Peacebuilding Practice Research Articles

Legitimacy and Coercion in Peacebuilding: A Balancing Act

ABSTRACTDespite the tendency of the power literature to analyse legitimacy and coercion in isolation, both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that coercion and legitimacy are not parallel lines but can interact in different ways, supporting or undermining each other. A methodical exploration of the relationship between legitimacy and coercion is important not only for improving the theoretical literatures on power and legitimacy but also in the light of the increasing interest in the power of legitimacy in statebuilding and peacebuilding. This article first analyses the overall interaction between coercion and legitimacy, and then explores the question that emerges from the interaction analysis; what level of coercion is permitted or required in order for a mission’s local legitimacy to be sustained? Finally, for the practice of peacebuilding, the article shows that an operation needs to understand its initial legitimacy standing with the local population, as this determines how much coercive force it can employ without undermining its overall legitimacy.

The Philosophical Worth of Liberal Peacebuilding

Konsep peacebuilding liberal sering dikaitkan dengan kegagalan upaya liberalisasi pada negara-negara gagal yang dilanda perang, Hal ini berpangkal dari kecenderungan praktik liberal dalam pembangunan perdamaian untuk membingkai dan memperlakukannya sebagai “proyek” liberal dan bukan sebagai upaya peacebuilding utamanya. Artikel ini melihat bahwasanya pembangunan perdamaian liberal layak dipertahankan apabila pembangunan tersebut mengakui dirinya sebagai proyek yang belum selesai. Artikel ini juga menganjurkan agar upaya pembangunan perdamaian lebih difokuskan pada solusi teknis daripada menekankannya sebagai sebuah gagasan ideologis. Peacebuilding liberal selayaknya ditarik dari definisi liberalisme yang lebih murni, terutama dengan memerhatikan gagasan kebebasan positif. Artikel ini dimulai dengan memecah premis dasar pembangunan perdamaian liberal serta menelisik dorongan ideologisnya, khususnya dengan merujuk pada paparan Roland Paris (2010). Lebih lanjut, artikel ini mengevaluasi berbagai kritik dan mengidentifikasi alternatif untuk agenda pembangunan perdamaian liberal. Selanjutnya, artikel ini menyampaikan argumen utama bahwa untuk menjauhkannya dari kritik terhadap pembangunan perdamaian liberal sebagai sebuah “proyek” idelogis, pembangunan perdamaian liberal harus mengurangi ambisi liberalnya dan meninjau lagi titik pandangnya dengan kembali mengenali bahwa liberalisme dalam tubuh gagasannya sendiri memiliki nilai-nilai yang saling bertentangan. Artikel ini kemudian menawarkan untuk memprioritaskan stabilitas di negara pascakonflik dengan berkonsentrasi pada solusi teknis kasus-per-kasus, yang seringkali dikaitkan dengan membangun kapasitas kelembagaan dan memastikan adanya landasan yang dapat menjamin masyarakat lokal menyampaikan tujuan dan kepentingan kolektifnya

Post-liberal peacebuilding and the pacifist state

In this article, I make a case for bringing pacifist political theory back into IR. I attempt this through a critical engagement with post-liberal peacebuilding models, contending that current efforts to go beyond the liberal peace do not extend far enough, particularly to the extent that they implicitly adopt a version of state-building which includes the military as a key actor, the doctrine of the legitimate monopoly on violence and the permanent prospective resort to violence as the final arbiter of radical disagreement and political conflict. This, I suggest, reproduces the epistemic, discursive and institutional structures in which violent political conflict first emerges; in particular, the acceptance of the instrumental rationality and legitimacy of violence is an essential cause of war and political violence. What I propose instead is a radical post-liberal politics in which both the legitimation of, and the means of, violence have been effectively removed from the political sphere. As such, I argue that pacifism offers important theoretical and empirical resources for the future development of peacebuilding theory and practice.

