From An Agenda for Peace and its Supplement to An Agenda for Development
• Peacebuilding: conceptual definition, timing, and sequence
• Preventive diplomacy vs. post-conflict peacebuilding
• An “integrated approach” to human security and to development
• International financing of peacebuilding
• Sovereignty, policy ownership, and peacebuilding
An analysis of the post-Cold War period as a whole, in Mats Berdal’s view “would surely reveal, as one of its most striking characteristics, the widespread practice of external intervention undertaken with the express aim of building sustainable peace [emphasis added] within societies ravaged by war and violent conflict.”1 It also reveals that, although the concept of “peacebuilding” was developed early on, it evolved over time as the context in which it took place started to change in fundamental ways soon after.
This chapter addresses the conceptual development of the term “peacebuilding” in Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace and how it evolved in its 1995 Supplement for An Agenda for Peace (hereafter Supplement) and in its 1994 An Agenda for Development; discusses the timing and sequence of UN activities; and analyzes what his proposals for “an integrated approach to human security” and “an integrated approach to development” mean in practice.
The chapter also addresses the issue of local “ownership” of policies and strategies for peacebuilding; analyzes the arguments of the Secretary-General for the UN to be able to draw on resources of the UN system as a whole for this purpose; and presents additional points made by academics and practitioners highlighting the economic aspects of peacebuilding, which reflect mostly their own expertise and the institutional mandate of their own organizations.
Upon assuming office, and “at a time when the UN seemed at last poised to play the role for which it was conceived,”2 the Security Council asked Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to make recommendations on how to strengthen the capacity of the UN for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping. In his An Agenda for Peace, he added to the three traditional UN activities a new one that he labelled “post-conflict peace-building” (with the hyphen dropping later on). He defined the term as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.” The “post-conflict” qualification was designed to contrast it with “preventive diplomacy,” an ongoing and fundamental UN peacebuilding activity.3
Boutros-Ghali’s argued that “[p]eacemaking and peace-keeping operations, to be truly successful, must come to include comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which will tend to consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among people.”4
Among the post-conflict peacebuilding structures, he listed the disarmament of former combatants and the restoration of order, controlling and possibly destroying weapons, establishing and training civilian police forces, monitoring and promoting human rights, and reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation. As de Soto rightly pointed out, “the institutions of economic management, budget formulation, and resource allocation appeared nowhere” among the structures mentioned in An Agenda for Peace.5
After some digression, Boutros-Ghali also mentioned that the UN has an obligation to develop and provide when requested “support for the transformation of deficient national structures and capabilities, and for the strengthening of new democratic institutions.”6 In de Soto’s view, the digression had the unfortunate effect of blurring Boutros-Ghali’s vivid original insight. As a result, “some of us in the Secretariat were disappointed at what appeared to be a dilution of the concept as originally stated, and made it our business to highlight and flesh it out on our own, unsupported but unopposed.”7
An Agenda for Peace was hardly an example of good organization. Before even defining the term “post-conflict peace-building,” together with the other UN activities in chapter II, Boutros-Ghali posited that with the end of the Cold War, demands on the UN surged, with the security arm of the organization emerging as a “central instrument for the prevention and resolution of conflicts and for the preservation of peace.” In his view, the aims of the organization were expanded “[t]o stand ready to assist in peacebuilding in its differing contexts: rebuilding the institutions and infrastructures of nations torn by civil war and strife; and building bonds of peaceful mutual benefit among nations formerly at war; and in the largest sense, to address the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression.”8
For our purposes – discussing the economics of peace as a critical component of peacebuilding – it should be highlighted that, by mentioning economic despair as one of the deepest causes of conflict9 and by linking “success” of UN peacemaking and peacekeeping activities to a sense of “well-being among people,”10 Boutros-Ghali was implicitly recognizing the importance of economic factors – without which it will be impossible to reduce economic despair and improve people’s well-being.
With the attention given by academics and practitioners alike to the major obstacle to peacebuilding identified in our Foreign Policy article as the UN-mediated peace agreement and the IMF-sponsored economic program were on a collision course,11 and with the Secretary-General expressing concern about it publicly in a press conference in Bangkok in April 1993 (Chapter 4), the “economic factor” in peacebuilding activities began to be seen in a new light.
