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trust-building by respected mediators are crucial. In others, positive and negative inducements by relevant states are significant. The literature (Carnegie Commission, 1997; Wallensteen, ed., 1998; Leatherman et al„ 1999; Zartman, 2001; Hampson and Malone, eds, 2002) explores a range of political measures (mediation with muscle, mobilization through regional and global organizations, attempts to influence the media); economic measures (sanctions, emergency aid, conditional offers of financial support); and military measures (preventive peacekeeping, arms embargoes, demilitarization).
Operational prevention thus goes wider than conflict resolution, if that is conceived as bringing parties together to analyse and transform a dispute. However, the effort to resolve conflict at an early stage is at the heart of prevention. It involves identifying the key issues, clearing mistrust and misperceptions and exploring feasible outcomes that bridge the opposing positions of the parties. Finding ways to negotiate agreements, agree procedures and channels for dispute resolution and transforming contentious relationships are central to the enterprise. These were characteristic of the work of Max van der Stoel, the OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities, whose intervention in Estonia has been cited above, and whose work in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s is one of the beacons of quiet preventive diplomacy in practice (Kemp, 2001). They are also the hallmarks of efforts by internal and external non-governmental peacemakers.
In some cases quite protracted conflicts continue at a political level, with successive negotiations, breakdowns, agreements and disagreements, but the conflict is eventually settled or suspended without violence breaking out. The long struggle over South Tyrol was negotiated between the Austrian and Italian governments and the local parties in Alto Adige. In other cases a negotiation process prevents a political conflict reaching any risk of violence. The peaceful divorce of the Czech and Slovak republics, and the negotiations between Moscow and the Tatar government over the status of Tatarstan within the Russian Federation are examples (Hopmann, 2001:151-6).
Non-governmental organizations, development agencies and social actors also take significant steps to address conflict and attempt to prevent violence at an early stage. It is difficult to evaluate the impact of this kind of 'preventive peacebuilding', especially when the main intended impact may be to improve relations between specific groups or address needs at a community or regional level. It is only when there is an obvious relationship between programmes at the local and community level and impact on the elite level that conflict impact assessment is clear. The work can sometimes be very challenging. For example, the programme by Conciliation Resources in Fiji supported a Citizens' Constitutional Forum which contributed to the adoption in
1997 of a power-sharing system. This was intended to address the domination of the indigenous Fijians over the Indian-Fijian group. But following the coup which overthrew the constitution in 2000, the situation became more polarized than ever. Conciliation Resources continues to work with its partners to encourage multiculturalism, respect for human rights and the re-establishment of the constitution.
Development agencies have a range of impacts, some positive, some highly negative. Large government donors typically work with the local government and may have negative impacts on local communities when centrally financed development programmes impact on them. For example, BU support for irrigation schemes in the Awash valley in Ethiopia have led to the intensification of latent conflict between local Afar clans and the central government, although this has been partly offset by a small-scale local project with the regional government (of which the central government disapproved). Development agencies bring substantial resources into poor countries and it is difficult for them to avoid enmeshment in local conflicts.
The effectiveness of measures to prevent violent conflicts depends on circumstances. As Stedman (1995) argued, they can exacerbate some situations. As Lund (1995) countered, they can mitigate others. Efforts to prevent latent conflicts from becoming violent are always justified, but they must be informed, sensitive and well judged, and carried out with representatives of the affected population, if they are not to do more harm than good.
Fifty years after the idea was first examined by the pioneers of the conflict resolution field, it is remarkable how the idea of conflict prevention has been adopted as the leading edge of international and multilateral conflict management policy. Mechanisms for peaceful change and systems for anticipation of future issues, two of the key perquisites for international peace and security which were absent from all of the historic peace treaties noted by Holsti in chapter 2 of this book (see table 2.1), are now being designed into the security architectures of regional and international organizations through the commitment to programmes of conflict prevention.
