As the liberal peace coalesced in modern international relations, there emerged four different generations of approaches for making peace, designed to consolidate the liberal peace system and international, state and civil architecture, which was by now widely accepted to be the most positive and sophisticated form of peace in history. By the latter part of the 20th century these had given birth to a range of processes designed to manage, resolve, or transform conflict:
The thinking that underlies the victor’s peace has contributed to modern ‘conflict management’ approaches in international politics, which aimed at little more than maintaining a negative peace. This represented a first generation of attempts to manage international conflict and stabilize the international system. Conflict management approaches developed after World War II. They have sometimes included the use of force by coalitions of states, but more often tools such as UN peacekeeping, high-level diplomacy (meaning the involvement of senior politicians, statesmen and women, and international bureaucrats like the UN Secretary General) and the use of international mediation. Such processes often produced ‘zero-sum’ outcomes in which a negative peace consisted of unstable relations between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in a conflict.
To this effect, the UN Charter stated:
All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
These binding statements are central to any modern conception of conflict management, aimed at maintaining international security. However, this type of security was envisaged in limited and state-centric, excluding non-state actors and non-state-centric, issues in conflict. The negative peace during much of the Cold War involved the preservation of the territorial integrity of states through conflict management approaches. The human rights of citizens were of secondary importance.
Reaching a ceasefire agreement, withdrawing foreign forces, establishing law and order, and achieving a comprehensive peace agreement at the diplomatic level were the key components of conflict management approaches. They aimed at supporting a basic minimum order without any overt violence. To achieve this any third parties involved in mediation or peacekeeping had to be neutral and impartial, or, alternatively, work according to their power and interests. International mediation as a diplomatic activity required interactions between states over territory, alliances, constitutional agreements, or boundaries, often led by a leader or by the UN. As mediation became more sophisticated, according to William Zartman (a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University), it enabled the search for windows of opportunity provided by ‘hurting stalemates’ (where disputants are caught up in a painful situation where they could not win on the battlefield but neither could they afford to give up the struggle) and ‘ripe moments’ (where new opportunities arise for a settlement to occur). The disputants might be more likely to settle and mediators, diplomats, and peacekeeping operations would be able to mobilize.
Though not mentioned by name in the UN Charter, UN peacekeeping was probably the most innovative of modern conflict management approaches. Peacekeeping was developed by the UN Secretary General and his team in 1956 during the Suez Crisis in order to prevent it from sparking a major conflict between the superpowers. Since 1990, several generations of peacekeeping have spanned very limited operations that simply patrolled ceasefires to much more complex, multidimensional operations.
This early type of peacekeeping involved four main principles: that the force should be defensive rather than offensive; that it should not include troops drawn from major powers (to enhance its neutrality); that it should be impartial; and that it should have consent and not intervene in the dispute. In this way a small and symbolic force, cheaply run, could offer symbolic support for peace and security, help uphold the UN Charter, and not take great risks because it had the consent of the parties to the dispute, whether the superpowers in the UN Security Council or armies and guerrilla fighters on the ground. It could also provide a calmer environment in which peace talks might be held.
The earliest forms of modern peacekeeping were essentially observer missions or disengagement missions (as in the missions in Kashmir (1947) or the Middle East (1948) in the 1950s), but they quickly developed into forms intended to provide the conditions of stability in which diplomacy, mediation, and negotiation could begin alongside peacekeeping forces (as in Cyprus from 1964 onwards). Many of the peacekeeping missions since 1956, and the Suez Crisis (1956–7), aimed at facilitating independence of colonial territories and enabling colonial powers to withdraw while saving face. They were aimed at preventing small wars, as in Cyprus in 1963 or 1974, from escalating into major conflicts. They normally patrolled agreed ceasefires, and tried to oversee the withdrawal of troops and the creation of a peace agreement, as after the Suez Crisis in 1956 or in Cyprus from 1964. In other words they tried to support a negative peace that would last only for as long as the peacekeepers were present.
