Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention (GE3V18008)
Summary
Summary Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention (PRI)
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Course
Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention (GE3V18008)
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Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
Summary of the course Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention useful for the Final Exam, from the minor Conflict Studies (Week 1 till Week 7). The summary contains lectures, articles and some relevant information from the seminars. The articles are: yan (2013), Kenkel (2013), Peter (2019), Rich...
Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention (GE3V18008)
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Summary Politics of Reconstruction and Intervention (Final exam)
Week 1
Lecture 1 - Introduction
Today’s agenda
- Introductions
- Peace and peace operations
- Introduction to the course
What is peace?
- Negative peace
- Positive peace: a general and complete peace (Galtung)
Peace institutes (after WW II)
- United Nations Peacekeeping
- African Union peace and Security
- European Union External Action
- International Peace Institute
- European Institute for Peace
- United States Institute for Peace
International interventions
- Fragile states index
- Peace operations
Evolution of peace operations
- Changes in understandings of effective peacemaking
- Changes in the mandates of peace missions
- Changes in the geopolitical world order
- Principle of state sovereignty less dominant
- Adherence to Human Rights more dominant
Course content
● Week 1
○ Introduction
● Week 2 - 4
○ The Liberal Peace thesis
● Week 5 - 6
○ The local and pragmatic turns
● Week 7
○ Peace operations and military interventions
Course objectives
1
, - Build your knowledge about the evolution of international peace operations
- Introduce you to key academic authors and texts
- Introduce you to academic debates about approaches to peacebuilding
- Improve your capacity to critically question dominant (academic and policy)
discourses on peacebuilding
Articles week 1
Article by Ryan - The evolution of peacebuilding
The emergence of the concept of peacebuilding
‘External assistance for post-war rebuilding had clear antecedents in the reconstruction of
Western Europe and Japan after World War II’.
The concept of peacebuilding only entered into the mainstream in 1992 when it appeared
in the United Nations (UN) document An Agenda for Peace
Galtung (1976) is credited with inventing the concept of peacebuilding. He regarded it as
one component of a tripartite conflict resolution strategy that also included peacekeeping
and peacemaking and believed that it should be an ‘associative approach’ that aims to
build better infrastructures of peace. One would be hard pressed to recognize Galtung’s
approach in An Agenda for Peace.
As a progressive and sanguine idea, one might be surprised to find it being so quickly
embraced in the study of international politics, which has not always been receptive to
hopeful thinking. However, after the end of the Cold War it appeared well matched to
what might be called an optimistic turn in world society that was based on a number of
developments:
- The first was the changing nature of armed conflict, and in particular the decline of
wars between sovereign states and the rise of what came to be called ‘ethnic
conflicts’
- In the case of conflicts within states different cultural groups still have to
live together in a single jurisdiction when the armed conflict stops, and this
seems to demand peace strategies that, are associative rather than
dissociative.
- The end of the Cold War unfroze some of these protracted intra-state conflicts that
had been linked to superpower rivalries and this allowed for greater international
involvement in emerging peace processes in these locations including Namibia,
Cambodia, El Salvador, and Northern Ireland. The first of these missions set in
motion so-called second-generation peace operations that attempted to
‘implement a comprehensive settlement’.
- Sustained peacebuilding work by the UN as a separate named activity really
started here,
- The way the Cold War ended, through non-violent revolutions that overthrew
repressive regimes, seemed to confirm the impression that world society was
experiencing an unstoppable wave of democratization.
- Given the prevalence of such views in the early 1990s it was not hard to
believe that positive interventions in conflict situations to promote greater
freedom were working with the tide of history and this might have further
encouraged a more crusading form of liberal interventionism.
Alongside such developments, there was also a growth in the idea that human rights
protection was more important than respect for state sovereignty.
2
,It is also important to realize that these developments occurred as the liberal peace
hypothesis emerged as one of the most influential doctrines of the post-Cold War era. As
such it was inevitable that it would impact on thinking about peacebuilding.
The evolution of peacebuilding at the UN
Re-reading An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali 1992) one is struck by how little it has to
say about peacebuilding.
The final paragraph addresses the need for action to enhance ‘support for the
transformation of deficient national structures and capabilities, and for the strengthening
of new democratic institutions. It identifies two main peacebuilding scenarios.
1. The first is ‘civil strife’, where a number of strategies are mentioned, including:
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.
