For 25 years Graciana del Castillo has been applying her relentless and unforgiving analytical mind to the subject of how the international community handles transitions from war to peace after intrastate conflict since the end of the Cold War. As the international community has grappled with this new challenge, del Castillo has pursued what we might call a running commentary in articles and books. Her readers will no doubt agree that flattery is not part of the portfolio of currencies in which she deals. They will also share my view that there is not much about which to dispense flattery. Her writings and the conclusions she reaches leave little room for optimism.
In fact, a casual reader might be forgiven for pigeonholing del Castillo as a UN basher. That reader would be mistaken. Indeed, she describes the UN as “the global organization responsible for the maintenance of peace and security … ideally placed to support economic reconstruction [the economics of peace] because of its political nature and the need for impartiality.” The bitter tone of her commentary is the result of deep-seated disappointment that the hope that shone briefly at the end of the Cold War, that the UN was finally coming into its own after decades of marginalization, was soon dashed. This was not just because of the inability of states, particularly those who in effect gave birth to the post-WWII collective security system, to come together consistently, but also because the secretariats of the programs and agencies that are at its centre seem incapable of adapting to the new challenges and the needs they generate.
As colleagues in the Executive Office of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, Graciana del Castillo and I jointly took an interest in the subject in the early 1990s when we were overseeing the implementation of and compliance with the 16 January 1992 Peace Accord that brought an end to the 12-year civil war in El Salvador. The Accord was the culmination of a 22-month negotiation which I shepherded as the personal representative for the Central American peace process of Boutros Ghali’s predecessor, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. It was initialled at midnight on 31 December 1991, his last day in office. Del Castillo joined Boutros Ghali’s team in 1992 as the senior economist in the Executive Office.
Del Castillo’s first article, “Obstacles to Peacebuilding,” Foreign Policy, 94 (Spring 1994) was written with me, as was the next, “Implementation of Comprehensive Peace Agreements: Staying the Course in El Salvador” in Global Governance, 1 (June 1995). Since then, except for a recent joint article titled “Obstacles to Peacebuilding Revisited,” Global Governance, 22 (2016), she has written several articles as well as three books on her own. Obstacles to Peacebuilding is her third.
Boutros Ghali became secretary-general at a time of hope, in the wake of Pérez de Cuéllar’s unprecedented—and still unmatched—string of peacemaking successes which placed the UN squarely among those who sired the end of the Cold War. The UN Security Council was able to hold its first meeting ever at the level of heads of state and government on the last day of Boutros Ghali’s first month in office. They asked him to recommend how to strengthen the capacity of the UN for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping.
Inspired in what had been agreed as part and parcel of ending the war in El Salvador, the UN’s first start-to-finish mediation of an internal conflict, Boutros Ghali quickly understood that internal conflict would soon become the UN’s bread and butter and that it would require comprehensive action rallying various arms of the UN system over prolonged periods of time. In his report to the UN membership pursuant to the Security Council summit’s request, titled An Agenda for Peace, he set out a fourth activity alongside the preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping triad which he called post-conflict peace-building (PCPB) and defined as the activities aimed at preventing the recurrence of conflict—as opposed to preventive diplomacy which is aimed at averting a conflict’s outbreak. An Agenda for Peace received many plaudits and, as the UN fumbled to articulate and give practical shape to PCPB, its recommendations were the subject of close examination over subsequent years.
In her first book, Rebuilding War-Torn States: The Challenge of Post-Conflict Economic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), del Castillo provided a comprehensive analysis of economic reconstruction amid the transition to peace, usually as part of a multipronged process, arguing that unless the overarching political objective of avoiding recurrence of conflict prevails at all times, peace will be ephemeral, and that policies that pursue purely economic objectives can have tragic consequences. While insisting on that main premise, which she first presented in “Post-Conflict Peace-Building: A Challenge for the United Nations,” CEPAL Review 55 (June 1995), she did not believe that the UN, at that time, had the operational, technical and human capacity needed to discharge such a task, nor had it taken the steps needed to develop it.
In her second book, Guilty Party: The International Community in Afghanistan (Bloomington, Ind.: XLibris, 2nd edition, 2016), she posited that the answer to extremism, insurgency, drugs, and poverty is inclusive and sustainable growth rather than war. She focused on what went wrong with US-led intervention and what can still be done to bring peace, stability, and prosperity to the country and the region.
In Obstacles to Peacebuilding, del Castillo turns her attention to the economic issues that can so decisively affect conflict resolution and the maintenance of peace but which are all too often neglected in the process of negotiating the end of a conflict. She distinguishes between the economics of war, the economics of conflict resolution, the economics of peace, and the economics of development. She analyzes rigorously the different goals of each of these, the necessary policies to address the challenges in each phase, and what is at stake if the specificities of each of these phases are not understood and solutions tailored to them are not designed and implemented. In particular, she argues that the failure to address correctly the economics of conflict resolution during peace negotiations and the economics of peace in the post-conflict period continue to be a major obstacle to peacebuilding.
Del Castillo also describes the difficulties involved in moving from one phase to the other, particularly since phases often overlap and the move is rarely linear. She argues that the lack of adequate economic expertise and the tendency to neglect the crucial importance of economic reconstruction issues in peacebuilding efforts—or to treat a state navigating such a transition as if it could simply return to well-worn development patterns—have led to the disappointing record.
She analyzes how views on these issues have evolved over the years, particularly at the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. She provides country evidence to substantiate her view—which we espoused in our 2016 article in Global Governance—that the much touted “Peacebuilding Architecture” put in place following the summit to mark the UN’s 60th anniversary, including an ill-conceived Peacebuilding Commission, which has produced a lacklustre performance—in fact merely rehashed old conceptual arguments on peacebuilding while skirting the difficult issue of how to improve the policymaking and operational capacity of the UN at headquarters and on the ground to make peace sustainable.
She also uses her experience of a quarter of a century to establish basic premises for effective economic reconstruction. She argues persuasively that the application of such premises to specific situations could help national policymakers and the UN and others involved in efforts to design more effective peacebuilding strategies in order to assist the move toward peace, stability and prosperity. She also presents a minimalist structure for reconstruction zones as an example of how to apply basic premises to create a more integrated framework utilizing conflict-sensitive policies and synergies between local communities, foreign investors, governments and foreign interveners to facilitate such move.
In del Castillo’s view, unless the UN starts thinking outside the box, its peacebuilding efforts will continue to fail simply because peacekeepers—those with the military capability to keep the peace—cannot be kept in a country indefinitely, nor is it realistic to rely on aid to provide the basic needs of war-torn countries endlessly.
Given the consequences of turmoil and terrorism in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere, and with a new secretary-general taking office in January 2017 and several silver anniversaries taking place that year, the author argues that the time is overdue to revisit and reflect on the disappointing and costly peacebuilding record, and find ways to make it better.