The Dilemmas of Statebuilding

Confronting the contradictions of postwar peace operations

Roland Paris, Timothy D. Sisk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134002139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the contradictions that emerge in international statebuilding efforts in war-torn societies.

Since the end of the Cold War, more than 20 major peace operations have been deployed to countries emerging from internal conflicts. This book argues that international efforts to construct effective, legitimate governmental structures in these countries are necessary but fraught with contradictions and vexing dilemmas.. Drawing on the latest scholarly research on postwar peace operations, the volume:

• 
  
  

• addresses cutting-edge issues of statebuilding including coordination, local ownership, security, elections, constitution making, and delivery of development aid

• 
  
  

• features contributions by leading and up-and-coming scholars

• 
  
  

• provides empirical case studies including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Croatia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and others

• 
  
  

• presents policy-relevant findings of use to students and policymakers alike

The Dilemmas of Statebuilding will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations and political science. Bringing new insights to security studies, international development, and peace and conflict research, it will also interest a range of policy makers.

1 Introduction

Understanding the contradictions of postwar statebuilding

Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk

Since the end of the Cold War, an enormous international experiment has been underway. A shifting constellation of international and regional organizations, national governments, and non-governmental organizations has conducted a series of complex “peacebuilding” operations aimed at stabilizing countries just emerging from periods of internal war. From Namibia in 1989 to Darfur in 2007, more than 20 major multilateral peacebuilding missions were deployed to post-conflict societies with the goal of preventing the resumption of violence (see Table 1.1). Nor is the demand for these operations likely to abate in the near future, given the increased tendency of armed conflicts to end in negotiated settlements rather than military victory.¹

Why characterize these missions as an experiment? For one thing, there is still no reliable formula for transforming a fragile ceasefire into a stable and lasting peace. Nor should this observation come as a surprise. It is difficult to imagine a more complex or demanding task than post-conflict peace-building, which combines three separate yet simultaneous transitions, each posing its own tremendous challenges: a social transition from internecine fighting to peace; a political transition from wartime government (or the absence of government) to postwar government; and an economic transition from war-warped accumulation and distribution to equitable, transparent postwar development that in turn reinforces peace. Peacebuilding also resembles an experiment in the sense that its methods have been evolving over the past two decades in response to the perceived lessons—and short-comings—of preceding missions. Much of this policy evolution has occurred within sectoral or “micro” areas of peacebuilding, such as specific techniques for organizing and administering elections, but there has also been policy evolution at the “macro” level of the missions as a whole, and in the broad approaches they pursue.

One of the most important macro-level shifts in peacebuilding strategy occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when major peacebuilding agencies began emphasizing the construction or strengthening of legitimate governmental institutions in countries emerging from civil conflict, or what we call “statebuilding” in this book. Statebuilding is a particular approach to peacebuilding, premised on the recognition that achieving security and development in societies emerging from civil war partly depends on the existence of capable, autonomous and legitimate governmental institutions. One of the lessons from the preceding years was that peacebuilding operations tended to rely on quick fixes, such as rapid elections and bursts of economic privatization, while paying too little attention to constructing the institutional foundations for functioning postwar governments and markets. Without mechanisms such as pre-election power-sharing pacts and institutions to uphold election results, for example, balloting initially served as a catalyst for renewed conflict in Angola in 1992. Without arrangements to ensure that newly elected officials would themselves respect the rule of law, autocratic elites reverted to despotic forms of rule in Cambodia during the 1990s and in Liberia after 1997. Without institutions to govern the market, economic reform initiatives were diverted by powerful black marketers in Bosnia in the years following the negotiation of the 1995 Dayton Accords. In response to these and other lessons, international agencies such as the United Nations (UN) began to reorient their peacebuilding strategies towards the construction of effective, legitimate governmental institutions in transitional states. Because such institutional reform required more time, moreover, missions began to be deployed for longer periods, including in Timor Leste, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone.

