Peacebuilding theory and the meaning of the ‘local’

Over the past few decades, contemporary academic debate on conflict resolution has discussed several approaches applied by institutional actors in different contexts and countries. One of these approaches is peacebuilding. When Johan Galtung introduced the concept of peacebuilding into the academic debate in 1975, his vision of peace as a ‘structure’ opened up a significant debate within peace and conflict studies. The overall understanding of peacebuilding by Galtung assumes that the mechanisms that peace is based on should be built into a ‘structure’ and be present as a reservoir for the system itself to draw up. More particularly, structures such as political, social and economic institutions must be found to remove causes of wars and to offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur (1975:298).

This idea that peace is a structure and peacebuilding should deal with structures that shape conflict situations has gained credit with both scholars and practitioners through a series of interventions in conflict-torn societies. The turning point of peacebuilding interventions was the end of the bipolar world at the end of the 1980s. Since then, the United Nations became the first international institution to pay particular attention to what peacebuilding could offer, better than existing approaches such as peacemaking and peacekeeping. The first UN attempt to operationalize peacebuilding and to clarify the interventional framework in which it is supposed to be implemented was the ‘Agenda for Peace’, a strategic document released by the UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992, explaining the role of the UN in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping.

The ‘Agenda for Peace’ therefore defines the concept of peacebuilding as the construction of a new environment which seeks to avoid the breakdown of peaceful conditions (par.57). In this UN

29 document peacebuilding, however, is not proposed as an isolated approach from other approaches to peace the UN has already been implementing. The best known are peacemaking (which consists of trying to bring hostile parties to agreement by peaceful means) and peace-keeping (which involves third-party intervention to keep warring groups apart and maintain the absence of direct violence). These operations, in the UN understanding, are urged to include comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which can consolidate peace. In 2000, the Brahimi report was adopted by the UN Security Council, in which peacebuilding was given specific attention. The report states that ‘peacebuilding defines activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war’ (A/55/305 S/2000/809, p3). In this report, the conception of peacebuilding refers to the meaning of ‘positive peace’ in Galtung’s sense. Galtung defines ‘positive peace’ as a situation without structural violence, where relationships among the parties are supportive and collaborative and conflicts are resolved constructively; the integration of human society. By contrast, ‘negative peace’ is just the absence of violence and war (1967:12).

To further emphasize the relevance of peacebuilding within the UN intervention framework, the UN General Assembly of 20 December 2005 adopted a resolution (A/RES/60/180) to establish the Peacebuilding Architecture (PBA) as an intergovernmental advisory body. In 2006, the Peacebuilding Architecture body was strengthened by the creation of three sub-bodies, namely the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) and Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) The main purpose of the Commission (PBC) was to focus attention on the reconstruction and institution-building efforts necessary for the recovery of conflict-affected countries and to support the development of integrated strategies in order to lay the foundation for sustainable peace.

On the academic level, over the decade following the creation of Peacebuilding Architecture, scholars intensified the debate on the concept of peacebuilding and how to implement it. Many concerns raised in this debate relate to the most significant ideologies that shape contemporary peacebuilding. One of the key ideologies is liberal optimism, based on the belief that human societies can be peaceful and prosperous through institutional fixes (Mac Ginty, 2013:2). One assumption of the liberal perspective is that institutional reinforcement can promote peace and prevent conflict. This is strongly rooted in the institutional approach which is related to the Weberian conception of the state, emphasizing the importance of central state institutions

(Lemay-30 Hébert, 2010:3; Fukuyama, 2004:20). Mac Ginty found that although, in many cases, liberal peace interventions are well intentioned and rely on the institutional approach, the vast majority of peacebuilding initiatives occur in the global south but are designed, directed and funded from the global north, which means that for many people in targeted countries, peacebuilding is something that comes from ‘outside’ of the context. This is criticized by the term ‘top-down peacebuilding’.

Peacebuilding interventions are also shaped by the economic dimension that lies in liberal ideas in what Brauer and Caruso (2013:152) term ‘peace economics’. They examine the normative aspect of ‘peace economics’ through the economic study and design of political, economic and cultural institutions and their interactions to prevent, mitigate and resolve the causes of violence within and between societies. Although ‘peace economics’ is about the contribution of economic science to peacebuilding, it remains challenged as ineffective to provide better measures of peacebuilding program outcomes. The difficulty of measuring peacebuilding programs has become another major subject of critiques in scholarly debate about peacebuilding paradigms.

The two broad categories of thinking that grasp the limitations of the above peacebuilding approaches are the problem-solving and critical paradigms (Pugh, 2013:11). The problem-solving approach, which adopts a functionalist approach to the problems of conflicts, accepts that conflict is part of the human experience and attempts to find ways to minimize its impact. It seeks to develop systems and institutions that are able to mitigate the impact of violent conflicts and help divided communities to cooperate. The second approach is the critical paradigm that seeks to go further than the problem-solving approach. It maintains that the problem-solving approach is merely engaged in superficial short-term fixes that fail to ask wider questions about power relations in society. Pugh claims that peacebuilding has come to mean revising the structures that led to conflict, inevitably diminishing sovereignty and replicating colonization processes through so-called ‘local empowerment’.

