Whole-of-Society Peacebuilding

Mary Martin, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000011807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Bibles

The complex problems of peace, security, and development in societies affected by conflict increasingly demand innovative ideas, and comprehensive strategies to tackle the diverse, simultaneous, and daunting challenges faced in trying to rebuild states and communities after war. This comprehensive collection sets out a 'Whole-of-Society' (WoS) approach which focuses on the social contexts within which conflict resolution and prevention take place. The aim of WoS is to grasp the complexity both within local society and in the relations between external peacebuilders and the people they set out to help. The book argues that, by understanding multiple actors, their relationships, and the conditions in which they operate, complexity becomes an opportunity to be grasped, not simply an impediment to building peace.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Mind the gaps. A Whole-of-Society approach to peacebuilding and conflict prevention

Mary Martin, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic and Linda Benraïs

ABSTRACT

External peacebuilding interventions have moved towards comprehensive strategies to tackle the complex problems of peace, security and development. This paper proposes a ‘Whole-of-Society’ (WOS) approach which seeks to enhance the effectiveness of externally led peacebuilding and conflict prevention through recourse to the social contexts within which they are implemented. The aim of WOS is to see complexity, both within local society and in the relations between external peacebuilders and local society, as an opportunity to be grasped, as much as an impediment to effective outcomes. A WOS approach adds a practice dimension to debates on ownership, local peace and hybridity, trust-in-peacebuilding and their conceptualisations of local agency and dynamics. It seeks to address the operational gaps that emerge within a societal perspective to peacebuilding, in particular by suggesting ways of achieving appropriate configurations of external and local resources, agency and initiatives.

A recurrent theme in conflict and security studies is the integration of discrete concepts and policy actions in order to achieve a more rounded and, by implication, a more effective response to situations of violence and instability, delivered by external intervention. This has led to pairing security and development, the synthesis of civilian and military capabilities and combinations of global, regional and local initiatives, as examples of how peacebuilding discourse has tended to bundle together otherwise standalone components.¹ In part, this trend reflects a need to deal with the increasing breadth and complexity of current conflict environments. Single approaches no longer seem adequate to the task.² Holistic approaches recognise a multiplicity of security needs and competing priorities for external attention, while comprehensive strategies seek to construct overarching programmes out of diverse elements such as administrative and technical experience, combat troops, diplomats and civil servants, judges and lawyers and development economists, all of which may be appropriate, but only some of which may be relevant to the specific circumstances of each conflict, and each intervention, thus setting up dilemmas of selection. The consequence for theory and practice of this trend towards comprehensiveness and the ability to choose from multiple components is that the problematic of peacebuilding interventions is framed in terms of the political and technical difficulties of combination and integration and how to manage an unwieldy process of many moving parts.³ Such a challenge suggests a supply-side, or ‘inside-out’ logic, reinforced by ‘self-referential’ paradigms that govern the design of external intervention policies,⁴ in which intervening states and international organisations grapple with how to implement their own policy choices and deploy variegated toolkits.⁵ As has been noted, particularly in critical security studies, this perspective tends to relegate the needs, wishes and perspectives of conflict-affected societies.⁶

This special issue frames the challenge posed to external peacebuilding as one of complex and dense conflict environments. Its aim is to suggest possibilities for combining diverse elements, actors and processes. Our approach is pragmatic, proposing that the need is for operational guidance as much as theories of change or new concepts of security. We have attempted to articulate ‘Whole-of-Society’ (WOS) as a practice-based approach which seeks to enhance the effectiveness of externally led peacebuilding and conflict prevention through recourse to the social contexts within which they are implemented, and with the aim of seeing complexity, within local society and in the relations between external peacebuilders and local society, as an opportunity to be grasped, as much as an impediment to effective outcomes.