With increased evidence of the challenges, in his Supplement, Boutros-Ghali added the “reintegration into civilian life” of former combatants and “the coordination of support for economic rehabilitation and reconstruction” to the list of activities needed for peacebuilding.12
It has gone unnoticed that in An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali only refers to “disarming” of warring parties, without mentioning the need for “reintegration into productive activities.” With the hindsight of experience, and the difficulties faced in El Salvador, Mozambique, Cambodia, and others, his Supplement explicitly notes that peacekeeping operations will have a mandate to launch various peacebuilding activities “especially the all-important reintegration of former combatants into productive civilian activities.”13
By then, the Secretary-General was acutely aware of the difficulty of reintegrating combatants productively and on a sustained basis under inadequate levels of aid and with the budgetary and external constraints imposed by IMF-sponsored economic programs. The lack of productive opportunities for reintegration proved then – and continues to be today – one of the major factors behind the dismal record with UN operations in the aftermath of the Cold War (Chapter 6).
The issue of “timing” and “sequence” of peacebuilding in relation to other UN activities has led to several interpretations and even confusion. Some of the confusion resulted from subsequent work at the UN. For example, the 2000 Report of the Panel on UN Peacekeeping – known as the Brahimi Report – notes that “[p]eace-building … defines activities undertaken on the far side of conflict [emphasis added].”14
Incomprehensibly, and perhaps explained by the lack of an institutional memory and competent staff at the UN, a 2010 document prepared by the Peacebuilding Support Office entitled UN Peacebuilding: An Orientation notes that, “[a]t the UN, ‘peacebuilding’ came to the forefront of intergovernmental debates with … An Agenda for Peace (1992). This identified postconflict peacebuilding as one of a series of tools at the UN’s disposal following [emphasis added] preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping.”15
This obviously does not make any sense and has created confusion. Indeed, why would one need peacebuilding “following” preventive diplomacy unless the latter failed? In addition, if one leaves peacebuilding activities to be performed “following” the peacekeeping mission ended, the result would most probably be failure.
In Boutros-Ghali's conception, peacebuilding would take place throughout different UN activities. As discussed above, his Agenda mentioned that peacebuilding activities would have to take place during peacemaking and peacekeeping to make the two successful.16 It also takes place during “preventive diplomacy” that “seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out.” That this was his conception is clear from the Supplement, where he specifically refers to “peace-building, whether preventive or post-conflict.”17
A distinction in terminology between the two situations is justified on the grounds that – although preventive diplomacy indeed requires a number of peacebuilding activities – for obvious reasons it excludes those that are specific to the post-conflict context, in particular disarming, demobilization, reintegration; destroying weapons; and demining.
Two additional points are worth clarifying. First, in order to be effective, post-conflict peacebuilding activities have to be carefully planned during the peacemaking phase – that is, they have to be included in peace agreements or planned carefully before military interventions such as those that took place in Afghanistan and Iraq. Otherwise, their implementation will likely fail.
Second, while the term “post-conflict” was inspired by and apposite to the Salvadoran case, the label would not apply to later operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the DRC, among others, where important armed groups had been excluded from the peace process and/or where large parts of the territory remained outside the control of the government. In these countries, a combination of peacebuilding and peacemaking would need to take place simultaneously, often in different parts of the country.
In defining “peacebuilding” in his An Agenda for Development, Boutros-Ghali strengthened the importance of the “economic factor” in sustaining peace by arguing that,
Only sustained, cooperative work on the underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems can place an achieved peace on a durable foundation. Unless there is reconstruction and development18 in the aftermath of conflict, there can be little expectation that peace will endure …. The most immediate task for peace-building is to alleviate the effects of war on the population.
Food aid, support for health and hygiene systems, the clearance of mines … represent the first peace-building tasks. … it is essential that efforts to address immediate needs are undertaken in ways that promote, rather than compromise, long-term development objectives. As food [and other relief supplies are] provided there must be concentration on restoring food production capacities … road construction, restoration and improvement of port facilities and establishment of regional stocks and distribution centres.