Rethinking peace-building practices through the Somaliland experience

ABSTRACTReflecting on the Somali case, the article argues that the systematic failures of international interventions in the country have largely derived from the modernising orientation underlying UN peace-building practices. Following this logic, the solution to the Somali problem becomes dependent upon the construction of a centralised authority. Resisting an alternative romanticisation of the Somaliland experiment, the article suggests that the multiple attempts to build a sui generis model of democracy, which combines Western and local forms of governance, are giving way to a hybrid political order that may, in turn, help us to rethink UN peace-building practices in less ethnocentric terms.

Agency & peacebuilding: the promise of local zones of peace

International peacebuilding has expanded rapidly in the two decades since the Agenda for Peace was published. Alongside this growth of peacebuilding has come the realisation that many peacebuilding projects conceived of and sponsored by the international community have failed to meet their own objectives or, more importantly, failed to have been embraced fully by those they were supposed to help: the individuals and communities attempting to rebuild their lives in post-conflict countries. Critical analysts discuss the current state of peacebuilding and model what they see as the post-liberal peacebuilding paradigm. In doing so, they point to agency as a missing element in local peacebuilding practice. This paper unpacks and theorises agency as a form of human need and proposes the use of zones of peace (ZoPs) as one method for engendering local agency while encouraging good governance, transparency and accountability in local peacebuilding projects.

Applying Cynefin Complexity Theory to Mediation

La version anglaise de ce document peut etre trouve a l'adresse http://ssrn.com/abstract=2859264Cynefin is a Welsh word that means we are influenced by multiple factors in our environment that we can never fully understand. It is a good way to describe the complex world we are experiencing in this early part of the 21st century. The Cynefin framework is a practice-based management system that seeks to modulate complexity rather than trying to constrain it. It challenges the command and control style of alpha leaders particularly in a complex environment. It requires leaders who can manage the flow of networks between people in a way that allow for a safe space for minority views, diverging opinions, conflict and internal disruption. This is the best pathway to creating strategic surprises and opportunities. Complexity theory and the Cynefin approach is an insightful way of thinking that has direct application to mediation, conflict resolution in general and peace building practices. ADR theorists and academics point to at least five models of mediation. However from a practice perspective there are only two models. The model that involves the parties working together in a joint session and the model that does not (caucused or shuttle mediation). The caucused mediation model is often conducted by alpha mediators (retired judges and senior lawyers) using a command and control approach.Mediating with the parties in the joint session requires mediators who can allow a fresh interaction between the parties in real time. It is a way of moving the focus away from the past and the future and on to the immediacy of the present. This is in harmony with complexity theory and the Cynefin approach of understanding and managing from the present rather than drawing from the past or hypothesising a future goal and trying to close the gap. It is managing for emergence rather than outcome. This paper examines the guiding principles behind the Cynefin approach and its application to management practices and applies them to the two practice models of mediation, the joint session approach and the caucused approach.

Motivation of Philanthropists in Peacebuilding: Promoting Peace as Personal Satisfaction?

This paper was developed out of an interest to learn more about the role, and more particularly about the motivations, of philanthropists who engage in peace research and peacebuilding practice. How can we explain this engagement in peacebuilding and conflict transformation despite the fact that (a) this field is highly contested in terms of substance, instruments and processes, and (b) it may take far more than one generation's lifespan for it to show positive results? Adopting an inductive approach, the article examines basic linkages between philanthropy and peacebuilding, laying the groundwork for preliminary results from a set of explorative semi-structured interviews on the topic. The authors analyse the implications of philanthropic financing for peacebuilding interventions and compare it with other sources of funding.

Space, discourse and environmental peacebuilding

The concept of environmental peacebuilding is becoming increasingly prominent among peacebuilding scholars and practitioners. This study provides a brief overview about the various discussions contributing to our understanding of environmental peacebuilding and concludes that questions of space have hardly been explicitly considered in these debates. Drawing on discourse-analytic spatial theory, I discuss how the social construction of scale, place and boundaries are relevant for environmental peacebuilding processes and outcomes. This theoretical approach is then applied to the Good Water Neighbours project, which aims at improving the regional water situation and at building peace between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. The results suggest that discursive constructions of space are important in facilitating, impeding or shaping environmental peacebuilding practices. Analyses of environmental peacebuilding, but also of peacebuilding more general, are therefore encouraged to draw more strongly on the findings of spatial theory.

