Integrated Peacebuilding

Innovative Approaches to Transforming Conflict

Craig Zelizer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429973291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Integrated Peacebuilding addresses the importance of weaving peacebuilding methods into diverse sectors including development, humanitarian assistance, gender, business, media, health, and the environment - areas where such work is needed the most. Incorporating peacebuilding approaches in these fields is critical for transforming today's protracted conflicts into tomorrow's sustainable peace. Covering both theory and practice, Dr. Zelizer and his team of leading academics and practitioners present original essays discussing the infrastructure of the peacebuilding field (outlining key actors, donors, and underlying motivations) as well as the ethical dilemmas created by modern conflict. Exploring both the challenges and lessons to be found in this emerging field, Integrated Peacebuilding is perfect for courses on peacebuilding, conflict resolution, international development, and related fields.

SECTION TWO

Sectoral Approaches to Integrated Peacebuilding

chapter three

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PEACEBUILDING

Wisler Andria

Fragile states are the toughest development challenge of our era. Too often, the development community has treated states affected by fragility and conflict simply as harder cases of development. Yet these situations require looking beyond the analytics of development—to a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and economy. This is not security as usual, or development as usual. Nor is it about what we have come to think of as peacebuilding or peacekeeping. This is about Securing Development—bringing security and development together first to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold over a decade and beyond. Only by securing development can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence.

—ROBERT ZOELLICK (2008, PARA. 12)

PEACEBUILDING AND INTERNATIONAL development historically have functioned as discrete sectors of practice. The schism was made apparent in a variety of venues, including academic literature, public discourse on political affairs, and media reports broadcast from conflict zones. More recently, scholars and practitioners have recognized that there exists an undeniable correlation between the two sectors that necessitates collaboration. Nearly two-thirds of development programming now operates within conflict-affected countries. Actors within both fields agree that social, economic, and political development is unsustainable in societies with violent conflict, and recognize that addressing the basic needs of these communities is both a moral and a practical imperative. This chapter discusses the relationship between international development and peacebuilding, the challenges of integrating peacebuilding into development, and how stakeholders responsible for peacebuilding interventions are becoming more accountable to the survival and sustenance needs of the communities they serve.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECTORS

In the summer of 1944, over 700 delegates from forty-five countries convened in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, for the United Nations (UN) Monetary and Financial Conference. Their goal was to consider the economic- and development-based causes of World War II, and to plot a course for ending the conflict and securing the peace. As the war dragged on, delegates signed the Bretton Woods Agreements that fashioned a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system. These agreements eventually manifested into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which was the precursor to the World Bank. The IBRD’s (1989) first stated purpose was

to assist in the reconstruction and development of territories of members by facilitating the investment of capital for productive purposes, including the restoration of economies destroyed or disrupted by war, the reconversion of productive facilities to peacetime needs and the encouragement of the development of productive facilities and resources in less developed countries. (para. 1)

Despite the initial understanding that international development was closely tied with processes to end violent conflict, the two sectors diverged as Cold War rivalries and subsequent UN Security Council vetoes began to regulate intervention in conflict-affected countries. Peace and security was sought by nation-states through the protection of their sovereignty and economic development. Driven by modernization theory, this development was addressed by international financial institutions, the UN, and donor agencies.¹

Nearly half a century after the historic Bretton Woods meeting, additional players in the prevention, response, and transformation of violent conflict began to act to prevent intrastate civil flare-ups from erupting into cross-border wars. In 1992, former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali sketched his vision for how UN interventions could expand in conflict-affected countries that were once made inaccessible due to Cold War politics in his “Agenda for Peace.” His follow-up report in 1994, “Agenda for Development,” showcased development’s potential for reducing tensions caused by underlying socioeconomic, cultural, and humanitarian inequalities. Practitioners at this time recognized the “importance of moving beyond the artificial separation between ‘conflict’ as belonging to the field of security issues and ‘development’ as the domain of economics” (Smoljan, 2003, p. 240).

