three central pillars of peacebuilding: process, outcome, and expertise. A comprehensive analysis of 49 international peacebuilding handbooks, produced by leading international organisations for policymakers and practitioners in the field, is conducted. The results show how the integration of the gender-resilience nexus signals new ways of understanding conflict dynamics and peacebuilding. Yet, gender peace expertise is ‘thin’ with regard to policies and practices of resilient conflict transformation. By way of conclusion, we suggest three directions to be taken in research to advance and refine the gender-resilience nexus. First, the politics and contestation of peacebuilding need to be problematised and explored further. Second, the understanding of resilience in peacebuilding needs to shift emphasis from conflict management to conflict transformation. Third, the positionality of peacebuilding actors and local contexts need to be probed further.

Between Human and State Security: Turkey’s Syria Policy under the Justice and Development Party (AKP)

ABSTRACT Since 2011, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has sought to portray the country as an emerging humanitarian and peacebuilding power, mobilising the country’s diplomatic and foreign policy resources to project the AKP’s vision of Turkey’s Islamic identity through the lens of its duty to help. An analysis of the official narratives on the state’s humanitarian and peacebuilding policies as they have evolved in the Syrian conflict highlights the tensions between a human security approach aimed at projecting Turkey as a normative humanitarian power and a state security approach based on the AKP government’s perceived national security needs.

Between the Domestic and the International: Ideational Factors, Peacebuilding and Foreign Policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf

ABSTRACT This Special Issue examines post-2011 dynamics and the plethora of changes in the regional and domestic order in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. It argues that ideational factors are instrumental in both the building of peace and the construction of threats. Consequently, ideational factors are constitutive in inciting or pacifying cases of tension and conflict. Departing from the inherent connection between the domestic and the international, the Special Issue analyses the reconfiguration of the region through the lens of possibilities rather than impediments and centres on the role of ideational factors in foreign policy and their impact on peacebuilding in the region.

International Society and the United Nations Peacebuilding

Since its first peacekeeping operation, the United Nations (UN) broadened its normative framework to provide efficient responses to the turbulent reality of countries experiencing intrastate wars. Back in the 1990s, the UN acknowledged that intrastate conflict causes are structural and socially rooted, and therefore achieving peace in collapsing states would only be possible through the strategy labelled as peacebuilding, aimed at achieving longstanding peace through the reconstruction of the state in the post-conflict phase. Based on English School theorists, this paper aims to analyze how the UN peacebuilding policies can be associated with the strengthening of the commitment of war-torn states to institutions and rules that underpins the group of states known as “international society”. To illustrate the aforementioned argument, this work consists of a case study methodology that assess the United Nations Mission in Liberia (2003-2018).

Norm Contestation and Normative Transformation in Global Peacebuilding Order(s): The Cases of China, Japan, and Russia

AbstractFocusing on the disconnect between mainstream “liberal” peacebuilding and the discourses and practices of “new” and “alternative” peacebuilding actors, this article develops a nonbinary approach that goes beyond norm localization to capture the ways in which major powers influence the nature, content, and direction of normative change. Within the context of their bilateral and multilateral contributions to the “global peacebuilding order,” what forms and types of interventions are conceived by these actors as peacebuilding? How, in turn, has the substantive content of their peacebuilding practices (re)shaped norms and narratives in international peacebuilding efforts? Based on extensive empirical research of the peacebuilding policies and activities of China, Japan, and Russia, this article analyzes the way in which these “top-top” dynamics between norms embedded in the liberal narrative and major powers with competing visions can influence peacebuilding as practiced and pursued in host states. In doing so, it brings together research on global norms and peacebuilding studies and offers a simple yet analytically powerful tool to better understand the evolution of global peacebuilding order(s) and the role of rising powers in (re)shaping global governance.

It’s the Little Things: The Role of International Interveners in the Social (re)Construction of the International Peace Architecture

ABSTRACT Much peace and conflict scholarship groups individual international interveners together as ‘the international’, treating them more as an ideational structure – the international peace architecture – than as individual agents. This article brings foreign policy analysis scholarship into conversation with constructivist scholarship to propose analytical questions that can be used to study the role that individual international interveners play in socially constructing the international peace architecture. It proposes questions at both the micro scale of individual international interveners and the meso scale of the international peace architecture, that is, the organisations that make peacebuilding policy and practice peacebuilding work. Analysis guided by these questions could inform future considerations of what peacebuilding means, who is a suitable candidate for performing peacebuilding work, the way that peacebuilding is practiced, and ultimately on the security of the conflict-affected populations in which peacebuilding interventions are conducted.