2. The other situation is international conflicts between states. Here the report
identifies a number of possibilities, including ‘concrete cooperative projects which
link two or more countries in a mutually beneficial undertaking’ and ‘joint
programmes through which barriers between nations are brought down by means of
freer travel, cultural exchanges and mutually beneficial youth and educational
projects’
a. This idea of inter-state peacebuilding has not been given the attention it
might deserve, probably because of the infrequent occurrence of
conventional wars since 1992.
There are several criticisms that can be directed at the Agenda’s approach to
peacebuilding:
1. It conceptualizes it as ‘post-conflict’ and this is problematic for two reasons.
a. The first is that no society is ‘post-conflict’, since conflict is ubiquitous –
maybe post-violence would be a better term, though a violence-free society
is also hard to imagine.
b. The second problem is that by seeming to restrict the idea of peacebuilding
to the final stage in the cycle of violent conflict it promotes a limited view
of what peacebuilding could be.
2. Roberts (1993) thought the document overestimated the ability of the UN to
organize complex peace operations and underestimated the difficulties with
funding and Security Council approval that were likely to arise.
3. Rupesinghe (1998) argued that it was too narrow because it underestimated the
role that NGOs can play in peace processes.
Yet An Agenda for Peace acted as a catalyst. This is evident from the large number of
important studies that emerged within the next decade.
Three years after An Agenda for Peace, and on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of
the UN, the Secretary-General issued a Supplement to an Agenda for Peace that offered
more information about the UN’s vision of peacebuilding.
- The Supplement recognizes the validity of the post-conflict approach, but now
proposes that it ‘can be as valuable in preventing conflict as in healing the wounds
after conflict has occurred’.
3
, - The Supplement also notes that implementation can be ‘complicated’ because of a
lack of support from member states and it calls for more attention to be devoted to
the ‘timing and modalities’ of returning peacebuilding functions to local actors so
as to preserve any gains that have been made.
- The focus of the rest of the section on peacebuilding is on two types of situations
that might require international attention.
- The first is where there is already a significant international presence in a
country. Here it is envisaged that a strong role for a peace operation will
not be problematic though it is pointed out that it is important that the
timing of the transfer of responsibilities back to local control should not be
unduly affected by institutional or budgetary considerations at the UN.
- The more difficult situation, the document argues, is when peacebuilding is
needed but where there is no strong international presence on the ground.
In such situations the hope is that the UN Secretary-General, could play an
early warning role and can initiate discussions with the state concerned
about what measures could be taken. This seems to be a restatement of
what Hammarskjold called preventive diplomacy.
- The Supplement seems no longer interested in inter-state peacebuilding and is
focused entirely on armed conflicts within a single sovereign state. It still
concentrates only on the structural dimensions of peacebuilding.
A number of other documents were issued by the organization around the same time that
seem to reveal a consolidation of the concept of peacebuilding around four pillars:
security, development, democratization and human rights:
- An Agenda for Development claims ‘peace-building offers the chance to establish
new institutions, social, political and judicial, that can give impetus to
development’ and goes on to argue that through a stronger emphasis on social
justice and land reform states ‘in transition can use peace-building measures as a
chance to put their national systems on the path of sustainable development’.
- The Agenda for Democratization notes that ‘the entire range of United Nations
assistance, from support for a culture of democracy to assistance in institution-
building for democratization, may well be understood as a key component of peace-
building’
The next major UN document to address peacebuilding was the Brahimi Report of 2000.
This was a comprehensive review of peace operations established by the UN Secretary-
General to try to learn the lessons from the challenges and failures of the 1990s.
- Brahimi approves the idea that the UN should develop a stronger peacebuilding
capacity. In fact, it proposes that the UN should become the focal point for such
international activity.
- The Report makes three other recommendations to improve UN peacebuilding.
- The first is to allocate some money at the start of a deployment for quick
impact projects.
- Secondly, there should be a ‘doctrinal shift’ in the use of civilian police and
human rights experts to strengthen the rule of law and respect for human
rights.
- Lastly, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) work should be
funded through the assessed budgets of peace operations in their first year
to speed up this work and reduce the dangers of a return to armed conflict.
- In fact, the high failure rate of peace processes has been a particular
problem
4
,In order to try to deal with such problems the UN realized it had to try to give a stronger
sense of direction to its work in this area and so at the end of 2005 it agreed to establish a
new Peacebuilding Commission.
- Its 31 members reflect the multi-dimensional nature of peacebuilding in that it
includes seven representatives each from the Security Council.
- The main functions of the Commission are to: promote best practice; improve the
coordination of actors engaged in this work; advise governments who want
assistance with peacebuilding tasks; and enhance the attention and the funding
given to peacebuilding at the international level.