Local experiences of liberal peace

Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of these complex relationships, practices of peacebuilding are often far less nuanced. Instead there is a tendency to pin the hopes of fragile post-conflict states on establishing a liberalized and supposedly peace-promoting economy and a worrying absence of grounded assessments of the impacts of such policies. This article argues that the resulting lack of clarity regarding the local impacts of such peacebuilding mechanisms contributes to continued unwarranted enthusiasm for marketization among policymakers and practitioners. This issue is addressed directly by exploring the destabilizing and potentially conflict-inducing impacts of one foreign direct investment (FDI) project in rural Sierra Leone. The dominance of liberal approaches to economic policy within peacebuilding has recently combined with a surge in large-scale FDI projects, often labelled as ‘land-grabs’, which can be interpreted as a direct embodiment of the liberal peace paradigm. While the liberal peace assumes that such projects will help by paying taxes, rebuilding state capacity and employing idle young males, the article illustrates that among local populations such projects can be experienced as deeply disruptive and potentially conflict-promoting. It therefore describes four specific mechanisms by which the project in this setting endangers Sierra Leone’s still precarious transition to peace. The article concludes with recommendations for peacebuilding theorists, policy advocates and practitioners trying to navigate the difficult waters of post-conflict peacebuilding by way of large-scale FDI and marketization in general.

Decolonising gender and peacebuilding: feminist frontiers and border thinking in Africa

The article seeks to theorise an integrated decolonised feminist frame for peacebuilding in an African context. Arguing that a decolonial-feminist lens has the potential to change the way we look at peacebuilding practices, I propose the notion of ‘feminist frontiers’ – an engaged yet stabilising heuristic tool for analysing racialised and gendered relations post-conflict. The argument is structured around three pillars, namely: metageographies as metaphoric mental-space constructions of a colonial peace; masks that constrain the introduction of complicated and intersected human subjecthoods; and mundane matter that elicits ambivalent engagements between human and post-human subjectivities in the areas of everyday political economies and infrastructural rule of peacebuilding. I conclude that such feminist frontiers represent intermediate and mediated spaces or epistemological borderlands from where the undertheorised and empirically understudied discursive and material dimensions of peacebuilding from a gender perspective can be investigated.

Understanding Japan’s Peacebuilding in Concept and Practice

In the post–Cold War era, Japan has developed its own version of peacebuilding in concept and practice and has taken a non-coercive approach to peacebuilding. It has been underpinned by domestic norms of pacifism. This article elaborates on the underexplored theme of Japan’s peacebuilding by focussing on its conceptual basis and three key dimensions of practice. It aims at providing a refined understanding of the Japanese version of peacebuilding, which encompasses highly comprehensive activities in and beyond troubled regions, while carefully excluding the role of military coercion. This article first presents a brief overview of the term ‘peacebuilding’ understood internationally. It then examines Japan’s understanding of the concept of peacebuilding. It consists of the ‘consolidation of peace’ as an immediate contribution to peace and human security, and ‘state-building’ as establishing and enhancing political, economic and social frameworks for durable peace in the long run. The third section of this article investigates three important dimensions of Japan’s peacebuilding practice: (1) the on-the-ground effort in troubled regions consisting of non-military peacekeeping and the provision of foreign aid; (2) taking leadership in developing principles of, and approaches to, peacebuilding in international forums; and (3) human resource development for fostering civilian peacebuilders at home. Finally, this article concludes that Japan is carving out its niche in the field of peacebuilding, suggesting that it is constructing an identity as a peacebuilder.