… the reintegration of combatants is difficult, but it is critically important to stability in the post-conflict period. In many conflicts, soldiers have been recruited at a very young age. As a result, the capacity of former combatants to return to peacetime society and make a living is severely compromised, thereby undermining society’s prospects for development. Effective reintegration of combatants is … essential to the sustainability of peace. Credit and small-enterprise programmes are vital if excombatants are to find productive employment. Basic education for re-entry into civilian society, special vocational programmes, on-the-job training, and education in agricultural techniques and management skills are key to post-conflict peace-building.19
I refer to the above arguments as Boutros-Ghali’s dictum for effective reconstruction and peacebuilding. To summarize,
• Peace will not be long lasting without effective “reconstruction and development;”
• Peacebuilding includes activities such as demining, disarming, demobilization, and reintegration that are fundamentally different from development-as-usual activities in the absence of violent conflict (and have serious budgetary implications);
• Humanitarian assistance should be accompanied from the very beginning with investment and capacity building to avoid long-term dependency; and,
• Effective reintegration requires the creation of job opportunities and a level playing field for farmers and small entrepreneurs.
With a single term in office, Boutros-Ghali did not have much time to put his dictum into practice. Much blood and treasure could have been saved had national policymakers and foreign interveners applied his dictum.
From an economics point of view – which is what this book focuses on – it is true that many of the policies and much of the expertise needed for preventive diplomacy and for post-conflict peacebuilding are the same.20 One could also argue in favor of having the same organizations and experts addressing both situations jointly, utilizing the same pool of resources and the same set of tools.
Indeed, as Boutros-Ghali stated at the time, and it would still be hard to dispute, “social and economic development can be as valuable in preventing conflict as in healing the wounds after conflict has occurred.”21 To be sure, different kinds of conflicts, humanitarian disasters, health pandemics, and failed states could possibly be prevented through decisive action to improve the well-being of the population of the respective countries through better employment opportunities and more cost-effective provision of basic services, infrastructure, and other public goods.
It goes without saying that it is better to prevent than to cure. Not surprisingly, as a candidate for secretary-general, António Guterres rightly posited the need to improve the capacity of the organization in this area. It is indeed a must to improve the political capacity of the UN in conflict prevention. At the same time, conflict prevention using economic tools across the world would require improving living conditions in a large number of countries with billions of deprived people in them, all experiencing various conflict and natural disaster risks of different degrees. But will the funds be available? Would it be possible to redirect funding from addressing crises towards this type of prevention?
At the time I was the senior economist in Boutros-Ghali’s office, I argued that prevention using economic tools is an overwhelming project and a long-term proposition that would require huge financial resources over long periods of time. Such resources were not – and would not likely ever be – available to the organization.22 To think otherwise is deceptive.
Having worked on Latin America for many years, and having represented Uruguay (the country where I was born and raised) in economic meetings at the UN in the mid-1980s, I also anticipated the difficulties of doing so for political reasons. Governments that exhibit increasingly high conflict risk – exactly those on which the UN preventive diplomacy efforts must be focused – become particularly zealous of their national sovereignty and foreign interference in internal matters, including on the economy. As a director for sovereign risk at Standard & Poor’s in the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to confirm that this was the case after observing it firsthand. At the present time, Venezuela provides a vivid example.
In terms of financing, I warned that for the UN to divert scarce resources and attention from the relatively small number of post-conflict countries that face the highest risk of reverting to conflict – or preventively from those few that are experiencing a rapidly rising risk of falling into it – would be a mistake. From a pure risk-analysis point of view, focusing limited funding on countries exhibiting the highest risks could be expected to yield a higher rate of return in terms of social welfare and would hence be a better investment of international resources to maintain peace. In expanding preventive action, the UN needs to ensure that its funding is not spread out too thinly on a large number of lower-risk countries as to be irrelevant.
An institution like the IMF, for example, that also argues that prevention of economic crises can be more effective than crisis resolution, provides precautionary financing to help prevent and insure against crises. Thus, countries that feel under stress can borrow from the Rapid Financial Instrument that provides quick financial assistance for this purpose. Would the UN be able to create a preventive fund with the amount necessary to have an impact on the many countries under conflict stress that would request it?
Clearly the UN should strengthen its preventive diplomacy capabilities, particularly in countries where there are specific risks. For such cases, the organization must sharpen its capacity (including through an overhaul of recruitment practices to replace its aging staff with new and highly-skilled talent) to be able to react through improved diplomatic and technical expertise, as well as through better early warning systems involving the UN system on the ground.