The UN's concern with conflict prevention evolved from the Agenda for Peace (1992), through the Brahimi Report (2000), to the Secretary-General's Report on Conflict Prevention to the 55th Session of the General Assembly in June 2001, which made conflict prevention a priority of the organization. Kofi Annan urged his staff to develop a
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'culture of prevention'. Similarly, UN Security Council Resolution 1366 of August 2001 identified a key role for the Security Council in the prevention of armed conflict. A Trust Fund for Preventive Action has been established and a system-wide training programme on early warning and preventive measures initiated. The so-called 'Annan Doctrine' which prioritized conflict prevention has influenced a wide range of actors to follow suit. Within the UN family, the UNDP defined its role in post-conflict peacebuilding through a conflict prevention strategy adopted in November 2000 and 20 per cent of UNDP track 3 funding is set aside for 'preventive and curative activities'.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has fifty-five participating states spanning Vancouver to Vladivostok, and has evolved as a primary regional organization for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Its conflict prevention structures and roles include a Conflict Prevention Centre, an Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and, as we have seen, a High Commissioner for National Minorities (HCNM) whose task is to identify and seek early resolution of ethnic tensions that might endanger peace, stability or friendly relations between the participating states of the OSCE. The HCNM gathers information, mediates, promotes dialogue, makes recommendations and informs OSCE members of potential conflicts; significantly, the HCNM does not require approval by states of the OSCE before becoming involved.
The European Union made its commitment to conflict prevention ai its Gothenburg Summit in June 2001, when it declared:
Conflict prevention calls for a cooperative approach to facilitate peaceful solutions to disputes, and implies addressing the root causes of conflicts. The EU underlines its political commitment to pursue conflict prevention as one of the main objectives of the EU's external relations. It resolves to continue to improve its capacity to prevent violent conflicts and to contribute to a global culture of prevention.
This statement of commitment by the EU was an integral step in the process of developing a Common European Security and Defence Policy, growing out of the previous Helsinki Summit (December 1999) and the Lisbon Council (March 2000). The European Commission launched Conflict Prevention Assessment Missions to areas of conflict including Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Indonesia and Nepal, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), through its Development Assistance Committee, has also produced guidelines for conflict prevention which depend on long-term structural preventive measures built into developmental assistance programmes (Ackermann, 2003). Many of the agencies of the UN,
and other international regional, and sub-regional organizations, were themselves also developing policies and programmes that emphasized the importance of robust values and structures for conflict prevention (Ackermann, 2003; Mack, 2003; Smith, 2003). It is also widely recognized that conflict prevention is a less costly policy than intervention after the onset of armed conflicts. Chalmers (2004), argued that for every £1 spent on preventive activity, an average of £4.1 will be generated on savings for the international community, compared to the costs of intervention after the onset of violent conflict.
It is nevertheless generally recognized that when it comes to conflict prevention in practice, there is a long way to go in translating rhetoric into reality. This is especially the case as far as the UN is concerned, where the resources available for preventive programmes are meagre. However, the significance of the UN's shift to a culture of prevention through the Annan Doctrine lies in its important role in. innovation and norm-setting. Ackermann has pointed out that in general, norm-setting evolves through three stages: awareness-raising and advocacy, acceptance and institutionalization, and internationalization (Ackermann, 2003: 7). In the period of the first decade of the new century it is anticipated that conflict prevention will have made strong progress towards the second stage.
The 2001 Report to the General Assembly and Security Council Resolution 1366 both recognized that it was important for member states and organizations of civil society to commit to conflict prevention. Many have responded. The G8 countries produced their Rome Initiative on Conflict Prevention in July 2001, concentrating on small arms and light weapons, conflict diamonds, children in conflict, civilian policing, conflict and development, the role of women and the contribution of the private sector in conflict prevention. The government of the United Kingdom launched its Global Conflict Prevention Pool in 2001, combining the three key departments (Ministry of Defence, Department for International Development, and the Foreign Office) in an attempt to coordinate strategy around policy development and programme delivery (Kapila and Vernmester, 2002). The budget of £74 million in 2004 was limited, but the rhetorical commitment was clear. NGOs have continued to research, advocate and implement appropriate conflict prevention activities, including International Alert, the International Crisis Group, and the European Centre for Conflict Prevention, whose database of conflict prevention organizations listed about 850 organizations active in 2004 (<www.euconflict.org>).