Table 1.1 Major post-civil conflict peacebuilding operations, 1989–2007

Increased attention on statebuilding as a foundation for peacebuilding made good sense. The assumption that political and economic liberalization could be achieved in the absence of functioning, legitimate institutions—an assumption that implicitly underpinned the design and conduct of peacebuilding in its early years—was deeply flawed (Paris 2004). In other development-related fields, too, weak governance was increasingly recognized as a contributing factor to a range of social ills: from poverty² and famine³ to disease.⁴ Institutional strengthening, alone, would not produce peace and prosperity, but without adequate attention to the statebuilding requirements of peacebuilding, war-torn states would be less likely to escape the multiple and mutually reinforcing “traps” of violence and underdevelopment.

As the mandates and time-frames of postconflict missions expanded, however, the problematic aspects of externally-assisted statebuilding became more apparent. Longer-term international deployments, for instance, risked being perceived by local actors as foreign intrusions in domestic affairs. How could international actors promote the goals of statebuilding without creating real or perceived “neo-trusteeship” arrangements over the host state? How could “local ownership” be achieved in the presence of powerful external actors? What about the danger of creating dependency on foreign actors or resources? How could international agencies promote statebuilding in a manner that respected local traditions and expectations in political, social and economic life? What were the long-run effects of different statebuilding strategies, including different electoral systems? How could postwar constitutions be designed to keep the peace in the short term and to lay the foundation for an effective, legitimate state in the longer-term? Postwar statebuilding is rife with these—and many other—vexing dilemmas.

To be sure, practitioners of statebuilding in the United Nations and other international organizations have been aware of many of these challenges. Issues such as coordination and coherence, local ownership, legitimacy, capacity-building, dependency, accountability, and exit are now commonly discussed in meetings of the new UN Peacebuilding Commission and elsewhere. But one of the arguments of this book is that such official discussions still tend to superficial, relying more on catch phrases than substance.⁵ Meanwhile, the underlying sources of statebuilding’s problems are rarely explored—or even directly acknowledged.

We believe that the time has come for a closer examination of the dilemmas and contradictions that lurk beneath the more visible, day-to-day challenges of statebuilding. Fundamental and unresolved tensions in the idea of externally-assisted statebuilding have given rise to a recurring series of policy problems facing peacebuilding actors in the field. Directly acknowledging and confronting these problems is crucial to the future success of the international community’s peacebuilding efforts. The principal objective of this book is to investigate these contradictions and the policy dilemmas they generate.

The evolution of peacebuilding practice and theory

During the Cold War, the UN’s principal security function was traditional peacekeeping, which typically involved deploying lightly-armed military forces to monitor ceasefires or patrol neutral buffer zones between former combatants. With rare exceptions, UN peacekeepers restricted themselves to the role of ceasefire observers, and stayed out of the domestic politics of their host states. They did so for several reasons: First, the UN Charter expressly prohibited the organization from intervening in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”⁶ Second, the Soviet Union and United States—both veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council—were wary of outside meddling in their respective Cold War spheres of influence, which in turn limited the UN’s opportunities to play a more active role in addressing domestic security problems, particularly in strategically important countries. Third, even when the Soviets and Americans saw little threat to their strategic interests, the intense ideological differences of the Cold War made it virtually impossible to reach agreement on supporting any particular model of domestic governance—democracy or otherwise—within the states hosting peacekeepers.

Faced with these constraints, successive UN Secretaries-General held that international peacekeepers “must not take on responsibilities which fall under the Government of the country” in which they were operating.⁷ But changing conditions at the end of the Cold War offered the UN a new entrée into domestic affairs which quickly revolutionized the organization’s peace operations. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union (later Russia) was willing to maintain previous levels of military and economic assistance to their respective clients, particularly in many parts of the world, including most of Africa, which were now deemed strategic backwaters. This created a demand and an opening for the UN and other international organizations to become more directly involved in efforts to end several long-standing conflicts.