While Boutros-Ghali’s architecture for building peace and fortifying development made a convincing theoretical claim for practical, ethical, and political implementation, the first two decades of the post-1989 era quickly underscored the practical difficulties of linking development and conflict. According to the 2011 World Development Report, some 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by repeating cycles of social, political, and criminal violence (World Bank, 2011). Seven of the ten lowest-ranking countries on the 2011 Human Development Index (HDI) published by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) are in or emerging from conflict. According to the UN Millennium Development Goals Report, Goal 2, “to achieve universal primary education by 2015,” is in serious jeopardy given that 42 percent (28 million) of children of primary-school age live in poor countries affected by conflict (United Nations, 2011, p. 17). On a global scale, the economic tax that violence levies on development programs is staggering: the Global Peace Index estimates that $9 trillion in income—a brick of the development foundation—is lost to violence annually (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2012).

Although the relationship between conflict and development has been demonstrated quantitatively, human and organizational roadblocks frustrate collaboration and result in circumspect communication between theorists and practitioners. The relationship between conflict and development continues to be “contested in terms of worldview, assumptions about human nature and society, and intended outcomes for peace and security that underpin various policies and approaches” (O’Gorman, 2011, p. 11).

In her recent book, Conflict and Development: Development Matters, Eleanor O’Gorman (2011) contributes to breaking down these obstructions by outlining three arguments to persuasively delineate the relationship between conflict and development. First, as noted earlier, violent conflict has proven to be a consequential hindrance to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); not one conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single MDG (World Bank, 2011). Second, O’Gorman notes how Mary Anderson (1999), in her book Do No Harm, asked, “How can humanitarian or development assistance be given in conflict situations in ways that rather than feeding into and exacerbating the conflict help local people to disengage and establish alternative systems for dealing with the problems that underlie the conflict?” (p. 2). Anderson recognized the impact of development in three ways: as a possible force for and driver of peace, which interacted with conflict; as having the potential for inflicting harm and engineering good; and as not neutral in any context. Anderson’s “do no harm” principle highlights the responsibility of development, aid, and humanitarian actors to not cause, enable, or inflame violent conflict through their policies and programs. This idea garnered both resistance and support from a spectrum of actors who found themselves rethinking development as exclusively a postwar occurrence with limited time frames. Third, O’Gorman (2011) underscores how development is contestably “well-placed” to respond to a number of the root causes of violent conflict, such as poverty, social injustice, and ethnic tensions, through structural interventions with the state and economy.

In contrast to the arguments put forth by O’Gorman,² who favors strengthening the link between peacebuilding and international development, a counterargument maintains that the two sectors are—in agenda and discourse, although not in practice—embroiled with each other, to the point of resemblance. Pushpa Iyer (2011) asserts that the liberal peacebuilding model, as forwarded by Boutros-Ghali and supported by the UN and other international donor agencies, parallels the neoliberal economic development models championed by the aforementioned international financial institutions.³ This conformity creates an environment in which donors dictate the ingredients of a formulaic peace, a vision currently dominated by traditional economic development initiatives that can ignore many other locally driven visions for peace. Iyer contends that “peacebuilding,” as defined and developed in the field of conflict resolution, is a much broader concept than “development,” and as such requires a longer-term engagement than development donors and workers traditionally commit. The donors’ current development-driven solutions for peace in conflict-affected countries overstress economics, and in turn understate the “oppression, discrimination, and rights abuses that societies in conflict experience” through the inequitable distribution of wealth and ensuing competition for resources (p. 17).

