Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
The last decade has seen a decrease in the number of violent conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. While violence in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan and South Sudan, Somalia, Mali, and Nigeria show that many areas of Africa remain highly insecure, the overall extent and severity of conflict in Africa has decreased since the end of the Cold War. The Human Security Report argues that international peacemaking and peacebuilding policies are an important part of the explanation for the overall decline in conflict in the 1990s and 2000s (Human Security Report Project 2011).1
Post-conflict peacebuilding programmes and initiatives have, indeed, become much more prominent in the last two decades, and many of these programmes are targeted towards countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) was established in 2005, and so far all the countries on its agenda have been in Africa, including Burundi, Central African Republic (CAR), Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Many bilateral donor agencies have established peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction units and programmes. In 2006, the African Union (AU) adopted a Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development Policy Framework (AU-PCRD) and some African sub-regional organizations have also developed peacebuilding units and initiatives. Similarly, the number of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) with peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction programming in Africa has also increased. Peacebuilding in Africa – as both policy and concept – seems to be in its heyday.
Nonetheless, this chapter argues that alongside the proliferation of peacebuilding institutions, there is no consensus about the role, aims, and effects of international post-conflict peace-building programmes and initiatives in Africa. While it is clear that the local, regional, and global spaces for peace in Africa have been altered through discourses and practices of peace-building, these practices play out differently in different locales. Post-conflict peacebuilding ideas and initiatives are at various times reinforced, questioned, subverted, or re-appropriated and redesigned by different African actors. The results, therefore, do not follow a single script towards a condition called ‘peace’. Instead, the trajectories of post-conflict peacebuilding programmes and initiatives tend to be messy and multifaceted, and only very rarely correspond to the cheerful statements in policy documents and institutional reports.
This chapter briefly traces the rise of post-conflict peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa and the types of activities and practices that typically fall under its purview. It then analyses four different perspectives on post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa, along with related criticisms. Finally, the chapter argues that post-conflict peacebuilding may be best thought of as a contest between multiple shifting ideas and practices, where the stakes are high and where continued violence is often a very real possibility. In other words, post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa is contested politics.2
The Concept and Practices of Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
Post-conflict peacebuilding is not a new phenomenon. The questions of how to ensure security, how to govern, and how to distribute resources after violent conflict have been addressed in many different ways across Africa and across the world over time (Murithi 2008; Curtis 2012: 4–5).
At the end of the Cold War, post-conflict peacebuilding came to be seen as a distinctive or specific area of international policy intervention. An Agenda for Peace, published in 1992 by then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, provided a coherent conceptualization of post-conflict peacebuilding, defining it as ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: para. 21). For Boutros-Ghali, post-conflict peacebuilding was seen as integrally related to, but distinct from, preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping. While peacekeeping was the deployment of a UN presence in the field to expand the possibilities for the prevention of conflict and the making of peace, peacebuilding included efforts to consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and wellbeing among people (ibid.: para. 55).
The early 1990s was a time of great optimism and belief in the possibilities of post-conflict peacebuilding, and in the ability of the UN to take the lead in these interventions (Sabaratnam 2011: 14). At the time of the publication of An Agenda for Peace, the number of UN peacekeeping operations was rapidly expanding. Nearly half of UN peacekeeping operations since the end of the Cold War have been in Africa. When this volume went to press, seven out of the 16 UN peacekeeping operations currently deployed were in Africa.