- The mandated five-year review of the Commission resulted in a 2010 report entitled
Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture. Its findings offered even
more ammunition to critics for it concluded that the ‘threshold of success’
established in 2005 had not been achieved and it called for improvements to be
made in nearly all aspects of the Commission’s work.
The current state of UN peacebuilding
The emergence of peacebuilding theory and practice has been one of the most interesting
developments in peace and conflict research in the past generation. Like peacekeeping,
peacebuilding has developed in an unplanned and ad hoc manner, which might be one
reason why it remains a concept that is hard to define.
There is no doubt that there is a close affinity between peacebuilding and the liberal
approach to peace and conflict. Indeed, any peace strategy that promotes democracy,
human rights, the respect for the law and a less restricted economy is going to contain
strong traces of liberal thinking.
There are undoubtedly good grounds for being skeptical about some of the grander claims
made by liberal peace thinkers. It can be an approach that is insensitive to gender issues,
class divisions and it is also blind to the power of ethnic and national identity.
Yet there is a need to be cautious in characterizing peacebuilding practice since 1988 as
‘liberal’ in an uncritical manner.
It should also be noted that if the way to strengthen peacebuilding is to put more emphasis
on grass roots empowerment and civil society, then the strongest support for these ideas
might come from the western liberal tradition.
Furthermore, although peacebuilding has been heavily influenced by liberal ideas this does
not mean the strategy has been implemented in accordance with these ideals. Such
implementation ‘suffers from vagueness and a general failure to distinguish properly
between the ideal and the reality on the ground’.
A second feature of peacebuilding as it has evolved through the UN is its strong focus on
structure-centered analysis. This bias in favor of structural change might be a more
general characteristic of peacebuilding doctrine. Galtung says that it ‘does not take
sufficiently into account the importance of attitudes, sentiments, emotions’
A final feature of how the concept of peacebuilding has evolved is its association with UN
peace operations that are characterized by two important features: the focus is on the
role of external actors and the interventions involve some highly invasive interventions.
The close association of peacebuilding and peacekeeping at a very early stage of its
development might have been justified on pragmatic grounds.
5
, Article Kenkel - Five generations of peace operations: from the thin blue line to
painting a country blue
Introduction
Grounded in the now extensive literature on peace operations and the attendant debates
surrounding issues of armed intervention, this article seeks to combine both international
practice and analytical contributions into a systematic and synthetic presentation of the
evolution of peace operations from their modern inception in 1948 to the present.
In doing so, peace operations’ progression is traced through five analytical “generations,”
each adding a crucial factor distinguishing it from its predecessors.
The historical progression of peace operations’ practice
Over the course of the six and a half decades of their existence as a practice, the United
Nations peace operations have undergone a series of fundamental transformations from
their original nature and purpose.
- Changes to peace operations have followed a number of central axes of change.
The highest-order conceptual shift provides a common lens for the ensuing axes and
consists of what Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams have termed a shift from a
Westphalian to a post-Westphalian approach to world order:
- The move to a “post-Westphalian” order is primarily paired with a
reordering of the relationship between two constituent elements of the
principle of sovereignty: the rights of states, principally to non-intervention
in their internal affairs, and individuals’ human rights.
- Recent changes to the practice of intervention, also embody advances in the
conceptualization of peace and security, primarily through such concepts as human
security:
- Growing attention to human rights and the attendant relativization of
borders’ inviolability is a direct consequence of the international
community’s failure to deal—including through effective peace operations—
with large-scale human tragedies
- In keeping with the shift to a post-Westphalian conception, peace operations have
undergone a three-part cumulative progression in terms of their central purpose.
1. To conflict resolution were added collective security concerns grounded in the
Westphalian order, and later humanitarian preoccupations.
2. From being at their inception a case-bound conflict resolution tool, they became a key
element in the attempt to reconstitute the core organizing principle of Westphalian
sovereignty where crises and internal conflicts had cast its primacy in doubt.
3. As in the wake of events such as Rwanda and Srebrenica the vertical component of
sovereignty (human rights) began to gain ground on the horizontal notion of non-
intervention, humanitarian concerns such as the protection of civilians and the distribution
of humanitarian aid emerged as a key justification and motivation for the dispatch of an
increasing number of peace operations.
In terms of the practice of peace operations, it has become common to divide their
evolution into subsequent “generations”. The approach taken in the next sections is to
divide past practice into five distinct generations.
It is equally crucial to note that the progress of missions has been cumulative: the
generations are built upon one another, sometimes within a single mission.
6
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