O’Gorman (2011) and Iyer (2011) both reveal some of the tensions and the opportunities arising from cross-sector work between development and peacebuilding. Given the current status of underdevelopment in conflict-affected countries and communities, it is imperative to get beyond the chicken-and-egg debate: whether peace is a prerequisite for development or whether development is a necessary condition for peace. The authors support the argument for an “inclusivist” (Smoljan, 2003) approach to integrating development and peacebuilding, a timely change given parallel shifts in both sectors regarding the movement in peacebuilding from national to human security and the trend from strictly economic growth to human development in international development. These advancements provide a fertile ground for cooperation, as human security moves beyond freedom from physical fear to include economic, food, health, personal, and additional elements ordinarily under the purview of development. Similarly, human development considers the satisfaction of basic human needs along with the eradication of poverty, disease, and injustice. Continued and deeper cross-sector interoperability would ensure an understanding and praxis of peacebuilding, with sustainable development as means, or process, and not simply as product (Barbanti, 2004).

RELEVANT THEORY

Theories from the fields of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and development studies help inform and explain the relative discrepancies between two sectors. While occasionally at odds, the respective theories uncover some of the areas that have challenged the sectors in their individual missions and in their attempts at coordination.

Two major ideas from peacebuilding and conflict resolution have illuminated the potential conflicts for development practitioners and donors in societies on the brink of, in, or emerging from violent conflict. The first is the changing nature of the dominant form of conflict in the past few decades—a shift from interstate to intrastate—with an emphasis on revitalized nationalism, civil war, ethnic hostilities, and the transnational systems of conflict finance (Kaldor, 1999). Since Mary Kaldor first published the seminal text New and Old Wars, the field of peacebuilding has reacted to her understanding of the blurry distinctions of the “old war,” being between the armies of two or more states, and the “new war,” which emerged at the end of the Cold War and includes the state or group use of political violence, organized crime, and large-scale violations of human rights. In the past decade, this changing global context, as described by Kaldor, has been further shocked by terrorist activity, particularly emanating from failed, fragile, or broken states where extremist groups use the fractured communities as grounds for recruiting and training.

Kaldor’s (1999) contribution caters directly to the second idea that has the practice of peacebuilding in impoverished, conflict-affected contexts. A challenge is that much of development theory and some practice still focuses on a realist, state-building development model, despite the nonexistence of the state in many areas, or the “sovereignty gap” (Zoellick, 2008). One of the challenges in a state-building-focused development model is that it displaces attention from the larger historical dynamics of the conflict context (Goodhand, 2003). In contrast to the emphasis on state-focused models, many peacebuilding workers have begun to professionalize their work with players and institutions beyond sovereign heads of state, bearing in mind that modern conflicts involve a range of actors, including cross-border rebel groups, transnational terrorist cells, civil-society organizations funded by the diaspora, and de facto military camps. Furthermore, peacebuilding actors, more habituated to a contextual long-term vision, in both the past and the future, often strive to understand how periods of colonialism, global legacies of economic disenfranchisement, and previous armed conflicts leave consequential residue that even the most well-intentioned development models have difficulty controlling for (Cerretti, 2009).

In turning to development studies, Olympio Barbanti (2004) opines that “because development aid does not deal directly with violence, conflict and conflict resolution have not been topics of major concern to development workers or theorists” (para. 4). While this gap of cross-sectoral understanding has been alleviated somewhat with the work of theorists, practitioners, and groups cited in this chapter, Josh Cerretti (2009) notes that dominant strains of development discourses continue to trivialize the realities of many societies that they target in relation to conflict. For those influenced by modernist or neoliberal economic thought, development theory and practice maintained a one-size-fits-all direct transferability of prescriptions well into the new millennium, through which industrialized countries imposed moral views and policies benefiting themselves (Escobar, 1995).

Specifically, Cerretti (2009) names the aforementioned neoliberal economic policies of the major international financial institutions (IFIs), which traditionally support less public involvement in the economy through reductions in government spending and barriers to international trade. At times they insist on conditions for development aid, which can lead to the marginalizatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• SECTION ONE Integrated Peacebuilding and the Peacebuilding Business
• SECTION TWO Sectoral Approaches to Integrated Peacebuilding
• Appendix A: Key Resources for Integrated Peacebuilding
• Glossary
• Index