The critical paradigm has also raised a range of controversies related to the prevailing liberal peacebuilding model that drives the problem-solving interventions. Critical challenges are increasingly voiced by scholars and stakeholders who argue that there is a need for a greater emphasis in peacebuilding upon human security, local solutions, social justice and the resolution of the underlying causes of conflicts (Newman et al, 2009:13). It is argued here that liberal institutions aimed at containing instability and building generic state institutions based upon

31 external models have neglected the welfare needs of local populations and have failed to engage with indigenous traditional institutions.

Peacebuilding through liberal institutions continues to fail to provide the ‘promised peace’ in post-conflict countries. In addition, peacebuilding and state-building have been merged into a technocratic set of projects within the same intervention framework without any clear demarcation (Menocal, 2011:1716). Neither approach is effective because in practice the organizations promote statebuilding programs at the local level instead of strengthening state–society relations, responsiveness and accountability, which is expected from peacebuilding theory (Chetail and Jütersonke, 2015:7). This concern is specifically shared by Curtis (2013: 80) when he demonstrates that, in the case of Africa, the peacebuilding as state-building template faces severe limitations as key questions and paradoxes of legitimacy, sovereignty, effectiveness and agency simply cannot be resolved through standard approaches.

One of the critiques of standard approaches is that the outcome of most peacebuilding interventions is founded on international standardized systems, legitimacy and norms and not founded on a contextual, critical and emancipatory epistemology of peace. Richmond for example advocates a new approach to ‘peace formation’ through which international actors can gain a better understanding of the root causes of conflicts, local actors may be assisted, power struggles may be ended or managed and local forms of legitimacy would be able to emerge (Richmond, 2014:14).

The question of local legitimacy draws the attention of Newman et al. (2009: 5), who criticize what they term ‘top-down models of peacebuilding-community-driven initiatives.’ The authors propose that the perceived absence of ‘local ownership’ and the lack of sufficient consultation with local stakeholders has led local populations to question the legitimacy of peacebuilding operations, throwing the sustainability of peacebuilding projects into question.

Academic and policymakers’ critiques of the dominant paradigms of state-building and peacebuilding have culminated in a new paradigm for peacebuilding during the last two decades.

This paradigm advocates an approach to conflict resolution that considers state-building and peacebuilding as dynamic and mutually-reinforcing processes, recognizing the network of both formal and informal institutions and fragmented social orders as requiring delicate management, even as historical grievances and concerns must be addressed (Nganje, 2013: 2). It is argued that at the local level, social cleavages erupt into violent conflict, and/or produce ‘everyday resistance’

32 which ultimately weakens state authority. In the same line of thought, Oda (2007:5) criticizes international organizations for imposing external models of dealing with conflicts and suggests a

‘peacebuilding from below’ approach. He finds that while ‘ordinary persons’ are increasingly gaining attention as significant actors in peacebuilding, traditional ‘negative’ models of peace continue to restrict how one can explain their involvement in the peace process. While sustainable peace is supposed to be rooted in and adapted to the context of the post-conflict state, and yet also produced by locals themselves, Donais (2009:755, cf. Donais 2009a, 2012) found that, in many cases, key individual actors had the power to challenge or veto many aspects of an unfolding peace process.

This inability of peacebuilding to adapt in the local context is associated with the fact that peacebuilding is merged with state-building approaches that offer the possibility of achieving a liberal peace, but are primarily concerned with institutional and legal design and with market access, with markedly less concern for the normative architecture of peacebuilding (Richmond 2014:4). Richmond stresses that these strategies lack a connection in context, on a grassroots level, amongst populations who have their own understandings of identity, sovereignty, institutions, rights and law and who have their own needs in terms of their own socio-historical and cultural traditions. These critiques of state-building in terms of what the authors describe as the ignorance of the ‘local’ is one of the key points discussed in this study. Alongside the critiques of these standard approaches and their ignorance of the local level, the ‘local turn’ reemerged in the debate among scholars and practitioners (see Paffenholz, 2016; Özerdem and Lee, 2015; Charbonneau and Parent, 2012).

In their attempts to escape criticism along these lines, a large number of international organizations have intensified their work at what they term the ‘local community’ level over the past two decades. As a result, they chose ‘local communities’ as a target group for peacebuilding intervention. To understand this choice two major points should be considered. First, following severe criticism of the UN and other important donors (the European Union, aid agencies and bilateral country partners) for their inefficient engagement during the Congolese crisis, certain international organizations wished to distance themselves from the maligned ‘International Community’ and its prevailing top-down approach by focusing programs and projects on the ‘local community’ level. Secondly, these international organizations assumed that these programs would benefit specific vulnerable groups of the population affected by violent conflict. Here is the point

33 at which the triangle of land, power and identity to understand conflict becomes central in the discourse of peacebuilding intervention. In practice, however, this thesis argues that even the turn to the local, supposedly to address the root causes of violence, has failed to do so. In the next section, I refer to the geographical discussion of processes of scale making, rescaling and the politics of scale as a theoretical approach to guide this study’s lines of argument.