The above would require that the UN development system strengthen its capabilities to become more effective in supporting development efforts in poor countries with relatively lower risk of conflict. Because of the well-known weak performance of the system in this regard – as it is well documented in a number of surveys and reports of FUNDS (Future United Nations Development System)23 – there is also a need to improve the cost-effectiveness and expedience with which the system provides development and peacebuilding assistance.
Economic policies and strategies relevant to preventive and post-conflict peacebuilding could also be used sometimes to strengthen “peacemaking.” Efforts at rehabilitation of services and infrastructure in places like the Palestinian Territories with an immediate impact on the wellbeing of the population, or efforts at productive reintegration of low- and mid-level Taliban militants as conflict rages in at least parts of Afghanistan, are examples of economic action that could help peacemaking. In fact, the “economics of conflict resolution” has been a much neglected factor in peacemaking, just as “the economics of peace” has been to post-conflict peacebuilding.
In An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali also argued that the addition of post-conflict peacebuilding responsibilities to the other UN activities would demand the concerted attention and efforts of an enlarged set of stakeholders involved in supporting countries in the war-to-peace transition as donors or providers of technical assistance.
Because different parts of the UN system were increasingly involved in peacebuilding, in his Supplement, Boutros-Ghali reiterated that “[i]f United Nations efforts are to succeed, the roles of the various players need to be carefully coordinated in an ‘integrated approach to human security.’”24
At the same time, in his report on the work of the organization in 1992, Boutros-Ghali also argued for “an integrated approach to development.” This may have been a way to reassure developing countries not affected by war that “the Organization’s responsibilities and commitments in the political and security area was not going to be carried out at the expense of its responsibilities in the development field, and neither should be subordinated to the other.”25 The Secretary-General’s argument for an integrated approach to development was that
Political progress and economic development are inseparable: both are equally important and must be pursued simultaneously. Political stability is needed to develop effective economic policies, but when economic conditions deteriorate too much … divisive political strife may take root.26
Not surprisingly, these two concepts of an integrated approach to human security and an integrated approach to development put together created great expectations that UN peacebuilding activities would be able to deal with deprivation and the scourges of war over a longer-term horizon, in a more cost-effective and integrated manner.
Boutros-Ghali embarked frantically in a series of landmark conferences with the idea of creating a more comprehensive and integrated vision of development that could guide the work of the organization in peacebuilding. In 1994, before some of these conferences had yet taken place, Boutros-Ghali published his own vision in An Agenda for Development. In it, the Secretary-General addressed peace, the economy, the environment, society, and democracy as the five basic pillars of development. In his view, human rights – including those of indigenous peoples, women, children, and the disabled – is as integral a part of development as are peace and democracy.
In this way, the two agendas – on peace and development – are inextricably linked. Although “the economy” is one of the basic pillars of “development,” it has been the much neglected one at the UN, including at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Moreover, the UN has failed to play a role in promoting inclusive growth, which is a sine qua non for effective peacebuilding (and part of Boutros-Ghali’s dictum).
A number of factors acted against an effective integration of human security and development. Particularly difficult was to integrate “the economy” as a foundation for peacebuilding and long-term development. Peace mediators – defined in a broad way to include all those that bring warring parties to an agreement for peace and affect its implementation – normally have extensive experience in diplomacy and often in international relations. Some also may have experience in international law, human rights, international justice, security, or peacekeeping.
Rarely, however, do peace mediators have much experience in economic and financial issues that would allow them to analyze how those factors affect conflict and could affect the post-conflict. Neither do they have experience to analyze issues affecting risks and opportunities for the private sector to create investment, employment, and growth going forward – all critical to war-torn countries. However, while they include in their teams political, human rights, justice, and security experts, they do not usually include economic and financial experts.
This is particularly unfortunate since economic reconstruction must be a strong pillar in peacebuilding efforts. Peace agreements often include national reconstruction plans which give a critical role to market-based, private-sector-led economic policies. Such plans, if not well-designed, are likely to interfere with effective political, security, and social reforms during the post-conflict peacebuilding phase.
Moreover, as de Soto and I also noted in our 1994 article, “language differences and a paucity of communication between peacemakers and economists are a part of the problem.”27 This has affected peacebuilding efforts in a variety of ways – from conflict resolution efforts to moving away from the war economy to post-conflict peacebuilding – and has been a major deterrent to effective integration.