WOS proposes a thicker form of engagement between external policies and conflict-affected societies, while recognising that in common with all peacebuilding approaches, this does not offer immediate solutions and may indeed raise further challenges and barriers in terms of efficiency and legitimacy. Thicker engagement requires identification of and systematic involvement with the breadth and diversity of actors which operate at multiple levels related to the conflict environment, from states and international institutions, global civil society, to local actors, as well as the existence of numerous relationships at policy level and on the ground. WOS proposes that interventions take account of not only actors in the conflict space, but also of formal and informal processes through which actors relate to each other and respond to conflict. It is through practitioners exploring and exploiting the detail of this dense kaleidoscope of actors and actorness that WOS envisages the emergence of fresh perspectives regarding working in the conflict space and the development of improved capacities. As the article on local ownership in this issue highlights, several things are going on here: externals must navigate multiple local dynamics and highly variegated socio-political orders; different perceptions exist of the conflict at every level from the international to the grass roots and the combination of externals and locals creates a contested arena of perspectives and interests. Interaction is rarely straightforward and constitutes a dynamic of its own that adds a further dimension beyond consideration of peacebuilding as driven by (either) external/or local factors.⁷ Against this backdrop, partnership and co-operation are not necessarily ‘difficult’.⁸ There is also the possibility of creative interactions between outsiders and insiders as well as within each of these categories. Thus, the question we consider here is not only how to limit the hazards of complex interaction but how to realise its potential.

WOS does not argue for an expansive vision of peacebuilding that implies additional policies, outreach to more actors or require externals to work with every civil society group. ‘Whole’ is not synonymous with ‘all’. The aim is not to simply increase the scope of intervention in a potentially infinite extension of inclusivity and comprehensiveness. More comprehensiveness and inclusivity may be neither feasible nor effective and risk diluting rather than improving the appropriateness of external action. Instead, the ability to define priorities and comparative advantages, and work with the fabric of local society based on a more profound understanding of context and changes in context, is proposed as part of a granular approach, which allows external actors to manoeuvre effectively and in a targeted way in complex settings.

As Schirch notes, the relationships between peacebuilding actors, the factors driving and mitigating conflict and activities taking place in different sectors comprise an ‘ecological relationship’ characterised by interdependence.⁹ A WOS approach emphasises the importance of understanding the totality rather than discrete elements of conflict and responses to it, but it also problematises the nature of interdependence and the perverse and positive relational dynamics which are triggered by conflict and its aftermath. This seeks to recast policy design, implementation and adaptation not as technical aspects of realising external interventions, but to ground them in the sociology of conflict and intervention, which is specific to each conflict situation.

A WOS approach sits within a scholarly discourse which brings a societal perspective to peacebuilding, regarding it as an activity rooted in political, social, cultural, economic and technological processes and the characteristics of the conflict-affected society, including indigenous norms and practices.¹⁰ Its premise is that governance interventions based on local realities, traditions and culture are preferable to state-building projects focusing primarily on creating new institutions.¹¹ WOS adds a practice dimension to debates on ownership, local peace and hybridity, trust-in-peacebuilding and their conceptualisations of local agency and dynamics as significant to the outcomes of intervention.¹² However, rather than arguing solely within these lines of scholarly discussion or even proposing more ethnological perspectives¹³ in a bid to improve the authenticity of practice, WOS seeks to contribute to finding ways of implementing peace and state-building as a societal enterprise and for re-imagining the possibilities created by external intervention.

A societal turn can also be seen in policy discourses which seek to analyse deep-seated conditions within conflict-affected societies and address peacebuilding with mechanisms of social reform, ranging from governance to health, education and environmental management.¹⁴ The idea of WOS emerges from ‘Whole of Government’ and joined-up government in public administration, which became popular during the early 2000s.¹⁵ Here, the proposition is that a heterogeneity of stakeholders, collaborative working and the diffusion/reassembling of responsibilities¹⁶ and ‘boundary crossing’ initiatives between different practice perspectives can be seen as significant as working through classic organisational structures.¹⁷ The supposed benefit is to create space for autonomous, peripheral actions while improving connectivity and co-ordination between diverse components, actors and processes.¹⁸