Colombia’s Program to Substitute Crops Used for Illegal Purposes: Its Impact on Security and Development

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between security and development in peacebuilding policies in post-accord Colombia. It focuses particularly on Colombia’s efforts to substitute crops used for illegal purposes with alternative forms of sustainable livelihood in order to curb what is perceived as one of the biggest threats to both security and development in the country. It argues that continued violence creates considerable obstacles for local peacebuilding actors trying to pursue security and development simultaneously. It significantly counteracts and undermines the successful outcomes of peacebuilding, turning security and development programmes against each other and blocking each other’s success.

The contested meanings of cybersecurity: evidence from post-conflict Colombia

ABSTRACT Cybersecurity is a contested concept. While some definitions focus on technical aspects, other insist on the strategic and geopolitical dimensions. Recently, the definition has included development-related aspects in an increasingly digitalised economy. Instead of cybersecurity, international organisations such as the OECD and private companies now focus on the management of digital risk. While this shift represents an opportunity to include new actors and issues on the political agenda, it does not lead to the de-securitisation of cyberspace, nor to the promotion of cyber peace. This article explores the debates around the definition of cybersecurity with a particular focus on how Colombia became one of the first states to follow the 2015 OECD guidelines on the management of digital risk as part of an effort to join the organisation. It describes how the resulting perspective on cybersecurity evidences a market-centred approach focusing on the development of a digital economy. However, it also discusses why the evolution of cybersecurity policies in Colombia represents a missed opportunity to design a cyber peacebuilding policy in a post-conflict context.

Japan’s Peacebuilding under the Abe Administration: Change and Continuity, 2012–2020

This article traces the developments in Japan’s peacebuilding policy in Abe Shinzo’s second term (2012–2020) and presents illustrative case studies to highlight the change and continuity that occurred during this period. Although Abe is internationally known for launching a new doctrine of “active pacifism”, his reforms in international peace cooperation policy incrementally built upon the existing discourses and practices. Abe’s vision of a more proactive peacebuilding policy has also been heavily circumscribed by Japan’s Constitution.

Pioneers of Peace, Implementers of Humanitarianism: Learning from the Ambivalence of Peacebuilders

ABSTRACT This article nuances the popular explanation that peace interventions fail because of a culture of peacebuilders unwilling to engage with the local. As a foundational part of their jobs, peacebuilders do engage with locals as they struggle daily to implement and make sense of peacebuilding policies in relation to the context they are placed within. If taken seriously, they provide a knowledge of peacebuilding that has so far been disregarded despite the recent turn to practice. We can use these ways of relating to the local to better understand what peacebuilding entails as an encounter between us and them.

Building peace through the nexus between security, democracy and development: a critical assessment of the United Nations mission in Liberia

The United Nations (UN) peacebuilding strategy often establish a nexus between security, democracy and development. Therefore, it argues that sustainable peace could be achieved whenever institutional reforms towards democratization and economic development takes place. Thus, we intend to identify whether the strengthening of state institutions in the aforementioned sectors contributes to tackling the root causes of intrastate warfare. Methodologically, this paper consists of a case study of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (2003-2018). To evaluate the effectiveness of the peacebuilding policies deployed in Liberia, we have gathered empirical data to identify advantages and flaws in the UN approach. Our findings evidence that although policies regarding the nexus between security, democracy and development have addressed some crucial post-conflict issues, reforms in these areas were inadequate to fragment local elites, to avoid uneven economic development and to ensure horizontal welfare for Liberians.

Ex-Rebel Authority after Civil War: Theory and Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire

How do former armed militants exercise local political power after civil wars end? Building on recent advances in the study of "rebel rulers" and local goods provision by armed groups, this article offers a typology of ex-rebel commander authority that emphasizes two dimensions of former militants' power: local-level ties to civilian populations ruled during civil war and national-level ties to post-conflict state elites. Put together, these dimensions produce four trajectories of ex-rebel authority. These trajectories shape whether and how ex-rebel commanders provide social goods within post-conflict communities and the durability of ex-rebels' local authority over time. We illustrate this typology with qualitative evidence from northern Côte d'Ivoire. The framework yields theoretical insights about local orders after civil war, as well as implications for peacebuilding policies.