It was thus most unfortunate that the progenitor of the integrated approach to peacebuilding and development failed to take the small practical steps needed to put them into practice.28 The cost of such wasted opportunity was indeed large. During the last quarter of a century, the demands on the UN to support countries coming out of war did greatly increase, but the integration of political and security issues with the socioeconomic ones remains elusive.
In An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali went beyond the need for a simple integration of the activities of the different peacebuilding actors. He argued that the Secretary-General should be able “to mobilize the resources needed for … positive leverage and engage the collective efforts of the UN system for the peaceful resolution of a conflict.”29
As de Soto and I clarified in our Foreign Policy article,
Lest alarm bells be needlessly set off, it should be emphasized that the expression “draw upon the resources” should not be taken literally to mean that the U.N. must be granted a blank check against funds of all agencies and programs. At the present time, however, we find ourselves at the opposite extreme …30
The lack of timely financing in El Salvador to implement key programs was a stark example of how political, security, and socioeconomic problems had been addressed separately as it was the tradition at the UN – rather than with the integrated approach that Boutros-Ghali promulgated.31
In his Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali went further on the issue of financing, rightly arguing that peacebuilding “can be a long-term process and expensive – except in comparison with the cost of peacemaking and peace-keeping if the conflict should recur.”32
Specifically addressing the issue that de Soto and I had first raised in our 1994 article, Boutros-Ghali acknowledged that the organization had learned that “in putting together the peacebuilding elements in a comprehensive settlement plan, the UN should consult the IFIs [international financial institutions] to ensure that the cost of implementing the plan is taken into account in the design of the economic plans of the governments concerned.”33
Although many of the financial restrictions on peacebuilding were real and to be taken seriously, fitting into the UN mould of blaming lack of resources for failure to carry out the organization’s functions with success, Boutros-Ghali argued that “[p]eace-building is another activity that is critically dependent on Member States’ readiness to make the necessary resources available.”34
More resources alone would not suffice to improve peacebuilding if the organization keeps on doing the same things and expects different results. This book will analyze and provide evidence that, in most cases, failure at peacebuilding has been directly linked to misguided policies, wrong sequence, and misplaced priorities, and to the lack of an integrated, operational, and cost-effective approach.
In An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali had strongly argued that “the foundation stone of this work [peacebuilding] is and must remain the State.”35 Because war-torn countries were engaging in the transition to peace with the support of foreign interveners, particularly the UN system at the time, this was blurring the issue of national “policy ownership.” A relevant issue became “who is in charge” of policymaking – the national authorities or the foreign interveners?
As de Soto and I argued in our 1994 Foreign Policy article, as a general rule, it is the role of sovereign governments to harmonize policies and set priorities as they embark on the transition to peace. An “arbitrary model of nation-building” must not be imposed on reluctant, sometimes faraway countries. At the time, we envisaged transitions in which the sovereign government would be in the front seat designing and implementing policies, with the UN system, including the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) in the back seat – close enough to facilitate, coordinate, and monitor the international community’s technical and financial support, but without imposing the strategy.36 This was clearly the pattern of the 1990s in countries such as Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Angola, and Guatemala.
Soon the nature of conflict and the ability to deal with it took a turn for the worse, which changed the operational nature of peace transitions. By the mid-1990s, conflicts were often interrupted through military intervention rather than negotiation. Following the human tragedies in Rwanda and Srebrenica, Boutros-Ghali’s Supplement recognized that a new breed of intra-state conflicts presented the UN with operational challenges not encountered since the Congo operation in the early 1960s.37
These conflicts were accompanied by humanitarian crises and the collapse of state institutions – including the police, the judiciary, and the institutional capacity for economic policymaking and management of aid. Many became so-called “failed states.”38
Not surprisingly, foreign intervention had to extend beyond military, humanitarian, and reconstruction tasks, to include the re-establishment of basic governance. This was the case in Rwanda and Burundi, where France, Belgium and other countries participated in humanitarian interventions in the mid-1990s, and by the turn of the century in Kosovo and East Timor, where NATO and Australia, respectively, led military interventions. The latter two became UN-led transitional administrations when the Security Council mandated the special representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) to exercise all executive and legislative power through the issuance of regulations.