Although a reinvigorated UN was seen as the key institution to promote post-conflict peacebuilding through peace missions coordinated by the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), other institutions followed suit. For instance, in 1997, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) created the Conflict Prevention and Post-Conflict Reconstruction Network to help coordinate aid agencies’ peacebuilding activities. Also in 1997, the World Bank adopted A Framework for World Bank Involvement in Post-Conflict Reconstruction, and established the Post-Conflict Fund (PCF) to make fast loans and grants to conflict-affected countries (van Houten 2007; World Bank 2004). Other UN agencies and units also took on peacebuilding roles. For instance, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) created the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery in 2001 to ‘provide a bridge between the humanitarian agencies that handle immediate needs and the long-term development phase following recovery’. The establishment of the UNPBC in 2005 was meant to provide even greater support to countries undergoing post-conflict transitions. Its goal is to bring together relevant actors and propose integrated strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding in specific countries.3
African-level institutions and programmes also developed post-conflict peacebuilding units and frameworks. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) developed a post-conflict reconstruction framework in 2005 and the AU developed one in 2006. In 2008 the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) adopted a Conflict Prevention Framework, to strengthen efforts to ‘prevent violent conflicts within and between states, and to support peacebuilding in post-conflict environments’ (ECOWAS 2008: section II, para. 5). To date, the AU and African regional organizations have mounted peacekeeping operations in Burundi, Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan, which often included peacebuilding elements (for more on regional organizations see Khadiagala, this volume). Therefore, since the publication of An Agenda for Peace in 1992, the number of institutions involved in post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa has expanded. Several other broad changes to peacebuilding are also notable.
First, Boutros-Ghali and others had conceptualized peacebuilding as part of a linear progression, starting with humanitarian relief and conflict management, then peace settlement, then peacebuilding and reconstruction, and finally development. Increasingly in the 1990s and 2000s, however, scholars and practitioners acknowledged that transitions from conflict rarely follow such a linear path. The very term ‘post-conflict’ may be a misnomer since violent conflict often continues at various levels of intensity even after the end of formal hostilities. Peacebuilding activities can therefore take place before, during, or after conflict. Likewise, ‘peace’ and ‘war’ may exist simultaneously in different parts of the same country. For instance in Sudan, even after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement formally ended the conflict between the North and the South in 2005, the conflict in Darfur escalated (Flint and de Waal 2005). Recent violence in disputed regions of Sudan and South Sudan is a result of what is often labelled as a ‘successful peace process’. Uganda is typically viewed as a ‘peaceful’ country since the National Resistance Army won the war and brought President Museveni to power in 1986. However, this obscures the years of continued conflict involving the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the northern part of Uganda and across its borders. Rwanda is often described as a peaceful country that has embarked on an ambitious developmental path, yet repeated controversies over the role of Rwanda in contributing to violence in the neighbouring DRC raise questions about the nature of peace in that country. Compared to the early 1990s, therefore, there is widespread belief that peacebuilding programmes and initiatives may be useful at various points in time, not only in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict.
Second, there has been a broadening of the notion of peacebuilding, and a corresponding expansion in the number and kinds of activities that are considered under the rubric of post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives. Peacebuilding occurs when security is, at best, unevenly distributed, and virtually all understandings of peacebuilding include ideas about how best to reduce insecurity. Often, reducing insecurity in countries emerging from conflict involves a reorganization of the security sector. Security sector reform (SSR) as well as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programmes tend to be seen as important components of peacebuilding, but this is not always the case. Eboe Hutchful criticizes African security sector reform for its emphasis on ‘effective’ security systems rather than on accountable systems, thereby contributing to militarization on the continent (Hutchful 2012). In Sierra Leone, Humphreys and Weinstein (2007) found little evidence that internationally funded DDR programmes facilitated successful demobilization or reintegration of combatants.
As the issue of ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states increasingly gained prominence on the international security agenda, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, many conceptions of peacebuilding expanded to include state-building or the establishment of legitimate forms of political authority. Indeed, by the early 2000s most multilateral peacebuilding institutions endorsed the view that durable peace depended on the construction or strengthening of state institutions. The goal is typically to ensure a regime is in place that is accountable to international norms, that has internal legitimacy, and that has ‘earned’ its sovereignty. Yet, as discussed below, there are some real dilemmas and questions involved in incorporating state-building into conceptions of post-conflict peacebuilding. What happens when locally specific ways of conducting politics do not conform to international normative expectations? This is especially important in Africa, where there is great diversity in terms of governance structures, patrimonial relationships, and hybrid mechanisms, and where there are significant border areas that fall outside of the state’s coercive reach.