After the end of the Cold War many conflicts flared up, in the Balkans, Africa, Central America, and Africa. UN peacekeeping again endeavoured to implement the terms of prior peace agreements negotiated by the UN Secretary General or other international mediators in places such as Namibia (1989–90), where an agreement between South Africa and local leaders led to Namibian Independence overseen by the UN. There were also similar UN forces sent around this time to implement agreements which brought civil wars to an end in Angola and Mozambique. Observer missions also monitored the transition into peace after the end of civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
More ambitious missions also occurred, as in Cambodia where the UN also acted as a transitional government during the process of building a democracy (1992–3). They became more involved in building a liberal and, therefore, positive form of peace. By the late 1990s and under increasing pressure, the UN was trying to conduct peacekeeping without local consent, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, exposing peacekeepers and international staff to the risk of being drawn into the conflict rather than being perceived as neutral third parties.
The evolution of peacekeeping occurred because the practice of conflict management in places like DR Congo or Cyprus in the early 1960s had failed to cope with the weaknesses of a negative peace or respond to local demands for a positive peace. Early forms of peacekeeping achieved some mitigation of open violence but rarely a comprehensive peace settlement (perhaps with the exception of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt after wars in 1967 and 1973, though this was mediated with some persuasiveness by US President Carter in 1978). Negative peace suffers from the same weakness as the victor’s peace: it needs permanent military and material guarantees, otherwise any peace process it engenders may collapse.
A second generation attempt to address the underlying dynamics of conflict, and to resolve and reconcile conflicting parties, focused on the rights and needs of citizens rather than states. This was partly in reaction to the limited goals of the previous approach.
It aimed at creating a ‘win–win’ outcome (where all parties feel they have won as a result of the peace process) driven by the needs of civil society in particular. It focused on the root causes of conflict from the perspective of individuals, groups, and societies, and on mutual accommodation at this level of analysis (it is often described as ‘track II’, track I being formal diplomacy, mediation, and negotiation). From this perspective, conflict arises out of a repression of basic human needs and is a social as well as a psychological phenomenon. Human needs are now often viewed as universal and non-negotiable in the UN and donor system. Second generation approaches saw injustice as a source of social unrest and human needs offered a framework for understanding about the causes of conflict, how it might be resolved, and how reconciliation and justice could be achieved, rather than merely managing enmity. This civil society-oriented discourse aimed to construct a positive peace addressing the societal roots of conflict and discriminatory and inequitable social, economic, and political structures.
Second generation approaches highlight human security rather than state security. From this theoretical basis a number of new methods for peacemaking emerged. Citizen diplomacy, conflict resolution, and similar approaches became common around the world in places such as Cyprus, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or Sri Lanka as an alternative and innovative way to reconcile societies. In these cases, in the 1990s and early 2000s, informal ‘back channels’ were created between a range of political and informal civil society actors across conflict lines. Meetings often took place informally between social groups to discuss local matters and how to improve everyday life, as well as to discuss broader visions of a peace process. International mediators found ways of promoting these and avoiding the usual obstacles relating to status and power emerging. In all of these cases informal channels of communication facilitated a peace process that eventually had a major impact on the official level and improved security significantly, at least for a time.
This second generation approach was particularly successful in Northern Ireland when the peace process began after 1994. The peace process in Northern Ireland took place at the elite and the social level, and was cemented by massive civil society and economic investment from the British government and the EU to iron out structural and economic inequalities between its communities. There was also a parallel agreement between the main governments historically involved and the creation of new and improved political institutions (the Good Friday Agreement of 1998). However, the potential of these processes in other locations such as Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka was not realized despite very promising starts in the 1990s. Their peace processes reverted to nationalistic, power-driven, formal processes, and eventually were not able to overcome the usual problems associated with sovereignty, militarization, and the inherent bias of pre-existing institutions. Conflict resolution approaches have, however, made it clear that in any society a peace process should meet political, social, and economic needs and rights.