Transitions to peace confronted yet another twist after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This gave rise to the US government’s “war on terror” and to US-led military interventions in Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003.
At the time of our Foreign Policy article, de Soto and I did not envisage the type of operation in which the UN would assume extreme positions – that is a very intrusive role (transitional UN-led administrations), versus a marginal one (transitional US-led administration).39
The marginal role was particularly true in Iraq where the Security Council did not approve the military intervention and where the UN presence, which the Council had mandated following it, soon ended with a devastating bomb attack in August 2003. After the invasion, the US became an occupying force, with the Coalition Provisional Authority making all policy decisions on economic reconstruction until June 2004 when an interim government was formed and Iraq resumed sovereignty. But US intrusion continued in all reconstruction matters, which restricted national ownership.
Afghanistan was allowed to make sovereign decisions concerning economic matters – particularly those which foreign interveners agreed with, such as the orthodox macroeconomic framework established in 2002. However, because a large part of the huge amount of aid that the country received during the first decade was channelled outside the national budget, policy ownership of programs was quite limited.
With the US military and civilian surges starting in 2006 as security deteriorated, the United States played a much more intrusive role in Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Because a large part of the economic reconstruction of both Iraq and Afghanistan was led by the US military and with resources allocated to it, it was labelled “expeditionary economics.”40
Variations over time in the type of foreign intervention in countries in the transition to peace created a whole new set of economic challenges for national policymakers and foreign interveners. The book will address them in following chapters.
As Berdal noted, Boutros-Ghali’s broad definition of the term “peacebuilding” acquired an even broader connotation over time at the UN and in the academic literature,41 with the term covering “integrated and coordinated actions aimed at addressing the root causes of violence, whether political, legal, institutional, military, humanitarian, human rights-related, environmental, economic and social, cultural or demographic.”42 In his view, the term is synonymous with the “entire basket of post-war needs” in countries and societies emerging from violent conflict. While the comprehensiveness was total, what was missing was “any sense of priorities.”43 Likewise, Charles Call and Elizabeth Cousens also talked about “laundry lists and what could be called ‘no agency left behind’ notion of peacebuilding.”44
The lack of priority, particularly with regard to basic economic issues, has been, and continues to be, a major obstacle to peacebuilding. Economic issues need to be addressed right away as sine qua non for effective and long-term productive reintegration of former combatants, which as Boutros-Ghali emphasized, is “essential to the sustainability of peace.”45 Despite the fact that reintegration should be used as a carrot to lure armed groups into supporting peace processes, donors have been reluctant to finance such programs that are not only costly but also require long-term support (Chapter 7).
The BWIs are the leading actors in the economic reactivation of war-torn countries. However, the UN lacks technical capacity to analyze some of the complex economic issues affecting these countries in a rigorous and consistent way, and is unable to communicate with the BWIs at a technical level, to find common ground on how to deal with them while addressing peacebuilding needs at the same time. This has impeded an effective and integrated approach to human security and raised questions with respect to the UN’s capacity as the leader of global peacebuilding efforts.
UNDP’s website notes that “UNDP helps governance institutions in countries bring constitutional reforms, organize credible elections, strengthen parliaments, and address policy and institutional options for peace, risk-reduction and development through reconciliation, empowerment and inclusion.” UNDP’s stated goal in this area is to bridge “the gap between humanitarian, peacebuilding and longer-term development efforts, helping countries in peaceful settlement of disputes and progress towards democratic governance.” It is interesting that the development arm of the UN specifically refers to everything except the economy of war-torn countries – as if it were not one of the basic pillars of development.
Two aspects are worth emphasizing from the conceptual framework of the early 1990s, given that it will affect the assessment of the current peacebuilding capacity of the organization. First, Boutros-Ghali’s framework clearly contemplated peacebuilding as an activity that needed to take place for preventive purposes, during peacemaking and peacekeeping, and in the post-conflict context. In his framework, peacebuilding would only succeed if it could integrate the many political, security, and socioeconomic factors necessary to ensure that conflict will not occur or recur.
Second, much blood and treasure could have been saved had national policymakers and foreign interveners applied Boutros-Ghali’s dictum that peace will not be long lasting without effective “reconstruction and development;” that peacebuilding requires peace-related activities such as reintegration of former combatants and other such activities that makes it fundamentally different from development-as-usual; that humanitarian assistance should be accompanied from the very beginning with investment and capacity building to avoid long-term dependency; and that effective reintegration requires the creation of job opportunities and a level playing field for small enterprises and farmers.