The effects of this intensified commitment are hard to establish. We saw in chapter 3 how in most recent surveys the incidence of major
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armed conflict has been going down since the mid-1990s (see figure 3.1), although Hegre (2004) shows the number of new wars oscillating. Gurr et al. (2001) identify a decline in internal wars between 1993 and 2000 and associate the easing of discrimination amongst minority groups with a more benign policy environment. The statistical evidence also suggests a shortening in the duration of wars, which could be due to a diminishing of the factors previously fuelling violent conflicts, such as less support from superpowers and proxy states for armed factions, although it may also be due to greater involvement in peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding by the international community and local actors. Once again statistical correlations can indicate likely causal factors, but cannot prove them.
Having examined structural and operational prevention at the interstate and the intrastate levels and the actors involved in prevention policy, we end the chapter by considering the application of conflict prevention policies to specific conflicts in the post-Cold War period and the early years of the twenty-first century.
First, let us note the existence of very different risks of violent conflict in different types of states, as indicated in chapter 3. In the OECD, no new internal or interstate wars within or between member states have started for many years. Clearly the combination of cross-cutting interests and identities, international institutions, dispute settlement mechanisms and membership of common security bodies in this area has largely eliminated the risk of intra-OECD warfare. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union a long period without armed conflict was broken by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, but after a burst of new conflicts, mainly over secession and self-determination, the number of new conflicts in this area is falling. Latin America has experienced no new internal wars since 1985. This leaves South and South-East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, all as regions with continuing inceptions of new wars as well as continuing old ones. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region which has experienced an increase in the level of armed conflicts.
Capacity to prevent conflict varies regionally too. Capacity exists at an international level (in the form of international institutions, norms), at the national level (in the form of state institutions, parliaments, laws, etc.) and at sub-state levels (local communities, civic associations, etc.). It is very weak or non-existent in countries where states have failed or are failing and economies are stagnating. A combination
of factors, including different configurations of structural causes and preventors of conflict, distinguish regions with little or no violent conflict from those with endemic violent conflicts.
We can illustrate how deep structural and light operational prevention have interacted by reference to one or two examples from Europe, and one or two from Africa.
The Baltic states present one of the most significant examples of conflicts that have been prevented, or averted. The secession of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia from the Soviet Union might well have given rise to armed conflicts, both between the new states and Russia and between the Baltic and Russian citizens in the Baltic states. But this did not happen. In the case of Estonia, which we looked at above, the outcome can be attributed to a combination of light and deep prevention. On the light side, the effective diplomatic interventions of Max van der Stoel and others, combined with the moderate positions taken by the Estonian President, de-escalated the crisis. At a deeper level, the membership of all the concerned parties in the OSCE, and their acceptance of OSCE standards on citizenship and minority rights, created a legitimate framework for consultation and mediation. Both the Baltic states and the Russian Federation sought entry into European institutions; this gave European institutions some weight in the conflict. Crucially, the West, the Baltic states and the Russian government were all keen to avoid an armed conflict, but to be effective this wish had to be translated into practical measures and bridge-building institutions in the Baltic states, including voting systems in which politicians had to seek support from both the main ethnic communities in order to gain power. Moreover, the Russian-speakers were divided. The majority of them saw their best hopes for the future in participating in the Estonian economy, which had better prospects of development and trade with the West than that of Russia (Khrychikov and Miall, 2002).
Macedonia is perhaps the best-known case with a significant experience of conflict prevention measures. While the international community failed to prevent the spread of violent conflict from Croatia to Bosnia, it made great efforts in Macedonia to significant effect. When Yugoslavia broke up, Macedonia was a weak state with dubious viability. Four neighbouring states had potential claims on its territory (Pettifer, 1992). The government of Greece claimed prior ownership to the name. There was a potentially serious latent conflict between the majority Macedonian Slavs and the Albanians in Macedonia, who constituted about a quarter of the population (Mickey and Albion, 1993). It was very reasonable to fear that if conflict were ignited in Kosovo it could spill over into Macedonia and trigger an armed conflict there.