In the last twenty years a very significant and innovative international peace architecture has developed. This is a third generation approach to both ending conflict and constructing a more advanced form of peace. It has involved large-scale and external forms of intervention since the early 1990s, from countries like Cambodia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, and many others.
This approach has been influenced by conflict transformation theory, which argues that what is necessary to make peace is a process that transforms the relationships, interests, nature of state and society which feeds a conflict. This is a long-term and multidimensional process, aimed at addressing the roots of conflict, including perceptions, communications, inequality, and social injustice. Liberal peacebuilding is heavily indebted to such approaches.
There are varying estimates, but by 2008 about 110,000 personnel were deployed in conflict or post-conflict countries populated by a total of 100 million people. These operations include a range of components, such as military intervention, democratization, and development, managed by international organizations such as the UN and the World Bank, foreign donors, and many regional and international agencies. They aimed to build a positive peace and focused on security, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, development, free trade, and a vibrant civil society. In the last twenty or so years liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding have become the dominant approaches for responding to localized and regional conflicts.
Once the liberal peace had been widely agreed by the international community in the early 1990s, the next step for the international community was to devise ways of installing it in conflict environments. As earlier chapters have outlined, liberal peacebuilding links peace and security directly with development, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and a vibrant civil society in a modern state framework. This is embedded in a system of global governance, international law, and trade.
This top–down architecture only offers part of the picture, however. Peacebuilding was initially theorized in the peace research literature as a grassroots, bottom–up process in which a local consensus within society led to a positive peace. As the concept evolved, it came to represent a convergence with the agendas of human rights, development, democratization, and human security, and in practice it also had to bring together conflicting interests of major states in the UN Security Council. A convergence of international norms and interests—a peacebuilding consensus—culminated in the contemporary liberal peacebuilding project. After the end of the Cold War this was in part based upon the development of more ambitious and integrated forms of peacekeeping, which evolved rapidly from multidimensional forms at first with the consent of local actors and in a multilateral form, and then, on occasion, without their consent. As a result, the demands on the role of the UN and its supporting actors multiplied and diversified enormously in terms of the tasks they undertook to build peace and the many locations around the world where they did so.
A number of UN documents starting with An Agenda for Peace in 1992 described peacebuilding in detail. This UN document, akin to a Cold War peace settlement, described peacebuilding as ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’. In 2007 the UN Secretary General provided a comprehensive definition:
Peacebuilding involves a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development. Peacebuilding strategies must be coherent and tailored to specific needs of the country concerned, based on national ownership, and should comprise a carefully prioritized, sequenced, and therefore relatively narrow set of activities aimed at achieving the above objectives.
However, this approach is constrained by the need to consider sovereign states and their right of non-intervention, as well as its implicit claim that peace should be built according to a universal formula, repeated throughout most contemporary policy documentation on peacebuilding.
A related evolution occurred with the concept of security in the UN and in the emerging ‘peace industry’. At least until the end of the Cold War security mainly revolved around whether wars were fought between states, and whether a state’s territory was secure. This was regardless of what was happening inside the state, which was often a site for authoritarian or totalitarian rule: often there was ongoing oppression of specific identity or socio-economic groups by the dominant elite. By the mid-1990s, as previously noted, many of the world’s policymakers began to think in terms of human security, reviving US President Roosevelt’s old post-World War II slogan, ‘freedom from fear, freedom from want’.
Since the early 1990s UN Integrated Missions endeavoured to support the broad ambitions of peacebuilding, as in the Balkans in the early 1990s along with other actors (such as NATO, the EU, and the OSCE). The early post-Cold War peacekeeping operations in Namibia, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, and El Salvador seemed to offer the hope that the peace engendered by UN intervention could go beyond patrolling ceasefires and would instead contribute to the democratization and liberal reform of failing and failed states. This blueprint was also used in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, DR Congo, and East Timor and others during the 1990s and 2000s. Liberal peacebuilding came to represent a multilevel approach, attempting to address the local, state, and regional aspects of, and actors in, conflict. It has become multidimensional in nature in that it brings together a wide range of actors who were able to deal with a wide range of issues and dynamics.
