Mind the gap: the importance of local institutional development in peace-building-funded security interventions

In this paper, the authors analyse current spending priorities of the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF)-funded security sector reform (SSR) programmes. They conclude that these spending priorities do not appear to support traditional components of SSR and underfund programmes needed for the development of local public administration and civil society. This is observed despite the published commitments of UN PBF funding priorities to include the strengthening of national institutions in the context of support to the wider security and justice sectors.1 ?1. See UNPBSO, Strategy 2012–2013. The underfunding of civil society and local administration has been shown to undermine PBF's goals for the type of liberal democratic reform upon which peace-building, conflict management and conflict prevention rests. Focusing on the importance of accountability, the authors build on the scholarship of the rule of law literature to explore wider concerns associated with limited support to local public institutions and civil society. Drawing on empirical research on the peace-building experience in Sierra Leone, the authors reflect on concerns with the effects of past and current funding priorities and expose a number of ‘capacity deficits’ which have emerged in the wake of PBF funding patterns. The article concludes with several recommendations for a contextual approach to the development of local institutions and civil society in PBF-recipient countries more generally, and in Sierra Leone more specifically. This work contributes to the growing literature that seeks to link security sector reform with the need for a more nuanced approach to peace-building.     

Sustainability and peace building: a key challenge

The overarching challenge facing the growing number of international peace-building interventions is to achieve sustainable peace. This paper illustrates this proposition through a brief investigation of the situation in Timor-Leste as the UN mission withdraws at the five-year state-building mark, and in Haiti as a ninth UN mission is established. Adopting the view that participatory democratic governance will best ensure long-term peace, the paper maintains that to build sustainable peace requires transformation on three interrelated fronts: (a) transformation of the society from one that resorts to violence to one that resorts to political means to resolve conflict, requiring that the elite negotiate and that there should be widespread social dialogue and reconciliation; (b) reform of the governance framework to seek to ensure both that a negotiated governance arrangement between parties prevents future conflict and the adoption of basic democratic governance; and (c) the creation of meaningful institutions that will be sustainable after the mission leaves. These institutions cannot be imposed from outside, but must be bodies that re able to perform their core function and are committed to doing so.     

Applying the security-development nexus on the ground: land restitution in Colombia

The general consensus on the security-development nexus is that both are key to achieving sustainable peace in war-torn societies. However, this debate has largely taken place among international actors, with little empirical evidence about how security and development relate to each other or are even considered by local actors. The current paper applies the security-development nexus to the case of land restitution in Colombia. Following decades of internal armed conflict, in 2012 the national government passed sweeping land restitution legislation amid ongoing violence. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple actors involved in this process, ranging from international organisations to national government units, from regional institutions to local communities, the paper analyses the objectives, impact, challenges and opportunities for land restitution related to security and development. Undermining peace-building, a lack of coherence in the integration of security and development priorities limits the extent to which either supports, or is promoted by, land restitution efforts in Colombia. The paper concludes with reflections on how the security-development nexus may promote peace-building amid ongoing conflict.     

Decentralisation and local governance in Mozambique: the challenges of promoting bottom-up dynamics from the top down

Since the conclusion of the peace accords in 1992, Mozambique has undergone several changes in the field of governance and institution-building. One key aspect of such reforms, strongly promoted by donors in peace-building contexts, has been the agenda of decentralisation and local governance, which has entailed political devolution in selected municipalities, and deconcentration and the creation of local councils in the rural districts. This article examines this agenda and its implementation focusing on two domains. First, it discusses the different interests that have shaped the political decisions taken on this agenda at the national level. Second, it examines the case of the local councils in the district of Angoche, critically debating the extent to which they epitomise the increase of local representativeness and, thus, whether or not they enhance bottom-up dynamics of governance. I argue that the limited effectiveness of such reforms in Mozambique reflect the inherent contradiction between the strong top-down dynamics that shape this process and the bottom-up effects that it aims to promote.     