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In response to these warning signs, the UN deployed its first ever preventive peacekeeping mission, in Macedonia in January 1993, initially as part of UNPROFOR, later renamed UNPREDEP in 1995. This effectively placed an international guarantee on Macedonia's territorial integrity. The peacekeepers prevented several incursions by Yugoslav troops from turning into violent incidents. The international community also supported the Macedonian economy and attempted to intervene in the conflict between Albanians and the Macedonians, with rather limited success. The OSCE High Commissioner also attempted to mediate between them, securing an agreement to establish a higher education institution in Tetovo. Despite several violent incidents, including the demonstrations in Tetovo in 1995, the conflict was contained. A crucial factor here was the moderate leadership of the Macedonian president and the internal political accommodation between the Albanian and Macedonian political parties. Prom the start, the government was a coalition between Albanian and Macedonian parties, and this gave powerful incentives for the elites to pursue moderate policies.
Macedonia's precarious stability was severely tested by the outbreak of war in Kosovo, and the temporary flight of 350,000 Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia. The UN was forced to withdraw UNPREDEP, when China refused to renew its mandate in response to the Macedonian government's decision to recognize Taiwan. NATO's KFOR replaced UNPREDEP, but it seemed thai this mu-ki deepen ihe divide between the Macedonians, who were critical of the NATO war on Serbia, and the Albanians who supported it. A further crisis arose in 2001 with the appearance of the NLA (National Liberation Army). This group was made up of KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) fighters from Kosovo and Albanians from Macedonia. It combined advocates of Albanian rights in Macedonia and probably criminals who wanted to protect their drug-running operations - a good example of the combination of greed and grievance in a rebel group. For a while, the Macedonian government seemed unable to contain the rebellion, and the risk that it could spread and ignite a major conflict was obvious. But it did not. Yet again, the elite accommodation held the situation in check. With the help of US and EU mediators, the Albanian and Macedonian parties signed the Ohrid agreement, which provided for new elections, arms to be collected by NATO troops, a revision of the constitution to give more rights to Albanians, and civilian monitors to assist the return of refugees. The agreement provided for devolution of power to local governments, the legalization of the university at Tetovo and the use of the Albanian language in state institutions. The Albanian rebel leader ALL Ahmeti came into politics. Disputes continued in 2004 over the boundaries of these local governments, and
on the ground economic difficulties and polarization between the ethnic communities continue to maintain a risk of further conflict. An EU-led military force, Operation Concordia, took over from NATO in March 2003. As in the Estonia case, the underlying conflicts are not yet fully reconciled, but Macedonia has managed to remain a unified state and to avoid an internal war. In this case the combination of cooperation between the political elites and international support has avoided what might well have been a bloody extension of the Yugoslav wars.
In both these European cases, international involvement to avoid conflict was strong, and these were relatively advanced economies. But Sub-Saharan Africa too, despite its proneness to armed conflicts, has striking cases of countries which have avoided armed conflict. Botswana, for example, is a diamond-rich developing country which has avoided the conflicts that have beset other diamond-rich countries like Sierra Leone and other Southern African countries like Angola and Mozambique. The country has had a democratic system since independence, though one party has dominated the political system. Traditionally a cattle-rearing aristocracy, Tswana society was reduced to a proletarianized peasantry under colonialism, but an educated group emerged on independence and invested its gains from education in cattle and trade. Botswana has managed to avoid the intense conflicts over control of the state between ethnic groups and downplays ethnic differences. Indigenous systems of land tenure have been gradually integrated with modern systems, and Land Boards, which have acquired powers formerly held by chiefs, grant land rights and manage disputes. Botswana's political stability and strong economic development have enabled it to escape the conflicts in the region, though unfortunately not the ravages of AIDS which have had a devastating impact on society in recent years.
