International Peacebuilding: Experiences, Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned

With the official end of the peacebuilding mission in Afghanistan in 2014 it is timely to reflect on the practices and lessons learned of the past 17 years of global peacebuilding operations—that is, to use the language of the UN, to help bring peace, security, and development to fragile and conflict affected states. Broadly speaking, in this Section we will look back and examine what peacebuilding missions have worked (and why), which ones have not worked (and why), and what concrete lessons could be drawn for policy makers in government and those in regional-, inter-governmental, and international institutions (e.g. EU, NATO, UN, OECD) to improve future peacebuilding operations? More specifically, with the significant expansion of both the number and purview of UN peace operations since the early 1990s, it is clear that international peacebuilding missions in conflict-affected states not only remains a significant tool of foreign policy makers (Diehl, 2014); it also continues to be highly controversial. Going back to the early 1990s and with the high number of interstate conflicts at the Cold War’s end, we have witnessed a significant increase of international peacebuilding missions as well as an increasing demand for resources for those operations, especially by the EU, NATO, the UN (s.f. von der Schulenburg 2014; Anderson and Olson, 2003). Reacting to this changing context, the United Nations issued An Agenda for Peace (1992), which introduced the concept of peacebuilding, and challenged up until this point accepted notions of sovereignty. Tainted in a liberal language (liberal peacebuilding), the document called for expanding military capabilities, especially in light of the lack of ‘robust’ peacekeepers in Somalia and Rwanda (Berdal & Ucko, 2015; UN, 1998; 2000), merging security and development policies, increased budgets, and generally more preventative action through diplomacy, military deployments, and development. In short, this new liberal peacebuilding paradigm shared the conviction that political and economic liberalism was the preferred road to peace. Thus, by the end of the 1990s both theory, policy, and practice emphasized the need for longer term, comprehensive approaches to peace (Paris, 2010). Numerous scholars and policy makers have internalized these complex understandings of conflict and instability, upholding that not only is security required for development and multitrack diplomacy required for conflict resolution, but also policy coherence between actors and fields is required to produce sustainable results (Picciotto, 2004; Uvin, 2002). In response to an evolving and growing demand for more coherence in international approaches to fragile and conflict affected states, calls for whole-of-government (OECD DAC, 2007) or “comprehensive approaches” (OECD DAC, 2004), harmonization of policies and practices (OECD DAC, 2005), and partnership with non-governmental organizations as well as national and local actors OECD (DAC, 2008; OECD DAC, 2012; World Bank, 2011; UNDP, 2012) emerged, and became the new ‘doctrine’ for international peacebuilders (Chandler, 2007; Tschirgi 2002). The terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 underlined this rational as weak states had increasingly become a threat to international peace and security. Against this backdrop and looking back at the peacebuilding operations that countries, regional as well as international organizations have carried out, this Section investigates what it is that makes a peacebuilding operation successful? What actors are best suited to carry out the mission, at what level of civilian-military cooperation, what resources are needed, from whom (national governments or international organizations), what forms of coordination and policies are needed at the local, national, and international level? The Section welcomes Papers that answer these questions on an empirical, comparative, and policy level. We thereby aspire to engage with the dynamic policy interactions between public, private, and civil society actors operating at the nexus of civil-military relations.