The 2000 Brahimi Report on Peacekeeping Reform illustrates a broadened conception of peacebuilding. The Report explains that peacebuilding consists of activities to ‘provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war’ (UN 2000). By 2004, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change identified poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation as major threats to security, along with armed conflict, terrorism, organized crime, and weapons of mass destruction, thus further expanding the scope of peacebuilding activities (UN 2004).
This expansion of activities reflects a change in emphasis from negative peace (the absence of war), towards positive peace (the absence of structural violence) (Ali and Matthews 2004: 7; see also Galtung 1969). Proponents of positive peace argue that focusing on negative peace as the desired outcome of peacebuilding is insufficient, since this ignores the multiple ways that people suffer. A narrow focus on negative peace puts efforts and resources into reaching cease-fires between belligerent groups, and guaranteeing these agreements through peacekeeping missions, whilst leaving other forms of insecurity, inequalities, and vulnerabilities unaddressed. A wide range of new issues have been placed on the broadened post-conflict peacebuilding agenda, such as addressing the unequal status of women, unequal access to education, and uneven development.
Third, there has been a deepening of peacebuilding activities. Peacebuilding no longer targets only the state, its institutions and its military, but also individuals and their local communities. For some, peacebuilding involves the reconstitution of individual identities and the re-forging of individual and community relationships. Social transformation may become an object of peace-building concern and intervention, including initiatives to improve individual psycho-social wellbeing. Since violent conflict affects the social fabric of communities in terms of population dislocation, mistrust, identity formation, and the erosion and creation of new social bonds, these issues have made their way onto the peacebuilding agenda. The role of ethnicity, the question of land distribution and reform, the consequences of population displacement, and issues of transitional justice and human rights are often seen as central to post-conflict peacebuilding.
The broadening and deepening of peacebuilding activities and the increased tendency to view these activities in a non-linear fashion have amplified the conceptual confusion associated with the term. Peacebuilding usually involves questions of how to ensure a secure environment, how to establish legitimate political authority, how to generate sustainable livelihoods, and how best to manage societal relations, yet within these broad categories there exist many trade-offs and ambiguities. The way in which these questions and tensions are resolved (or unresolved) varies from case to case in Africa.
Four Perspectives on Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
The field of post-conflict peacebuilding is therefore replete with tensions, contradictions, and conceptual confusion. A growing body of multi-disciplinary academic work has attempted to make sense of peacebuilding efforts and their consequences in different contexts. Often, this work contains important normative assumptions about the nature of peace and about the motivations of peace-builders. While there are significant areas of overlap, it is helpful to distinguish between four main perspectives on peacebuilding. These four positions are both analytical frameworks for understanding peacebuilding, as well as normative positions. Indeed, there is frequent slippage between normative and descriptive categories in the academic and policy literature on peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding as Liberal Governance
Perhaps the most widespread view of post-conflict peacebuilding sees peacebuilding as part of a global project of liberal governance. Much of the policy and academic literature describes peacebuilding in this way, and adopts normative positions either in favour or against it.
It is not difficult to find policy documents and donor statements that put forth the notion of peacebuilding as liberal governance. An Agenda for Peace described political and economic liberalization as key elements in the transformation of war-torn societies.4 The 2005 UN report In Larger Freedom said that: ‘Humanity will not enjoy security without development, it will not enjoy development without security, and will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.’ The central message in the 2011 ‘World Development Report’ is that ‘strengthening legitimate institutions and governance to provide citizen security, justice, and jobs is crucial to break cycles of violence’ (World Bank 2011: 2).
This view of peacebuilding as liberal governance is based upon the idea of a ‘liberal peace’, with its roots in European Enlightenment thinking. Multi-party electoral democracy and a market economy are seen as inherently peaceful and desirable. Post-conflict peacebuilding therefore consists of activities and initiatives to help bring about and facilitate this desired liberal end. This includes promoting the rule of law, constitutional democracy, human rights, a pro-market economy, and neoliberal development. Once these processes take hold with the support of international peacebuilders, it is believed that they will become self-reinforcing.