So far, the record of peacebuilding has been mixed. Many operations in different locations have merely resulted in rather authoritarian regimes so far. This is because the process is inconsistent in its design, or is inefficient and ill coordinated by international actors, or because deficiencies have arisen because local actors are given too much say and thus insert their illiberalism, nationalism, and interests into the process.
To avoid such tendencies, international administration of post-conflict environments (meaning that the UN or specific groups of states assume responsibility for another state emerging from conflict) became more common again. This approach was used in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, Timor Leste, and to some degree in Afghanistan. However, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, more interventionary approaches were used. These aimed at producing regional and international stability while reforming the state (a process often now called ‘statebuilding’). They have been widely regarded as only achieving a negative peace.
Peacebuilding approaches draw upon the idea that peace can be built by external actors such as the UN, donors, NGOs, and foreign militaries, based on liberal norms to create a liberal state. By the start of the 21st century, an even more ambitious agenda emerged via the Millennium Development Goals (2000), and a new doctrine called the Responsibility to Protect (2005). This implied that sovereignty entailed responsibility to citizens, and if a state undermined the human rights of its citizens, committed acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing, the international community might intervene.
The international community, led by the UN and key donors, designed these policies to achieve economic stability, prosperity, and to guarantee human rights as well as the rule of law. They were in part driven by the demands made by electorates in many developed states in order to support populations in local contexts who bore the brunt of conflict. Such approaches have also been resisted by some states (such as Russia and China, among others) which argue that such trends are little better than new forms of colonialism, representing northern/Western hegemony, and that they are an attack on their sovereign rights.
Even so, peacebuilding processes now involve tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel working in post-conflict locations across the world. In sum liberal peacebuilding continued the shift towards a much more positive understanding of peace. Through the adoption of liberal norms and institutions, as well as neoliberal forms of development, encapsulated within a modern state framework, liberal peacebuilding offered a broader view of peace. It also offered what appeared to be a globally applicable blueprint method, to which end the UN Peacebuilding Commission was established in 2005. Working in countries such as Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, and Central African Republic, the UN Peacebuilding Commission, Peacebuilding Fund, and Peacebuilding Support Office are involved in integrating and coordinating the range of processes that occur.
Yet, liberal peacebuilding has also been widely criticized for being illiberal (resting on military intervention), inefficient, and ill coordinated, for assuming that promoting democracy, human rights, and trade are enough to make peace, and for not paying enough attention to local preferences and needs. On average, at least two out of five peace settlements during this period have collapsed within a few years, though improvements in peace and security around the world have been achieved in the last twenty-five years.
In the early 2000s, a new doctrine called statebuilding emerged, which represented a significant retreat from the normative aspirations of the liberal peace (relating to human rights in particular). Increasing state weakness, in the areas of security, crime, terrorism, as well as deviations from the liberal norms of the developed north, were seen as threats to international peace and security. Many of the world’s leaders thought that this was the lesson of the 2000s, especially in relation to states like Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea, Pakistan, and others. Such failing and post-conflict states were a threat to the international system, becoming breeding grounds for a dangerous mix of terrorism, poverty, crime, trafficking, and humanitarian catastrophe, which might have spilt over into other states.
The aim of statebuilding is to create prosperous and stable liberal states framed by a ‘good governance’ agenda, via externalized strategies of intervention. With the apparent limitations of peacebuilding especially in terms of its susceptibility to mission creep (as in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo in the 1990s, where international actors became part of the conflicts) statebuilding appeared to offer a unified theory designed to produce an intervention with a small or ‘light footprint’—as in Afghanistan. It implied that any international intervention would not turn into a far-reaching form of trusteeship. This, it was calculated, would be less objectionable to international or local partners than a major intervention.
States that emerge from statebuilding should provide their citizens with security, goods, services, law, and institutions. This may also facilitate democracy, rights, transitional and long-term justice, integration, and a rule of law, provide for basic needs, and mitigate identity conflicts. According to the 1997 World Bank report, ‘The State in a Changing World’, this type of state framework has a set of core functions, ranging from the minimalist functions of security, law, and order, to the ‘activist’ functions associated with legitimate institutions, public services, welfare, and social support.