In 1989, the UN sent a mission to Namibia to monitor the conduct of local police and disarm former fighters, while preparing the country for its first democratic election and assisting in the drafting of a new national constitution. These functions went well beyond the constraints that had traditionally been imposed on peacekeepers, including the prohibition on involvement in the domestic affairs of host states. In 1991, new missions were launched in Angola, El Salvador, and Cambodia, involving the organization of elections, human-rights training and monitoring, and even (in Cambodia) temporarily taking over the administration of an entire country. In 1992, the UN deployed personnel to Bosnia and Somalia in the midst of ongoing civil conflicts, with formal Security Council authorization to use force for purposes other than their own self-defense—another contrast from traditional peace-keeping. In the same year, the UN sent a mission in Mozambique with wide-ranging responsibilities paralleling those in Angola, El Salvador, and Cambodia, including the preparation and supervision of democratic elections.

In his 1992 policy statement An Agenda for Peace, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali presented a conceptual map of these new mission types (Boutros-Ghali 1992). He defined “peacekeeping” in traditional terms, as lightly armed missions that would mainly perform observation functions. His second category of operations—peace enforcement—involved more heavily armed contingents authorized to use force to achieve purposes other than self-protection. A third category of missions—post-conflict peacebuilding—aimed “to strengthen and solidify peace” in the aftermath of “civil strife.” According to Boutros-Ghali, peacebuilding might include such functions as “disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation” (1992, para. 55). In addition, Boutros-Ghali underlined the importance of preventive diplomacy, or efforts to ease tensions before they result in conflict, which might include the “preventive deployment” of UN forces in order to avert violence.

The distinction between these different mission types was never absolute—nor could it be. The UN was moving in the direction of more complex multifunctional operations which sometimes displayed elements of all these mission types combined. The contradictions manifested themselves in an especially important way in Bosnia, where the ill-fated UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) ended with peacekeepers unable to establish zones of safety that could stop crimes against humanity. In the ensuing years, some actors broadened the definition of “peacebuilding” to include everything from preventive diplomacy and humanitarian aid to different types of civilian assistance, military operations, development activities, and post-conflict reconstruction.⁸ This was, in some respects, understandable: post-conflict peacebuilding aimed not only to consolidate peace after war, but also to prevent renewed violence in countries that had recently experienced conflict, and it therefore had simultaneously preventive and remedial purposes. On the other hand, such definitional broadening risked deflecting attention away from the special challenges and circumstances of postwar reconstruction, which is the focus of this volume.

Definitional nuances aside, peacebuilding in its post-conflict form became the UN’s principal peace and security activity after the Cold War. Between 1989 and 1993 alone, eight major peacebuilding missions were deployed into territories emerging from war: Namibia, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Liberia, and Rwanda (see Table 1.1). The apparent failure of subsequent peace-enforcement operations in Somalia and Bosnia in 1993–94 had a chilling effect on UN operations through the mid-1990s, creating a lull on the deployment of new missions that lasted until the latter part of the decade. Nevertheless, three new operations were created during this relatively slow period: in Bosnia (1995), Croatia (1995), and Guatemala (1997).

In hindsight, the missions launched between 1989 and 1997 may be viewed as a first generation of peacebuilding operations following the Cold War, and they revealed the international community’s relative inexperience in dealing with the task of post-conflict stabilization. Initial mandates tended to be for very limited periods, focusing primarily on holding a successful post-conflict election, usually within the first one or two years of peace, after which it was hoped that the host societies would be on their way to a lasting peace based on democracy and functioning free-market economies. Relatively little attention was paid to the longer-term tasks of constructing or strengthening the instituti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: understanding the contradictions of postwar statebuilding
• PART I Domestic and international context
• PART II Security
• PART III Political economy
• PART IV Institutional design
• PART V Autonomy and dependence
• PART VI Reflections and conclusions
• References