Liberal peacebuilding is based upon a number of universalist assumptions. There is a shared belief in ideas of progress and rationality. Despite their different configurations and particularities, all societies will benefit from political and economic liberalization. That means that peacebuilding lessons, techniques, and programmes applied in one part of the world are relevant to other parts of the world. A standardized approach to peacebuilding that includes the promotion of multi-party elections and institution building, constitutional and legal reform, and economic pro-market reform are universally appropriate, with only limited adaptations to suit the ‘local’ context. An approach that works for El Salvador should therefore also work in the DRC, with only limited adjustments. This approach assumes that peacebuilding is authored primarily by outsiders, perhaps with the assistance and input of enlightened locals. All actors in conflict-affected countries are identified vis-à-vis their position on liberal peace. Those who violently disagree with liberal peacebuilding are labelled as ‘spoilers’ who must be socialized or marginalized (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008: 285). Peace, development, and governance are seen to go hand in hand and reinforce one another in this liberal framework.
The widely shared conviction in peacebuilding as liberal governance coincided with the end of the Cold War. The perceived success of (liberal) war-to-peace transitions in Namibia in 1989–90 and in Mozambique in 1992–94 reinforced these ideas. The problem, however, was that many of the peacebuilding efforts in the 1990s did not lead to their intended outcomes. In Rwanda, a carefully crafted peace settlement and power-sharing agreement in 1993 failed to prevent – and arguably may have contributed to – the genocide in 1994 (Clapham 1998). In Angola, notwithstanding a peace agreement in 1991, a UN peacekeeping mission, and multi-party elections in 1992, hostilities resumed when the losing presidential candidate Jonas Savimbi disputed the results. Even those countries that are often judged as peacebuilding successes, such as Namibia and Mozambique, have experienced high rates of inequality and persistent insecurity among some communities. In the late 1990s and 2000s as UN missions took on a larger set of peacebuilding goals, the results remained mixed. In Liberia, new rounds of fighting occurred after the elections of 1997. In Sierra Leone, conflict continued even after the Lomé Peace Accord of 1999 and its power-sharing provisions. Peacebuilding in Sudan may have contributed to the reduction of hostilities between the North and South, but triggered further conflict in Darfur. The disputed election in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010 followed a 2007 peace agreement, but resulted in further violence.
For proponents of peacebuilding as liberal governance, peacebuilding failures such as these do not represent the limits of liberal peace, but rather the flawed implementation of policies and initiatives grounded in liberal ideas. Thus, post-conflict peacebuilding failures in Africa had more to do with improper sequencing, a lack of coordination, or insufficient commitment by outsiders, not problems with the liberal idea itself. In a widely cited argument, Roland Paris (2004, 2010) notes that rapid political and economic liberalization in post-conflict countries can trigger a renewal of conflict instead of a reinforcement of structures of peace. Paris does not criticize economic and political liberalization per se; he simply argues that it cannot be done too quickly in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. Rapid political liberalization can exacerbate tensions since elites may use violence to gain electoral support; and rapid economic liberalization can generate tensions through increased unemployment and economic uncertainties. Paris argues in favour of ‘institutionalization before liberalization’, meaning building state institutional capacity first in order to enable liberal values and practices to take hold over time.
This argument, and others like it, do not fundamentally question the content of liberal post-conflict peacebuilding, but suggest ways in which the international peacebuilding community may improve practices to get to their desired outcomes (Jarstad and Sisk 2008). These improvements may include more local buy-in and local participation, more reliance on African continental and regional organizations, or deeper and more intrusive peacebuilding engagement. For proponents of peacebuilding as liberal governance, academic knowledge is an important tool for peacebuilding, which can help practitioners identify and better understand the local obstacles to liberal peace, and help develop better mechanisms to promote and support peacebuilding. Unsurprisingly, many policy practitioners, through lessons learned units and evaluations divisions, have adopted similar conclusions about post-conflict peacebuilding failures and possible remedies. The UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, for instance, makes a case for greater policy coherence and donor coordination and more careful attention to sequencing (UN 2004).