Democracy,Regional Security Institutions,and Rivalry Mitigation: Evidence From Europe,South America,and Asia

The fact that democracies maintain peaceful relations with each other is regarded as one of the few law-like correlations in international relations, but the causes of this empirical phenomenon remain contested. This paper tries to fill this theoretical gap by attributing the remarkable stability between democracies to inter-democratic institutions. At the same time, it contributes to the debate on the need to differentiate among international organizations in order to assess their peace-building effects. We identify transnational and trans-governmental linkages as crucial features that distinguish inter-democratic from traditional institutions with non-democratic or mixed membership. In order to explain these institutions’ peace-building effect, we analyze the impact of international institutions on rivalry mitigation with a view to five pairs of states: France-Germany, Greece-Turkey, Argentina-Brazil, Indonesia-Malaysia, and Japan-South Korea. Those dyads all look back at a history of rivalry, conflict, and mutual threat perceptions, and they are located in highly institutionalized regional settings but vary with regard to their political regime type. The controlled comparison of cases demonstrates that the embeddedness of international institutions in transnational and trans-governmental linkages corresponds to each member's regime type and that these institutional differences are responsible for the varying extent of rivalry mitigation.     

From self-reliant churches to self-governing communities: comparing the indigenization of Christianity and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa

Christian missionaries, especially from Anglo-American Protestant denominations, have been remarkably successful in their effort to plant ‘self-propagating, self-supporting, self-governing’ churches throughout the world and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Today's international non-governmental organizations and inter-governmental organizations engaged in development, humanitarian assistance, peace-building and human rights resemble ‘secular missionaries’ spreading their gospel of democracy, good governance, peace, justice and sustainable development. This article investigates the extent to which today's secular missionaries might learn from the indigenization of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. I conclude that an essential ingredient in the missionary strategy of evangelization is conspicuously absent in contemporary programmes of development, democratization, or peace-building. In particular, the extensive efforts devoted by Protestant missionaries to the translation of their Biblical message into local languages and symbolic repertoires bear little resemblance to efforts to transplant Western ideals of universal human rights or the institutional templates of democratic governance first developed in the United States and Western Europe.     

Intimate yet dysfunctional? The relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the European Union

The rise of India and the EU as global actors has sparked growing interest in their peace-building approaches. This paper compares the objectives and effects of the EU's and India's engagement in different conflict contexts within and alongside their borders. It examines whether their practices of conflict resolution or peace-building strive for more than conflict management or ‘governmentality’. This article asks whether there is sufficient consistency across either actors' governance interventions to even speak of a distinct ‘strategy’ or ‘governance culture’. It illustrates the close relationship between governance and conflict response initiatives but finds that the relationship is often dysfunctional.     

Capacity development for good governance in developing societies: lessons from the field

Good governance is essential for sustaining economic transformation in developing countries. However, many developing countries currently lack the capacity, as opposed to the will, to achieve and then sustain a climate of good governance. This article addresses, from a practitioner's field perspective, the fundamental objectives, principles, and key areas that need to be addressed for developing capacity for good governance. These frameworks are now beginning to be recognised, as both governments and donor institutions attempt to take advantage of the current demand and opportunities for addressing governance deficits. In pursuing capacity development for good governance, developing countries must ensure that such initiatives are comprehensively designed to be simultaneously related to change and transformation at the individual, institutional, and societal levels and to be owned and controlled locally.     

The myth of liberal peace-building

‘Liberal peace-building’ is a subject of intense debate within contemporary IR. This article contends, however, that for all the merits of much of the work on the subject, the overall terms of the debate are rooted in a series of questionable assumptions. Proponents and critics alike hold that peace-building is an essentially liberal project, over which there is a global (or Western) consensus, and which is pursued by a decentralised plurality of institutions irrespective of the particularly of war-endings. This article shows that this is misleading. Focusing on the relations between peace agreements and peace-building, it shows that peace agreements are contextually specific political arrangements, driven above all by strategic considerations of power and legitimacy, in relation to which liberal peace-building doctrines and practices are unevenly applied, instrumentalised or plain ignored—including by international actors. It argues in turn that liberal peace-building discourse overstates both the liberalism of contemporary peace interventions, and the degree of global consensus thereover, and fails to capture the enduring centrality of states, strategy and geopolitics in the making of peace. These arguments are developed with reference to a wide range of cases of post-Cold War peace interventions, though with especial focus on UN peace-building in Cambodia in the early 1990s.     

