Sustainable Peacebuilding Research Articles

Towards Sustainable Peace and Development in Sierra Leone: Civil Society and the Peacebuilding Commission

The Sierra Leone civil war that ended in January 2002 was particularly brutal and left the country economically devastated. Four-and-a-half years later, Sierra Leone was selected as one of two countries to receive focussed attention from the newly created United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). The PBC is mandated to support post-conflict recovery and sustainable development with the participation of all relevant stakeholders, including civil society. Drawing on field research and theories of sustainable peacebuilding and the role of civil society, this paper assesses the PBC's performance in Sierra Leone in its first year of operation. The article concludes that the PBC needs to clarify its priorities in relation to civil society participation in order to fulfil its potential to assist governments in promoting sustainable peace and development.

Economic Assistance, Development and Peacebuilding: The Role of the IFI and EU Peace II Fund in Northern Ireland

This article examines the images of 98 study participants interviewed during the summer of 2006 and a public opinion survey of 1,023 adults conducted in October 2006 with regards to the role of the European Union (EU) Peace II Fund and the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) in community development, reconciliation, and sustainable peacebuilding. The perceptions of community group leaders, funding agency civil servants, and development officers are explored with regards to the role of both funds in building the peace dividend in Northern Ireland. Further, the article explains the importance of community development and cross-community contact through joint economic, peace and justice, and social development projects.

(Re-)building governance in post-conflict Africa: the role of the state and informal institutions

Post-conflict governance is an increasingly important aspect of foreign development assistance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the weakening and disintegration of the state undermine sustainable human development. A major challenge in post-conflict rebuilding in SSA concerns the incorporation of subnational non-state structures and informal institutions into the post-conflict governance apparatus. In order to tackle this apparent gap in sustainable peacebuilding, more theoretical and empirical research is needed into the nuanced role(s) and contribution(s) of the post-conflict state in reconstituting governance and rehabilitating communities. This article discusses the post-Washington Consensus (PWC), an emerging development approach which seeks to re-introduce the role of the state in development and post-conflict studies. The central proposition of the article is that, contrary to the anti-statist premise of the Washington Consensus, states, non-state structures, and informal institutions play an important role in cultivating institutional reconciliation, interpenetration, and integration between macro-level government structures and subnational social institutions.

Non-State Actors, Peacebuilding and Security Governance in West Africa: Beyond Commercialisation

The governance of security in West Africa manifests numerous challenges which point to the need for a comprehensive security agenda to integrate various actors often operating from opposing perspectives. This article argues that the disproportionate focus on the role of commercial security actors in West Africa effectively eclipses research and policy interest in other non-state actors in security governance and tends to undermine sustainable peacebuilding. The article attempts a typology of non-state actors engaged in security governance beyond security contractors and argues that the governance of security should be seen to include ‘insecurity actors’ (such as criminal networks and local mercenaries) because they form part of the ‘push-and-pull’ – exerted by various security actors – whose end result is the de facto governance of security. The challenge of peacebuilding therefore is to bridge the gap between the normative value of security governance (predicated on democratic principles of accountability, transparency and participation) and the reality of diverse interests and perspectives.

Civil-Military Responses to Security Challenges in Peace Operations: Ten Lessons from Kosovo

The complex environments in which peace operations have to function often pose difficult internal security challenges, such as the demilitarization of nonstate militias, control and seizure of heavy and light weapons, protection of humanitarian aid/zones, deterrence of anarchy and crime in situations of state collapse, prevention of interethnic violence, and control of porous and/or contested borders. Security sector reforms have been central to the mandates of Balkans peace operations, but difficulties in responding to specific security challenges have often led to operational setbacks in the field. Effective management of such challenges has thus been an increasingly important priority for both the United Nations and European security organizations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). But while NATO can provide the requisite forces for a strong military deterrent, it cannot contribute the political, administrative, legal, and economic elements necessary for effective security sector reform. Joint action by both military and civil actors is necessary for successful management of the security sector. And successful security sector management is in turn central to the broader strategic goal of fostering a sustainable peace-building dynamic. (1) In this article, I examine the recent experience of civil-military responses to security sector issues in the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). It should be noted here that UNMIK and KFOR have been the most successful complex Balkans operations to date for interorganizational interaction and have demonstrated that many post-Bosnia lessons were effectively applied in the international peacebuilding response to the 1999 Kosovo conflict. A comparison of evolving Balkans security sector action, from Bosnia and Eastern Slavonia to Kosovo, suggests that the civil-military interface should move from cooperative relations to coordinated unity of effort. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that Kosovo is not in a truly condition, as previous Balkans theaters have been. The key elements for postconflict status--a peace agreement and/or determination of a final end state for the territory--are glaringly absent in Kosovo and have been from the arrival of international actors in the contested province. Indeed, Kosovo's indeterminate political status is at the root of many of its most intractable threats to public security, including endemic violence against ethnic minorities, particularly Serbs, and the consequent emergence of polarized ethnic enclaves. Civil-Military Interaction and the Imperative for Coordination The inherent complexity of Balkans conflict environments has demanded interaction between NATO's military forces and the civilian organizations, such as the UN and the OSCE, also active in addressing security sector issues. The capacity of the UN is challenged where deterrent military force is needed in a rapid and massive manner. This need has been the norm for the Balkans, with Bosnia and Kosovo both requiring tens of thousands of well-equipped forces able to project a credible war-fighting face. The fact that NATO is the only organization in the region with the capacity to mount such missions was recognized early on by Kofi Annan. In 1993, he advocated UN-NATO cooperation in the delivery of missions that needed peacekeeping with teeth, noting that their size and complexity make it imperative to explore new avenues of cooperation with regional organizations such as NATO. (2) The interrelated nature of security challenges in these missions has also meant that what used to be understood as a clear distinction between military and civil roles has become increasingly indistinct. While NATO has taken some concrete steps to institutionalize aspects of civil-military interaction in the field, these have generally been only to the extent of formalized cooperation. …

Peacebuilding and the New Regionalism in southern Africa

This paper investigates the complexities of establishing sustainable peacebuilding strategies in southern Africa within 'new' security/'new' regionalism contexts. Building peace requires initiatives based upon longer-term developmental, political, economic and social objectives. If peacebuilding is to fulfil its potential for the advancement of 'human' security in Southern Africa, these criteria will best be met through regional solutions. Yet, the new regionalism is multi-dimensional and the various regionalist forces are not necessarily compatible. Although national governments have made some efforts toward the development of a regional security complex, strong statist and realist tendencies persist at official levels and regionalist pressures within civil societies as well as by external actors tend to be mixed and often contradictory. Apart from a widespread recognition in South Africa of the need to give a bottom-up perspective on the question 'who is security all about?', there has been a growing recognition throughout the region as a whole of the desirability of a regional dimension to the security referent.

Sustainable peace-building in the South: Experiences from Latin America

While some recent internal conflicts have attracted international attention, other long-term conflicts with high accumulative death tolls have been relatively ignored. A decontextualised and partial view of conflict and violence is further encouraged by the separation between the emergency and development sections in many Northern aid agencies. Drawing on detailed case-studies of postconflict experience in El Salvador, Peru, and Nicaragua, the author argues that conflict analysis, emergency intervention, and peace-building must be rooted within specific socio-historical contexts. The article ends with a critical reflection on the extent to which local-level capacities have in fact been able to influence the post-war situation and prospects for long-term and sustainable peace-building in these three countries.