The criticisms of peacebuilding as liberal governance are diverse. Some critics disagree that contemporary peacebuilding practices can be characterized as liberal. Many others agree with the peacebuilding as liberal governance descriptive framework, but criticize it as a normative project and believe that peacebuilding’s failures can be attributed to its liberal underpinnings. These critics put forth alternative normative positions on peacebuilding, discussed below.
Peacebuilding as Stabilization
A second perspective on post-conflict peacebuilding shares the liberal concern with order, but rather than focusing attention on order within states, this view sees peacebuilding as being primarily concerned with maintaining the international status quo. Like the peacebuilding as liberal governance perspective, peacebuilding as stabilization is both a descriptive framework as well as a normative position.
While this view acknowledges the multitude of activities conducted under the post-conflict peacebuilding umbrella, the rationale for these activities is to maintain global security and stability. Authors that describe peacebuilding in this way do not see peacebuilding as transformative or emancipatory. Instead, peacebuilding is a disciplinary tool that serves to regulate and stabilize the global South (Duffield 2002).
The view of peacebuilding as stabilization has become increasingly important since the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the subsequent global ‘war on terror’. The recent conflation, for instance, of anti-terrorism measures with peacebuilding shows that this view may be gaining currency (Stepanova 2003). The UN peace operation in the DRC changed its mission and its name from United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) to the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in 2010. A central part of MONUSCO’s mandate is to assist the Congolese government in strengthening its military capacity, and to support the Congolese government in consolidating state authority. In Uganda, peacebuilding has been re-fashioned to focus on the military defeat of the LRA, particularly as it has become active in the CAR and DRC (Branch 2011).
There are therefore signs that the more expansive and multi-faceted liberal peacebuilding may be giving way to a more limited view of peacebuilding. In part, this may be a response to the perceived failings of peacebuilding as liberal governance with its transformational agenda. As China becomes increasingly involved in areas of Africa emerging from conflict, this view of peacebuilding as stabilization may continue to rise in importance. China has been reluctant to engage with an expansive peacebuilding agenda, and instead has emphasized win-win development on the one hand, and stabilization or security on the other. Other international actors may retreat to this more limited agenda.
Peacebuilding as stabilization is a descriptive framework for understanding contemporary peacebuilding practices, yet it also raises different moral claims. For some, limiting the objectives of peacebuilding programmes in Africa is justifiable due to the difficulties in achieving success with a more expansive agenda. Peacebuilding as stabilization reflects more traditional realist concerns. Other authors are much more critical of an emphasis on stability and the maintenance of the global status quo (Pugh et al. 2008; Chandler 2006; Duffield 2002), with some authors claiming that peacebuilding is disguised imperialism covering for the political and economic interests of the West (Schellhaas and Seegers 2009). Indeed, the peacebuilding as stabilization perspective focuses on the interests and motivations of external peacebuilders and asks ‘whose peace’ is served by peacebuilding programmes and activities. In contrast to advocates of the peacebuilding as liberal governance view who believe in the shared benefits of liberalism, a stabilization perspective implicitly acknowledges that the benefits of post-conflict peacebuilding may be unequal and selective. While much of the peacebuilding as liberal governance literature focuses on African elites and their identities and interests as being the main obstacles to overcome and re-shape through peacebuilding, the stabilization literature puts the interests of external peacebuilders at the forefront. It highlights that global powers and institutions are not disinterested actors or neutral vessels, and that their post-conflict peacebuilding programmes are not divorced from other political interests.