Statebuilding is assumed to capture both local and international forms of legitimacy and especially the local desire for sovereignty. It converts these into a political architecture with territorial control, political stability, and economic viability. It offers a process of modernization whereby previous institutions are brought into line with the current models associated with international expectations. Its genealogy reaches back to the reconstruction and nation-building experiments after the US civil war, in Germany and Japan, and much of Western Europe after World War II.
This understanding of the state anticipates a range of core functions that provides security and consolidates democracy, rights, and prosperity. The state is responsible for security and justice, revenue creation and collection, providing basic services, and creating jobs, and the better the state is at these tasks the more legitimacy it would receive from its citizens. The state focuses on security, law, and property rights, and protects the marginalized. It should be decentralized, competitive, and meritocratic. Statebuilding itself emanates from international organizations, institutions, and donors, their norms and political and economic practices, passed down through systems of global governance, international conventions, regional organizations, to the state and its citizens.
The statebuilding project has suffered from the same flaws as liberal peacebuilding: a lack of a peace dividend and a failure to offer security, an everyday peace or social justice, as graphically illustrated in contemporary Afghanistan.
Liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding represent the most advanced Western and global consensus on the importance of international institutions and open markets, and on democracy and human rights, in preventing conflict as well as attending to its underlying causes. This consensus also includes a broad range of non-Western states (though non-developed and subaltern actors are less represented). It has had some success in reducing violence and inducing some compliance with liberal norms, institutions, law, and markets. Yet there have been few outright ‘successes’ to speak of. Of course, this depends how success is defined. If it depends on a state not relapsing into violence, available data shows that about half of post-war environments in which the UN has worked achieve a negative peace at least for the first five years after the end of the conflict. The number of interstate and civil wars have been reduced as have the number of deaths. The numbers of durable and negotiated settlements also appear to have increased. Thus, this is at least a basis for a more positive peace to emerge.
However, out of 18 or more UN attempts at democratization since the end of the Cold War, 13 had suffered some form of authoritarian regime within several years. In addition, the international financial institutions like the World Bank have used structural adjustment and development projects that have failed to provide the sorts of economic opportunities and welfare that would be expected to provide a quick ‘peace dividend’. The relationship between peacebuilding and justice has also been controversial. Justice has often remained subservient to stability because some influential individuals and organizations in conflict environments are implicated in violence, corruption, or crimes against humanity. In effect, liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding has become a system of governance in post-conflict and development settings rather than a process of reconciliation.
What this indicates is a failure to achieve goals of peacebuilding and statebuilding, or to come to terms with the lived experiences of individuals and their needs in everyday life, or vis-à-vis their culture and traditions. There have been several common complaints:
The liberal peace framework has aimed to reform or create neoliberal democracies open for international trade rather than social democracies to support their citizens’ welfare. This is despite the huge volume of evidence about the importance of poverty and inequality in maintaining conflict and its many stratifications. Peaceful societies are generally more equal, as are peaceful regions.
Privately, many policymakers and bureaucrats agree with this idea, and the UN, World Bank, and many donors and NGOs have constantly adjusted their approaches to engage with such problems. Current discussions of ‘local ownership’ and ‘participation’ for example in the UN and World Bank are indicative of concern that peacebuilding and statebuilding are more or less irrelevant to some or many post-conflict citizens’ everyday lives.
What have instead emerged are fragile states propped up by international actors, from the UN, the World Bank, to national donors or international NGOs. However, much has been learned about peacebuilding through such experiences, including the need for local power systems, political and economic frameworks, society, religion, and culture to be part of any framework for peace. Liberal peace is now being supplanted by hybrid or post-liberal forms of peace, which draw on liberal peacebuilding and local context factors simultaneously. This is significant because peacebuilding and statebuilding are mainly being applied outside of the Western or northern contexts where they were initially developed.