Parties,personalities and political power: legacies of liberal peace-building in Timor-Leste

This article examines the tension between liberal peace-building and local political culture through the lens of party and personality politics in Timor-Leste. It argues that the efforts of the UN peacekeeping mission to promote multi-party democracy cut across the interests of two opposing political forces: the charismatic resistance leader, Xanana Gusmão, who was deeply suspicious of party politics and favoured supra-partisan coalitions; and the dominant political party, FRETILIN, which pursued majoritarian power. Over the 16 years since independence, FRETILIN maintained a strong party identity and the governments it led met strenuous opposition and came to a premature end, while the Gusmão-led or -backed governments formed and survived as pragmatic tactical alliances. The article concludes that although the UN peacekeeping mission guided institutional design to favour political party organisation as the foundation for achieving representational government, the institutions have subsequently evolved in response to local political drivers. While outside actors can seek to influence the formal rules of the game, local political culture will determine how the game is played.     

Trade,peace-building and hybrid governance in the Sudan-South Sudan borderlands

ABSTRACT

Trade and markets in weak states are often discussed in relation with violence, security and peace-building. A case in point are marketplaces in the Sudan-South Sudan borderlands where communities separated by insecurity and hostility meet, not only to trade but also to negotiate and exchange information. This does not imply that establishment of such markets automatically results in peace and stability. Based on new empirical research on the Amieth market in Abyei – an area contested by the two Sudans – I argue that such markets rely on security guarantees negotiated between a set of heterogenous societal groups and that the overall impact of such border markets is largely determined within a context of hybrid security governance. The conclusion emphasises that without a proper analysis of this context, external assistance to such borderland markets might just as well enable violent conflict actors as being a tool for peace-building.     

Empowering peace: service provision and state legitimacy in Nepal’s peace-building process

There is growing demand for an understanding of peace beyond the absence of violence. As such research focuses increasingly on the issue of state legitimacy as a tool to assess and understand peace processes. In this paper the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is studied to assess whether the provision of services like electricity to rural communities of war-torn countries through state actors contributes to the consolidation of the post-war political system. The qualitative analysis of two localities in post-war Nepal highlights that service provision in the form of electricity through micro-hydropower yields tremendously positive socio-economic effects for rural communities. However, socio-economic development in combination with interactions among villagers has strengthened local autonomy through emphasising alternative local governance structures. This highlights that the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is more complex than previous research anticipates. The absence of a positive effect on state legitimacy raises the question of whether in its current case-specific form service provision is conducive to the broader peace-building efforts in post-war Nepal, because it stresses the divide between state and society.     

The perils of ‘going local’: liberal peace-building agendas in Nepal

Responding to recent critiques, foreign aid organisations are increasingly ‘going local’ in their operations in order to integrate local actors into their peace-building and aid projects. This is done under the belief that entering into partnerships directly with grassroots actors will increase local autonomy in joint ventures, thus empowering locals as agents of change both during and after the project period. But despite its normative and conceptual appeal, we argue that this model is not workable in practice and cannot be under the current structural conditions of the international aid environment. This is due to a fundamental disconnect between the conceptualisation and rationale of ‘going local’ and the structural and institutional frameworks within which ‘local ownership’ is supposed to be operationalised and implemented. This paper uses the example of Nepal to illustrate that this disconnect not only prevents foreign aid organisations from reaching their stated goals, but exacerbates the very problems that ‘going local’ is supposed to address.     

Formal versus traditional institutions: evidence from Ghana

Citizens in Ghana have a host of options when it comes to local governance provision as a result of the government’s decentralization policies. We undertake to explore and understand how Ghanaians navigate the constellation of local institutions, both formal and traditional, to solve an array of common problems. A four-constituency survey was administered during the summer of 2009 and asked respondents about their experiences interacting with four formal institutions and one traditional institution. We find that formal institutions are by and large working effectively and are enhanced by the presence of a traditional institution. We consider the implications of our results with respect to both democratization and decentralization.     