In the context of peacebuilding (as distinct from public administration), this definition suggests similarities between the WOS approach and the trend towards resilience building with its focus on individuals at grass-roots (whether beneficiaries or providers of security) and implies a proposal to transform rather than simply preserve the social status quo through a multilevel, multidimensional and multilateral approach,¹⁹ which joins together all sectors with a possible link to peace and development. Resilience building is also premised on deepening relations between policymakers and a diverse array of civil society institutions including ‘cultural organisations, religious communities, social partners, human rights defenders’ and the private sector as partners.²⁰

In policy terms, WOS is part of a trajectory in intervention which has moved from attempting to pacify conflict societies through military and coercive means, towards an emphasis on stabilisation and reform measures, and in a further step, the co-production of peace, the creation of resilience and organic interaction between multiple external and internal stakeholders, including so-called hybrid peace formulations. As part of the cognitive shift from seeing intervention as predominantly externally driven, towards a recognition of the local, the proposition of WOS is that peacebuilding and conflict prevention will be more effective if they are enacted as social and relational processes, and when a range of actors, actions and intentions are identified and taken into account. In this vein, the motivation for a WOS approach is to address the practice gaps that emerge from a societal perspective and suggest ways of achieving appropriate configurations of external and local resources, agency and initiatives.

Rather than simply following a generalised ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding with its emphases on the acceptance/acceptability of externally led reforms, and in gaining a more accurate picture of indigenous agency,²¹ WOS proposes a disaggregation of the local into salient constituencies of actor and agency, where this salience is context specific, and prescribes actions informed by strategic combinations of actors and processes. It emphasises a relational dimension, seeing peacebuilding as an inherently interactive process animated by the resources, capacities and perspectives of both local society and external actors. If the motivation for a WOS approach is complexity of the peacebuilding environment, the nature of complexity can be understood as not only comprising multiple agents and forms of agency, but also constant shifts in conditions on the ground and the need for continuous review and reshaping of relations and engagements between people and processes.

In terms of policy utility, rather than proposing WOS as a novel concept to reframe the goals and methods of civilian peacebuilding, the premise in this special issue is that it can sharpen and refine what external actors do in applying comprehensive approaches and engaging in deep-seated interventions which disrupt in profound ways the local social fabric, for example with governance and security reform measures. The aim here is that WOS can offer new purpose and traction to these sensitive and difficult initiatives.

We have used the case of EU interventions in conflict and crisis settings to propose and examine the principal characteristics of a WOS approach; to provide empirical insights into how it could add value by looking at specific examples of EU policies in action; and also to consider critically its limitations. Comprehensiveness is a distinctive feature of the EU’s global role in conflict and crisis management, representing ‘a [] working method and a set of concrete measures and processes to improve how the EU, based on a common strategic vision and drawing on its wide array of existing tools and instruments, collectively can develop, embed and deliver more coherent and more effective policies, working practices, actions and results’.²²

With the launch of the EU Global Security Strategy (EUGSS) in June 2016, and in its Council Conclusions of January 2018, the EU emphasised integration as a core feature of its external action with the aim of improving inclusiveness and efficiency. The Integrated Approach refers to multilevel applications of policies and instruments which ‘respect[s] and reaffirm[s] the various mandates, roles, aims and legal frameworks of the stakeholders involved’.²³ Both...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Mind the gaps. A Whole-of-Society approach to peacebuilding and conflict prevention
• 2. From policy to action: assessing the European Union’s approach to inclusive mediation and dialogue support in Georgia and Yemen
• 3. Decentralising power: building inclusive peace? The European Union’s support to governance reform in Eastern Ukraine
• 4. Wholly local? ownership as philosophy and practice in peacebuilding interventions
• 5. Bracing the wind and riding the norm life cycle: inclusive peacebuilding in the European capacity building mission in Sahel–Mali (EUCAP Sahel–Mali)
• 6. Coordinating international interventions in complex settings. An analysis of the EU peace and state-building efforts in post-independence Kosovo
• 7. Manoeuvring wars, rebels and governments: the EU’s experience in Sri Lanka
• Index