Contrary to peacebuilding as liberal governance, this stabilization view holds less faith in the possibilities of transformation and socialization. If part of failure of post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa is perceived as Africans’ stubborn attachment to parochial identities, peacebuilding as stabilization seeks to control the expression of those identities, without transforming them. Low-intensity conflict and localized violence or repression may be acceptable or perhaps inevitable under this view, so long as it does not affect international order and stability. Paradoxically then, increased militarization comes to be seen as peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding as stabilization and peacebuilding as liberal governance share a concern with order. For some critics, they are both part of a strategy to maintain the global status quo, with its inequalities and selective privileges intact. These intentions may be obscured by the universalist language of peacebuilding, but like similar concepts of human security, the ‘responsibility to protect’, and development, the aim is to subvert radical challenges to the global distribution of power and resources. While stabilization relies more heavily on external coercion and on building the coercive apparatus of the state, and liberal governance relies more extensively on building institutions and markets, both share a preoccupation with stability.
Peacebuilding as Social Justice
A third perspective on post-conflict peacebuilding emphasizes social justice. The peacebuilding as liberal governance framework would see an initiative to end discrimination against minority groups as a step towards order, and therefore peace. A social justice perspective would see the same initiative as a step towards justice, and therefore peace.
Under a peacebuilding as social justice framework, post-conflict peacebuilding can and should address structural violence, and not only the threat of direct physical violence (Francis 2002). Post-conflict peacebuilding therefore involves programmes to encourage inclusive access to resources and institutions, to empower marginalized groups, to end discrimination against women and other disadvantaged groups, and to redistribute income and land ownership. Peacebuilding is thus a powerful agenda and rallying cry through which deeply rooted inequalities and vulnerabilities can be addressed.
This perspective therefore provides a framework for understanding post-conflict peace-building activities and initiatives, but also makes moral claims about the purpose and desired outcomes of these activities. Advocates of peacebuilding as liberal governance believe that questions of social justice can and have been addressed within liberal frameworks. Critics, however, believe that liberal governance privileges order and the interests of the interveners, rather than justice. Thus peacebuilding as social justice has emerged as a substantive critique of peacebuilding programmes and initiatives that are based on geopolitics and donor self-interest. Advocates of peacebuilding as social justice focus their attention both on inequalities between Africa and the rest of the world, and inequalities within Africa.
For instance, many authors who take a social justice approach believe that peacebuilding cannot be divorced from a discussion of global capitalism and the distribution of the world’s resources. Liberal peacebuilding tends to focus on how to restructure economies internally so that countries can attract foreign investment and be better integrated into the global economy. However, the networked economies in the DRC, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Angola, Sudan, and South Sudan show that both violent conflict and peace are compatible with markets that are well integrated internationally, albeit unevenly. An emphasis on social justice raises questions about these networks and about unequal international economic relations. According to a social justice view, seeing uneven global capitalist structures as the indisputable and inevitable context for post-conflict peacebuilding severely limits possibilities.
In calling for a redistribution of resources both within countries and internationally, post-conflict peacebuilding as social justice echoes earlier claims made by dependency theorists such as Samir Amin, who believed that underdevelopment in Africa was linked to global capitalism. However, as Mahmood Mamdani (1997) points out, a social justice approach to peacebuilding also requires a focus on state structures, including the de-racialization of power, the redressing of systemic group disadvantage, and the formation of an inclusive, redefined political community at the level of the state.
Peacebuilding as Local Participation and Ownership
The three previous perspectives see post-conflict peacebuilding as a series of activities and initiatives to help reach certain predetermined goals: liberal governance, stability, and social justice. A fourth perspective on post-conflict peacebuilding differs from the previous three in that it focuses on process rather than outcomes. Often, this is framed in terms of local participation and ownership.
The starting point for advocates of this view is the disjuncture between the peacebuilding requirements of African local communities and the goals of external peacebuilders. Thus, rather than being guided by external models and by the disciplining power of external norms, post-conflict peacebuilding gains meaning and value from within African countries and locales. This resonates with calls for local ownership and participation, which is believed to lead to more sustainable outcomes and institutions that are more widely accepted by local communities. This view of post-conflict peacebuilding opens up the space for participation by a broader range of actors, including faith-based leaders, representatives of ethnic communities, and others who may fall outside the parameters of the liberal peace.