Peace-building in Haiti: the case for vertical integration

In light of growing attention to grassroots and community-based approaches to peace-building, this paper explores this ‘local turn’ through an examination of ongoing efforts to address community-based insecurity in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. In recent years, these communities have been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs. However, the fragmented nature of these interventions and the range of different strategies deployed, from enforcement to inducement to engagement, have limited their overall impact. Drawing on a distinction between horizontally- and vertically-integrated peace-building, as well as on recent insights about the centrality of state-society relations in peace-building processes, we make a case for greater coherence and co-ordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform. In the particular case of Haiti, we suggest that renewed interest in community policing may provide one platform through which a more vertically-integrated form of peace-building, one which connects community-level agency with wider, structural-level reform processes, might emerge.     

Militarism,states and resistance in Africa: exploring colonial patterns in stabilisation missions

ABSTRACT

The article explores how stabilisation missions reproduce the patterns that constituted colonial states. Following African historiography, the article argues that stabilisation’s militarised approach to neutralising resistance, its racialisation of targets and its aim to constitute and reform state authority evoke how colonial states were forged by the inseparable relationship between authority, force, race, production and resistance. However, it will be shown that those patterns cannot be fully understood without an account of the broader structure of coloniality and imperialism. In so doing, the article aims to contribute to bring together different literatures on contemporary peace-building interventions and contemporary militarism by examining the relation between militarism, coloniality and imperialism. It focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo to show how an intensified use of force against resistance, added to frames that see Congolese politics as deviant, has guided the goal of restoration of state authority, and with it, different economic reforms, all of which have reinforced the military and economic power of national and international elites, without reporting significant benefits to the population at large.     

How the ‘entry’ defines the ‘exit’: contradictions between the political and military strategies adopted in 2001 and how they have deleteriously affected the longer-term possibilities for stabilisation in Afghanistan

Focusing on the period 2001–2003, the paper discusses how the Western military intervention in Afghanistan changed power structures early on, undermining the political settlement in the long term and culminating in the present electoral crisis. Key concepts, a theoretical framework and the initial military approach (including how the initial military strategy undermined an indigenous solution for toppling the Taliban) are outlined and literature focused on hybrid governance and ‘legitimacy’ as an important but overlooked facet of peace-building is presented. Examples of ‘lessons learned’ in relation to the failure to engage with traditional forms of governance–early on in the Afghan conflict—are set out. The objective is to show that the military strategy adopted in 2001–2002 had adverse long-term consequences that were hard to reverse later on (e.g. by shifting the goalposts of military activity to, for example, a counter-insurgency strategy from 2005 onwards). This paper does not aim to resolve these paradoxes in the Afghan context going forward but offers implicit recommendations based on ‘lessons learned’.     

The modern face of traditional agrarian rule: local government in Pakistan

The 1980s saw an increasing enthusiasm for decentralisation and good governance in developing countries. Citing an ethnographic study of the office of Tehsil Mayor in Kharalpur, Pakistan, it is argued that decentralisation, instead of creating opportunities for people to engage in democratic participation and empowerment through modern local government institutions, has itself been subverted by the traditional norms and rules of patronage-based personalised governance. Modernity has not influenced tradition: rather, it is the other way around. This has further strengthened the power and prestige of the rural elite.     

Assessing international aid for local governance in the Western Balkans

This article investigates the impact of international efforts to cultivate effective and authoritative local governing institutions in the Western Balkans, a prime testing ground for democratization aid to post-war states. It explores three hypotheses, each of which argues that a particular approach of international actors toward domestic officials best improves the quality of local governance. The study's gathering of interview and survey data from field-based actors enables it to evaluate local government reforms' impact on domestic communities. This investigation arrives at three findings. First, in the view of Western Balkan peoples, local governance reforms do not produce benefits when they are either imposed or ignored by international authorities. Secondly, reforms produce benefits for local communities when they are designed to meet domestic concerns. More specifically, reforms valued by local communities are designed in ways that respond to domestic, rather than international, concepts of good local governance that emphasize socioeconomic aspects and produce tangible benefits. Well designed reforms also include significant aid targeting local governance that is coupled with the promise of a larger political settlement that is attractive to powerful domestic elites and contingent on clearly articulated local governance reforms. Thirdly, such aid best characterises European Union efforts only in Macedonia.     

Peace-building and the predatory political economy of insecurity: evidence from Cambodia,East Timor and Afghanistan

International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post-conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalisation lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, post-conflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.