UN Peacebuilding Architecture

The First 10 Years

Cedric de Coning, Eli Stamnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317231899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Since its establishment, the UN's Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) has been involved in peacebuilding processes in more than 20 countries. This edited volume takes stock of the overall impact of the PBA during its first decade in existence, and generates innovative recommendations for how the architecture can be modified and utilized to create more synergy and fusion between the UN's peace and development work.

The volume is based on commissioned research and independent evaluations as well as informed opinions of several key decision-makers closely engaged in shaping the UN's peacebuilding agenda. It seeks to find a balance between identifying the reality and constraints of the UN's multilateral framework, while being bold in exploring new and innovative ways in which the UN can enhance the results of its peace and development work through the PBA.

The research and writing of each chapter has been guided by four objectives:

• to assess the overall impact of the PBA;
• to generate innovative ideas for how the PBA can be made more effective post-2015;
• to analyze the PBA's role at the nexus of the UN's peace and development work; and
• to consider what would be required for the PBA to increase and improve its impact in future.

It will be of interest to diplomats, UN officials, the policy community and scholars engaged in the debate following the 2015 review and the implementation of its recommendations, and will be an essential resource for UN and peacebuilding scholars.

Part I Setting up the UN Peacebuilding Architecture

DOI: 10.4324/9781315625409-2

1 The vision and thinking behind the UN Peacebuilding Architecture

Abiodun Williams and Mark Bailey

DOI: 10.4324/9781315625409-3

• Vision for peacebuilding: what was needed?
• Cleavages in the peacebuilding debate by 2005
• Momentum gathers for reform
• Towards a Peacebuilding Commission
• Debating the terms of the new Peacebuilding Architecture
• Role of civil society and the private sector
• The World Summit and beyond
• The Peacebuilding Support Office
• The Peacebuilding Fund
• The establishment of the Peacebuilding Architecture
• Conclusions

The United Nations (UN) Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) was born at a rare international moment when political will aligned with intellectual momentum to produce genuine organizational change. The story of the origins of the PBA, and the contours it eventually took, is fundamentally one of the search for such an alignment. Attempts to translate scholarship and operational experience into new institutional forms entail a constant struggle to reconcile what expertise says is needed, and what is politically feasible. The Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) that emerged in 2005 was a product of such negotiation—as were the strengths and flaws that it exhibited. Along with the other two pillars of the new PBA—the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO)—the commission represented a middle path between optimum policy and political reality.

By the time of the 2005 World Summit, whose Outcome Document ¹ provided the mandate for the creation of these three new entities, there was widespread agreement within the UN system that building sustainable peace in countries susceptible to conflict was critical to the world organization’s work in upholding international peace and security, promoting sustainable development, and protecting human rights.

The UN’s experience in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War underlined the relevance of such a focus, as well as the need to improve its own efforts. Increasingly, the UN became the international community’s “actor of choice” to manage difficult post-conflict transitions. It had been vested with unparalleled authority, and had registered some noteworthy successes, as in Namibia and Croatia. ² All too often, however, it had labored under the weight of its new responsibilities, which could extend to plenipotentiary authority, as in Kosovo and Timor-Leste. ³

The impetus for reform in 2005 may have proven decisive, but it was not wholly new. Previous UN reports had introduced the concept of peacebuilding, and further refined the UN’s understanding. However, they had done little to foster momentum towards a coherent approach across the UN system. In contrast, the reforms of 2005 not only demonstrated that peacebuilding was an idea whose time had come, but offered normative coherence with broader efforts to reform the UN in the early twenty-first century. ⁴ They also provided a chance to affirm the UN’s relevance, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s own reforming credentials, at a time when the leadership of the organization and its leader had been called into question.

This chapter argues that the creation of the PBA was a signature accomplishment, but recognizes the significant gap between original reform proposals and what was ultimately achieved. Scholarly attention has focused on accounting for the ultimate form that other landmark reforms took—not least the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), where the consensus achieved in the World Summit Outcome Document differed substantially from the recommendations of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. ⁵ However, there has been little analysis of what accounts for the discrepancies between the eventual form of the PBA and the initial vision for the new peacebuilding institutions, particularly as laid out by the High-Level Panel on Challenges, Threats and Change, which had recommended the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission in its 2004 report. ⁶

This chapter examines the UN’s thinking on peacebuilding in the period immediately before the creation of the PBA, and provides an analysis of the negotiation process that led to the creation of the architecture as it is today. We highlight key cleavages in the debate, particularly around a potential preventive mandate for the proposed commission, which put into clear relief the stakes for key member states, including the G-77 and the United States, as well as UN Secretariat and wider UN system actors. The negotiations around this sensitive issue were emblematic of the disagreements between member states, particularly between donors and countries that might themselves end up on the PBC docket, as well as implicating the interests of various other actors within the wider UN.

Vision for peacebuilding: what was needed?

That the failure to build sustainable peace was proving inimical to the wider aims of the United Nations seemed self-evident by 2005, and was also supported by scholarly work which increasingly spoke with one voice on the relevance of a peacebuilding paradigm, if not the form it should take. Particularly influential was the work of Paul Collier, who argued that between one-quarter and one-third of all negotiated peace settlements ended in failure, with reversion to civil war within five years. ⁷ Collier’s earlier finding, that half the countries emerging from violent conflict reverted to conflict within five years, had gained considerable currency within the UN, and amongst influential member states. ⁸

Senior UN officials, including the Secretary-General, agreed that more effective mechanisms were needed to prevent the recurrence of conflict after civil wars and to ensure that longer-term efforts toward development were not undermined by a renewal of conflict—a process that Collier memorably referred to as “development in reverse” in a paper that estimated the cost of an average civil war at US$54 billion. ⁹ Central to these efforts was the need to support institution building and promote the rule of law in post-conflict societies. There was concomitant concern that the UN and the wider international system were too poorly equipped, and too poorly coordinated, to handle such problems. Peacebuilding activities were mired in bureaucratic turf battles, lack of funding and failure to share best practices. These twin problems—external trends and an internal inability to check them—ultimately produced a consensus that innovations were necessary, and that they should take the form of a new peacebuilding architecture that could better enable the UN system to meet the challenge of helping countries successfully complete the transition from war to peace.