This view therefore tends to reject the universalist assumptions of liberal peace and the presumed distinction between the liberal peacebuilder and illiberal ‘other’ underpinning the peacebuilding as stabilization approach. Likewise, it may raise questions about who determines the content of social justice, and indeed about the very premise that outside intervention can be characterized as peacebuilding.
Yet within this perspective there exists significant disagreement. A key question is whether continental and regional African institutions are better informed about the possibilities for post-conflict peacebuilding than their international counterparts, and whether they are the appropriate vehicles for local participation and ownership. The experiences of the AU, NEPAD, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and African sub-regional organizations suggest that these institutions tend to adopt similar peacebuilding logics to their international counterparts, relying heavily upon liberal governance and stabilization packages.
Devolving responsibility to post-conflict governments will not resolve ambiguities or satisfy the transformative aspirations of other local groups. Domestic elites tend to revert to strategies that reproduce their positions of power, and there is nothing to indicate that there is any more of a consensus on peacebuilding priorities among inhabitants within a country than outside.
Finally, it is notoriously difficult to discern who is the ‘local’ in local peacebuilding. Sometimes, local is used to mean the national country in which a post-conflict peacebuilding intervention takes place. Yet a national actor from the capital city may be an outsider when entering into another specific local community (Pouligny 2009: 175). The question of who is involved and who decides on process and priorities in post-conflict peacebuilding cannot be settled with a mere appeal to local participation and ownership.
The Contested Politics of Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
The literature on the political economy of conflict in Africa suggests that peace and war often have much in common (Keen 2001; Richards 2005; Mwanasali 2000). During armed hostilities, belligerents and those associated with the conflict near and far have a diverse set of aims and interests, which do not always have to do with winning the war. Likewise, a post-conflict peace involves the negotiation and re-negotiation of interests and values without necessarily finding common ground or consensus. Gaining profits, sustaining livelihoods, promoting honour, and maintaining power can be aims pursued in both war and in peace. Since conflict and peace are often situated in internationalized networks, the large numbers of beneficiaries and losers to any programme, change, or intervention typically stretch beyond national borders.
The four different perspectives on post-conflict peacebuilding described above are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and institutions such as the UN and the AU use the language of all four. Furthermore, it is possible for the same actor or agency to hold a normative commitment toward social justice and local participation, but to encourage stabilization and/or liberal governance. In practice, however, certain goals and processes are prioritized and privileged over others by different actors, at different times, and in different places. Despite the common use of the language of peacebuilding, different institutions show important variation in the way that they conceptualize and operationalize peacebuilding. In a survey of 24 governmental and intergovernmental bodies active in peacebuilding, Barnett et al. (2007) show that there are great divisions among these bodies regarding the specific approaches to achieve peace, often depending on prevailing organizational mandates and interests.
These different approaches lead to tensions in peacebuilding programming and unintended consequences on the ground. Post-conflict processes and goals are fragmented, contradictory, and contested. For instance, in 2001 the Rwandan government instituted the gacaca jurisdictions to hear and judge the cases of genocide suspects (Clark, this volume). Supporters saw this as a home-grown, historically rooted way of achieving post-conflict reconciliation and justice in Rwanda. Critics saw it as the reinvention of tradition with the aim of further extending the power of a repressive Rwandan state. In Uganda, mato oput ceremonies have been discussed as a locally appropriate way to address community reconciliation in northern Uganda. Yet critics say that the emphasis on mato oput represents a convergence of interests between some foreign aid organizations and older male Acholi who want to reinforce their diminishing power. It is not something that is universally accepted among the Acholi (Allen 2007). Claims to universality should be suspect in any post-conflict peacebuilding programme or initiative.