Political reconciliation in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville: the dark side of hybridity

ABSTRACTIn recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operations, little attention has been paid to examining whether or not they also bring unintended negative consequences. Drawing on the cases of Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville, this article examines the potentially dark side of hybridity. It demonstrates that, in each of these cases, hybrid approaches to political reconciliation have brought both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side of the equation, hybridity has seen imported international approaches to reconciliation adapted to meet local demands and ensure resonance with local populations. On the negative side, however, the misappropriation and instrumentalisation of local practices within hybrid approaches has served to damage their legitimacy and to jeopardise their contributions to reconciliation. The article thus concludes that the existence and extent of this dark side necessitates a re-evaluation of how hybrid approaches to political reconciliation are planned and implemented.

Examining Peacebuilding Through a Trauma Lens: Practitioner Reflections on Programs for Youth Exposed to Traumatic Stressors in Intergroup Conflict

The international community recognizes that young people are increasingly vulnerable to psychosocial trauma within in intergroup conflict. Exposure to traumatic stressors within these conflicts poses unique risks not only to the neurological and social development of youth, but also to their capacities to fully engage in peacebuilding interventions. With a growing focus on youth programming in peacebuilding strategies, there is greater imperative to explore the intersections of trauma and peacebuilding, which are naturally linked in their focus on intra- and inter-personal transformation. This intersection has largely been overlooked in the literature, though it deserves far greater attention based on the growing knowledge of the psychological sequela of youth in intergroup conflict. Through a qualitative evaluation of practitioner reflections, this study explores how practitioners conceptualize and approach issues of traumatic stress in youth peacebuilding programs focused on youth in intergroup conflict. The aim is to identify the working assumptions related to trauma undergirding peacebuilding practice and determine how to revisit these assumptions to account for the traumatic dimensions of intractable identity-based violence. The study's findings offer practical steps forward to enhance trauma-sensitive peacebuilding practice.

Rethinking Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Programs

This article introduces the special issue on DDR and ‘Armed Non-Statutory Actors’ (ANSAs) which we prefer to the less precise label of Armed Non-State Actors. The understanding that disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs are essential in helping to prevent the recurrence of war in post-conflict situations is at the heart of current peacebuilding practice and the academic literature on peacekeeping and stabilization. But the changing strategic context of DDR programs and in particular the proliferation of ANSAs presents new challenges, the responses to which have been characterized as ‘second generation’ DDR. The changing context poses new questions and forces us to rethink assumptions and templates of DDR as the concept is blurred and expanded. The question is if it makes sense to hold on to the concept or whether the assumptions associated with it will get in the way of rethinking templates for violence reduction in the future.

What has Changed with Peace? Local Perceptions of Empowerment in Mozambique

Democracy promotion and economic liberalisation have been two pillars of contemporary peacebuilding practices. Whereas several studies have discussed the implementation of such reforms, much less has been written about their long-term effects, including repercussions in terms of changing people's perception about their own power and ability to influence political spaces. Addressing this gap in the literature, this article analyses local perceptions of change following the peace accords in Mozambique. The analysis is based on interviews and focus groups conducted in Northern Mozambique in 2012, as well as on two surveys on democracy conducted by the Afrobarometer project in 2002 and 2012. This article concludes that whilst democratisation has contributed to people's empowerment by creating formal spaces for participation, economic liberalisation has instead contributed to the reverse; in failing to tackle poverty, it has negatively affected the very spaces for empowerment created by democratisation.

Review of Adam Moor's Peacebuilding in practice: local experience in two Bosnian towns

Armed conflict in Yugoslavia gave birth to six nations with different identities and economic outlooks. It is now divided along ethnic lines and includes six republics – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia – and Kosovo with supervised independence. The conflicts that arose through this division of nations still exist in different forms; one religious, and the other, nationalism. There have been many attempts to analyse peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts and practices in different conflict-hit countries. Studies of peacebuilding have received particular attention in security and peace studies around the world. The emergence of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the unique case studies for peace and security researchers and many scholars have highlighted the country’s dangerous conflict. Adam Moore’s book was published in 2013 by Cornell University Press, Ithaca, US. The book was funded in project form by several international organisations and institutes of peace such as the Council of European Union Studies, International Research and Exchanges Board and The United States Institute of Peace. The book contains an interesting case study of two Bosnian towns, Brcko and Mostar. The examples of these towns have been used in a comparative analysis to improve understanding of the differences in peacebuilding practices between local political parties and institutions, and local and international ones.