With a single term in office, Boutros-Ghali failed to put his dictum into practice. Regrettably, the UN continues to lack the capacity to make his dictum operational. Building up such capacity must become a top priority of Secretary-General António Guterres if he is serious about improving the peacebuilding capacity – both preventive and post-conflict – of the organization.
1 Mats Berdal, Building Peace After War (London: Routledge, 2009), 11.
2 Álvaro de Soto, Foreword in Mats Berdal and Dominik Zaum, eds, Political Economy of Statebuilding: Power After Peace (London: Routledge, 2013), xvii–xx.
3 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 11.
4 Ibid., 32.
5 De Soto, Foreword, xviii.
6 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 32.
7 De Soto, Foreword, xvii–xviii.
8 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 7–8.
9 Ibid., 8.
10 Ibid., 32.
11 De Soto and del Castillo, Obstacles to Peacebuilding, 70.
12 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement, 5.
13 Ibid., 10.
14 UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (New York: United Nations, 2000), 3.
15 See UN Peacebuilding: An Orientation (New York: United Nations, 2010), 45.
16 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 32.
17 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, 10.
18 By mentioning both reconstruction and development, Boutros-Ghali clearly makes a distinction between the two that other people have ignored.
19 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Development, 2.
20 The complex issues of disarming, demobilization, reintegration and demining, however, are only relevant to the post-conflict situations.
21 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement, 10.
22 My arguments at the time are discussed in del Castillo, Rebuilding War-Torn States, 38–39.
23 See Future UN Development System (FUNDS) web page.
24 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement, 16.
25 United Nations, Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization (New York: General Assembly document A/47/1, 1992), 26–27.
26 Ibid.
27 De Soto and del Castillo, Obstacles to Peacebuilding, 79.
28 Del Castillo, Rebuilding War-Torn States, 2008, 127–28.
29 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 11.
30 De Soto and del Castillo, Obstacles to Peacebuilding, 77.
31 Ibid., 71.
32 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement, 1995, 19.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 30.
36 De Soto and del Castillo, Obstacles to Peacebuilding, 77. For more on sovereign decisions and ownership, see del Castillo, Rebuilding War-Torn States, 230–231.
37 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement, 5.
38 Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, “Saving Failed States,” Foreign Policy 89 (1992–93), 3–20.
39 The earlier period in Iraq was often referred to as “US-led occupation.”
40 See Carl J. Schramm, “Expeditionary Economics,” Foreign Affairs 89 (March 2010). See also papers commissioned by the US Military Academy at West Point for a Conference on Expeditionary Economics: Towards a Doctrine for Enabling Stabilization and Growth (West Point, NY: February 15–17 and May 24–26, 2011).
41 Berdal, Building Peace After War, 18. Berdal provides an excellent tour d’horizon of peacebuilding issues, including political economy ones, in many UN operations. On this subject, see also Elizabeth M. Cousens, introduction in Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, Cousens and Chetan Kumar, eds. (Boulder, Colo., and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 5–10; Ho-Won Jeong, Peacebuilding in Postconflict Societies: Strategy and Process (Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005); Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Roland Paris, “Post-Conflict Peacebuilding,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael Barnett et al., “Peacebuilding: What Is in a Name?” Global Governance, 13 (2007), Table 2, 46; Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner, “Introduction to Whose Peace?” in Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding, Pugh, Cooper, and Turner, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens, “Ending Wars and Building Peace: International Responses to War-Torn Societies,” International Studies Perspectives, 9 (2008); Robert Ricigliano, Making Peace Last: A Toolbox for Sustainable Peacebuilding (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2012); Rob Jenkins, “Post-Conflict Peacebuilding,” in Thomas Weiss and R. Wilkinson, eds, International Organizations and Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2013); and Jenkins, Peacebuilding, 18–43.
42 United Nations, Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization (New York: General Assembly document A/53/1, 1998, paragraph 61). Cited by Berdal, Building Peace After War (2009: 18).
43 Ibid.
44 Call and Cousens, “Ending Wars and Building Peace,” 3.
45 Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Development, 2.