Similarly, the very logic of a negotiated peace agreement can be very different for international peacebuilders and for local political competitors. Some international actors may view a peace agreement as a binding commitment between different belligerents that sets out a common vision for a post-conflict future, whereas the parties themselves may see it in instrumental and contextual terms. This happened in both the DRC and Sudan, where political elites adjusted their strategies to a changed context. Elites that were included in the peace agreements as well as elites that were excluded maintained the use or the threat of violence as a parallel tool in what Alex de Waal (2009) calls the political marketplace. In Burundi there have been repeated tensions between the government and the donor community over post-conflict peacebuilding priorities. Using the language of sovereignty, the Burundian government has tried to assert full control over the agenda, while at the same time ensuring the continuation of donor funds. Leaders in the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have made similar claims.
Post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa is therefore not solely a product of hegemonic external forces or a failed example of peacebuilding elsewhere. Africans are not passive recipients of post-conflict frameworks, policies, and programmes. Instead, they have at times adjusted, re-shaped, implemented, and subverted international peacebuilding strategies. In some cases, the large amounts of foreign aid that accompany post-conflict peacebuilding have been used by holders of state power as an additional rent that can be used for decidedly non-peaceful purposes (Englebert and Tull 2008: 123). When conflict ends through military victory as in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda, peacebuilding power dynamics are often different than in cases where conflict ended through a negotiated settlement. Different state-society relations in various African countries inevitably lead to different post-conflict political configurations.
Post-conflict peacebuilding is thus not a single script, but a set of ideas and practices, mediated by interactions between local communities, national, regional, and international actors. Rather than being viewed in terms of a specific goal, outcome, or process, post-conflict peacebuilding is the expression of continued contested politics. There is no independent perspective that can adjudicate between competing perspectives and normative commitments to post-conflict peacebuilding. All actors with a stake in post-conflict structures bring their own ideas, interests, norms and practices to a situation that is highly political and that may alter the local and international landscapes in expected and unexpected ways. Recent work on hybridity in peacebuilding, focusing on the interactions between multiple groups, practices, and worldviews, better captures the diverse agendas at play in any post-conflict arena (Mac Ginty 2011). Thinking of peacebuilding as contested ideas and practices opens the possibility that there may be multiple manifestations of peace within African societies and politics, and alternatives to peacebuilding as liberal governance. Oliver Richmond proposes unscripted conversations between local actors (Richmond 2009: 326, 328–29). Still, any conversation cannot be separate from relations of power, and the different conceptions of a post-conflict normative order have significant consequences. Much is at stake with peacebuilding in Africa, and continued violence often remains a very real possibility.
Conclusion
This chapter has highlighted the rise of post-conflict peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa, and the different activities and approaches commonly associated with it. In different ways and in different places, post-conflict peacebuilding engages with questions of security, political authority, economy, and society. Various approaches to post-conflict peacebuilding in Africa as elsewhere carry with them certain assumptions about how best to resolve these questions, and indeed which questions and whose interests take precedence over others. The result is a necessarily fragmented, contradictory, and polyvalent set of practices seeking to shape the nature and exercise of power in African countries emerging from conflict.
Ultimately post-conflict peacebuilding is a political contest, where peace is not a universally recognized object to discover or impose, but a set of contested ideas and practices. These contests play out differently in various parts of Africa and are contingent upon a wide set of factors. Across Africa, the political meanings of peace and peacebuilding are subject to continued negotiation and renegotiation between international, regional, and local actors. Masking the subjective nature of post-conflict peacebuilding disguises ideology and may obscure the various ways in which peace is understood and experienced in different African contexts.
Notes
1The ‘2006 Human Security Brief’ stated that the greatest decline in armed conflict around the world was in sub-Saharan Africa, and that sub-Saharan Africa was no longer the world’s most conflict-affected region (Human Security Centre 2007: 26–31).
2The chapter draws extensively from Curtis (2012), which presents an extended version of the argument here.
3For more information visit the UNPBC website, www.un.org/en/peacebuilding/ (accessed 2 June 2012); see also Bellamy (2010).
4Paragraph 9 sees new opportunities for peace now that ‘many States are seeking more open forms of economic policy’; paragraph 56 talks of social and economic development; and paragraph 59 recommends the strengthening of new democratic institutions, the rule of law, and good governance (Boutros-Ghali 1992).
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