Exploring Barriers to Constructing Locally Based Peacebuilding Theory

This article seeks to explore why, after significant financial investment and a history of nearly 50 years of civil society activity, there is a paucity of explicitly codified and consolidated indigenous theory that has emerged from peacebuilding practice in Northern Ireland. Methodologically, this apparent contradiction is explored, utilizing both empirical research (interviews with key peacebuilders) and the wide practitioner experience of the authors. It is argued that two complex dynamics have contributed to the subordination of local practice-based knowledge, namely, the professionalization of peace and the dominance of research over practice within academia. These two dynamics have played a mutually exacerbatory and significant role in creating barriers to constructing local peacebuilding theory. Phronesis, an Aristotelian term for practical knowledge, is explored to discover what insights it may contribute to both research, theory and practice in the field of peacebuilding, followed by examples of institutions demonstrating its value for practice–theory reflexivity. The article concludes with a call for peace research that validates and values practical knowledge. By doing so, the authors argue, new avenues for collaborative partnership between practitioners and academics can open up, which may play a constructive role in bridging practice–theory divides and, most importantly, contribute to building more effective and sustainable peacebuilding processes in Northern Ireland and in other conflict contexts.

Poststructuralist-Feminist International Relations: A Point of Reconciliation?

The relationships between peace studies and international relations (IR) has never been easy. The “strategic” nature of inter-state relations in IR and its state-centric focus are some of the big challenges to the humanitarian nature of peace studies. However, the rise of feminism in IR in the 1980s has given us a new promise in opening the field of IR to a greater humanitarian focus which could take even the individual level of analysis into account. IR poststructuralist-feminism - which is understood as an IR feminist perspective which deconstruct the “common assumptions of culture” (Sylvester, 1994) including feminism itself - is particularly progressive in the sense that it does not only provide the room to problematize the basic assumptions of mainstream IR, but also room to even question the premises of the IR feminists themselves, a self-reflective quality shared by contemporary peace studies. One of the latest theoretical developments in poststructuralist-feminist IR is the “adoption” of positive psychology into IR methodology in order to take a deeper look into the mostly forgotten dimension of humans’ capability to flourish even under the most extreme condition (Penttinen, 2013). Again, this new proposal resonates with the current trend in peace studies scholarship in which peacebuilding processes are geared toward fuller ownership by the locals and harnesses their capabilities to survive. This article would like to analyze the potentialities of feminist approaches in IR, particularly those which come from the poststructuralist school of thought, as a fruitful “meeting point” for peace studies and IR. Once we identify the “meeting point,” hopefully it can bring us into a rich inter-disciplinary endeavor in the future as well as a better understanding of the dynamics of peacebuilding practices in the context of international relations.Key Words: international relations, poststructuralist feminist IR, peace studies, positive psychology, reflective practices

Desecuritisation of water and the technocratic turn in peacebuilding

This article addresses the research gap of water desecuritisation and advances an interdisciplinary approach within the issue area of peacebuilding. It draws upon three strands of research: security, peacebuilding and transboundary water management. The article examines three core questions: (1) how is desecuritisation conceptualised and understood in theory as well as within the context of water development; (2) in what ways are water conflict addressed within the liberal peacebuilding paradigm; and (3) what are the roles and implications of technocracy in resolving conflict and building peace? The article conducts a conceptual scoping, which critically probes what desecuritisation and peacebuilding do politically in the water sector. It draws empirical illustrations from the Israeli–Palestinian water conflict where water is securitised while major peacebuilding efforts have been made to desecuritise the conflict. It concludes that technical blueprints may run the risk of depoliticising conflict dynamics, which contradicts the normative assumption about desecuritisation as a return to normal politics. Moreover, the technocratic turn in peacebuilding practices have empowered certain actors, who act as the “new” peacemakers while others are marginalised.

Gendering agency in transitional justice

Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.