The new architecture was congruent with Kofi Annan’s own vision of twenty-first-century sovereignty, ¹⁰ which he saw as implying responsibility and which was vested in a state’s citizenry, not just in the state itself. ¹¹ This was a silver thread that ran throughout his 2005 reform agenda. If the intellectual foundations for peacebuilding had been compellingly laid, the norm-entrepreneurship of an activist Secretary-General with an instinctive understanding of the “political traffic” in New York was also essential to peacebuilding’s “coming of age.”

Cleavages in the peacebuilding debate by 2005

The overwhelming economic, political, and human cost of the failure to build lasting peace, the UN’s own experience of peace operations in the 1990s, and the increased scholarly focus on the topic aligned to produce a growing body of work on peacebuilding which had a significant impact on UN reform initiatives. In this section, we highlight some of the key cleavages that influenced thinking within the UN itself, particularly during the 2005 negotiations.

“Peacebuilding” as a term has given rise to considerable definitional variance between scholars, ¹² and therefore also between those in the policy sphere attempting to institutionalize a particular understanding of peacebuilding: its scope. ¹³ The primordial question of what peacebuilding was attempting to achieve was one such open question as the 2005 negotiations approached, with a spectrum of views developing from Galtungian “positive peace” ¹⁴ to an absence of violence with some basic standards of governance. ¹⁵ In the negotiation stage, the ambiguity surrounding peacebuilding facilitated progress by allowing actors within the UN bureaucracy and member-state delegations to project their own conceptual aspirations into the reform process, ¹⁶ even if underlying divergences could not be ignored once the PBA became operational.

The contentious nature of some issues could, however, not be avoided. One such issue was the role of prevention activities in peacebuilding. For Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, for example, peacebuilding is in effect “the frontline of preventive action.” ¹⁷ This view was consistent with the call for coherence between conflict-prevention efforts and post-conflict peacebuilding implied in the seminal report on UN peacekeeping, the Brahimi Report, issued in 2000. ¹⁸ Although earlier UN reform documents, including Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace, had explicitly situated peacebuilding as a “post-conflict” activity, ¹⁹ reformists nevertheless hoped that it could be linked more coherently to activities aimed at conflict prevention.

The need for institutional coherence between prevention and peacebuilding efforts was underlined in a landmark presidential statement of the UN Security Council in 2001:

The Security Council recognizes that peacebuilding is aimed at preventing the outbreak, the recurrence or the continuation of armed conflict and therefore encompasses a wide range of political, development, humanitarian and human rights programmes and mechanism. This requires short- and long-term actions tailored to address the particular needs of societies sliding into conflict or emerging from it … ²⁰

This view was in line with Kofi Annan’s own emphasis on the importance and interconnectedness of conflict prevention. He had “pledged to move the United Nations from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention,” ²¹ and expected that the new PBA—along with R2P, the principal reform on peace and security during his tenure—would reflect this aspiration. Yet, even though the high-level panel agreed with this view, prevention was to be the principal casualty of the ensuing negotiations with and between member states.

The debate about prevention was part of a wider discussion in the academic literature about the sequencing of peacebuilding: was it to be undertaken “across the conflict cycle,” ²² or was it explicitly a “post-conflict” activity? ²³ A linked question was whether there was a discernible “peacebuilding period.” When, for example, could peacebuilding be declared to have been achieved? Could one measure a period of time where recurrence had been avoided, or were all post-conflict states (including, for example, Germany and Japan) forever in a peacebuilding stage? The view taken on this contentious subject had ramifications for the relationship of peacebuilding to other activities undertaken by the UN in conflict zones—mediation, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and peace monitoring—and for where authority lay. Unlike these enterprises, which were generally attached to specific departments within the UN Secretariat, peacebuilding was seen as a holistic enterprise, necessarily bringing together different elements of the UN system.

Connecting the debate on peacebuilding to concurrent reform processes, not least the effort to replace the moribund Commission on Human Rights with a more effective Human Rights Council, were different views about the characteristic of the state whose capacities international actors were engaged in (re)building. Some scholars placed the emphasis on the ability of a state to provide a modicum of security, while others stressed that legitimacy rested on the ability to deliver services. ²⁴

Discussions about the nature of the state that was to emerge from peacebuilding efforts raised questions of democratic legitimacy. Was peacebuilding an inherently liberal process, as many argued, owing to its co-emergence at the high point of economic liberalization, the temptation of Western donors to adhere to “end of history” thinking and the intellectual attractiveness of democratic peace? Finally, a key debate in the literature that led directly into the negotiations between member states and within the UN itself was who peacebuilders actually were. This was to have implications for the institutional locus of the PBA within the UN system, as well as its reporting lines. At the time when the PBA was created, there was increasing emphasis, in the literature as well as operationally, on a “whole-of-system” approach intended to facilitate activities by a “coalition of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• Global Institutions
• UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Foreword: Reflections on the birth of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• Introduction: Assessing the impact of the UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• Part I: Setting up the UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• Part II: The Peacebuilding Architecture's instruments in practice
• Part III: The institutional and conceptual impact of the Peacebuilding Architecture
• Part IV: Country-specific impact of the Peacebuilding Architecture
• Part V: Findings and conclusion
• Index
• Routledge Global Institutions Series