Higher Education in Emergencies: The Case of Consociational North Macedonia

Eighteen years after the end of 2001 conflict between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, North Macedonia remains a country deeply polarized along ethno-national lines with implications for the maintenance of peace. The peace-building policies introduced by the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) based on a consociational model of power-sharing have accommodated the demands of ethnic Albanians, including the right of access to higher education (HE) in the mother-tongue which represented one of the root-causes in the escalation of the 2001 conflict. The OFA’s exclusive focus on access and availability through state funding for higher education in the Albanian language has however favored a process of ethnicization of the tertiary sector. This paper seeks to investigate the unintended consequences of the OFA-induced ethnic self-ghettoisation within the public higher education system and, by the same token, it critiques the OFA’s lack of mechanisms to reach across the ethnic divide through the lenses of a rights-based approach to education. It ultimately argues that without a strong governmental commitment to deethnicize education by transcending the OFA’s intrinsic limits, power-sharing remains permeable to political manipulation which critically hampers social transformation and increases the probability of inter-ethnic tension, further weakening the peace process.

Changing religious landscapes challenge confession-based state policies on religion

In contrast to state-religion systems of separation, many European states have a confession-based policy on religion. This describes the relationship of the state to one or more preferred state-recognised religious confessions. State recognition, or preferential treatment of the chosen religious confessions, can occur in many variations. These preferred confessions are predominantly the (former) Christian state churches. Such policies date from a period when Christian state churches involved a major part of the population. In view of changing religious landscapes, traditional confession-based policies have developed an exclusive character. These policies include only chosen declining religious groups, while they exclude groups that have gained social relevance. Notwithstanding the new situation, many governments have hitherto failed to address the need for the adjustment of their policies on religion. Unadjusted policies are unsuitable to deal creatively with religious diversity in today’s society. Governments that treat religious communities differently come into conflict with state neutrality and religious peace. This article opens the door to a six-part study, arguing that confession-based state policies on religion should incline towards greater inclusiveness. It is in the state’s best interest to mobilise the positive potential of all religious-sociological groups. This article specifically focuses on the changes that are becoming apparent in today’s religious landscapes and how these changes challenge traditional confession-based policies. It lays the foundation for the subsequent articles as a case study and a new conceptual framework for a fair, progressive and peacebuilding policy on religion for the Swiss Canton Bern.

Timely interventions: Temporality and peacebuilding

AbstractWhile there has been a long engagement with the impact of time on peacebuilding policies and practice, this engagement has to date focused predominately on issues of short- versus long-term initiatives, and of waning donor support for such initiatives. More recently, the critical peacebuilding turn has focused attention on the politics of the everyday as being essential to emancipatory endeavours enacted through localisation. Yet despite this, time itself has not been the subject of analysis, and the politics of time have not been integrated into the study of peacebuilding. This article, drawing both on historical institutionalist and on critical international studies analyses of temporality, provides a framework for analysing the impacts of time on the potential to achieve emancipatory peace. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Cambodia, this article asserts that a focus on Policy Time, Liberal Political Time, and Intergenerational Time highlights how peacebuilding initiatives are framed by disparate timescapes that limit the visibility of local chronopolitics, and that this in turn restricts local empowerment and resistances.

The Conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh: Moving Towards Peace

In this paper we discuss the conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh in the framework of game theory. Observing the current state of the conflict, we conclude that there is no sustainable or pure strategy equilibrium. The game is possible to solve for mixed strategies, based on maximizing expected payoffs of conflict parties. Then, we discuss how Armenia can prevent Azerbaijan to restart the war through a proper selection of policy components in its payoff structure. We argue that Armenia should be more active in international lobbying for Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence, as it will ultimately increase the probability of peaceful solution. The recent large-scale war, initiated by Azerbaijan in September 27th, 2020, can be a natural test for the suggested game structure and implied peacebuilding policies. According to the game, Azerbaijan will fail to resolve the conflict via military means despite of the on-going large-scale war and will be compelled to join the negotiations.