Kenya has suffered from inter-ethnic conflicts associated with the control of the state by dominant ethnic groups. Stagnant or declining economic growth in the 1990s combined with conflicts in peripheral areas (such as among the pastoralists in the north-east) seemed to threaten the country's stability. However, the elections of 2002 brought the opposition to power peacefully - an unusual event in Africa. The new government's policy of providing free education, encouraging agricultural cooperatives and tackling corruption gained dividends initially in economic progress and international support. Notwithstanding its ethnic and economic divisions, Kenya has avoided large-scale internal conflict.
Similar stories of relative peace can be found if we turn from the country to the group level of analysis. Although ethnicity has been a frequent source of ethnic conflict in the 1990s and 2000s, there are
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Success
Failure .
Light measures Deep measures
Armed conflict averted Peaceful change
Armed conflict Confhct'prqne situation
many ethnic groups which have lived peaceably, though not without conflict, together with majority communities: for example, the Chinese community in Malaysia, the French-speaking population in Canada, the Macedonian community in Albania, and so on. Horowitz (1985) and Gurr (2000) give examples and analyses of the factors that have prevented potential conflicts in these cases.
Assessing conflict prevention evidently depends considerably on the frame of analysis chosen and the criteria used to assess proneness to conflict. Wallensteen (2002b) offers a list of thirty candidates for conflict prevention analysis since the end of the Cold War where operational conflict prevention of some kind took place. A much larger list could be compiled to examine the impact of structural prevention. The study of the impact of both operational and structural prevention on conflict incidence, and of their interaction with forces fuelling conflict, is still in its infancy.
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strengthen the preventers, and to foster a culture of prevention, with early identification, discussion and transformation of emergent conflicts.
Recommended reading
Hampson and Malone, eds (2002); Leathermati (1999); Wallensteen (1998).
In this chapter we have looked at the causes and preventors of contemporary armed conflicts. If, as A. J. P. Taylor suggests, wars have both general and specific causes, then systems of conflict prevention should address both the generic conditions which make societies prone to armed conflicts, and the potential triggers which translate war-pronenss into armed conflict. If structural conflict prevention is successful in providing capacity to manage emergent conflicts peacefully at an early stage, it should make societies less conflict-prone. If operational conflict prevention is successful, it should avert armed conflicts, without necessarily removing the underlying conditions of proneness to armed conflict (see table 5.2). Both light and deep approaches to conflict prevention are clearly necessary.
The cases we have quoted suggest that conflict prevention is noL easy. It is difficult for the preventors to gain a purchase in situations of violence or chaotic change, and episodes of violence can readily overwhelm them. Nevertheless, where preventive measures have begun, and where circumstances are propitious, a cumulative process of peacebuilding can be seen. The challenge is gradually to introduce and
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c. n A P TT It"
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping
.Certainly the idea of an international peace force effective against a : Wg disturber of the peace seems today unrealizable to the point of absurdity. We did, however, take at least a step in the direction of TutTting international force behind an international decision a year ago in the Suez crisis. The birth of this force was sudden and it was ■ surgical. The arrangements for the reception of the infant were rudimentary and the midwives had no precedents or experience to guide them. Nevertheless, UNEF, the first genuinely international police force of its kind, came into being and into action.... We made at least a beginning then. If, on that foundation, we do not build something more permanent and stronger, we will once again have ignored realities, rejected opportunities and betrayed our trust. Will we never learn?
Extract from Lester Pearson's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech ' referring to Ms comments on the origins of United Nations
Peacekeeping, 1957
Sadly, in the 50th year of UN peacekeeping operations, the perceived failures and costs of the UN mission in former Yugoslavia, and recent experiences in Somalia, have led to widespread disillusionment. Yet if the world loses faith in peacekeeping, and responses to the new world disorder are limited to the extremes of total war or total peace, the world will become a more dangerous place. Rather than lose faith in the whole peace process, we need to analyse the changed operational circumstances and try to determine new doctrines for the future
General Sir Michael Rose, Commander UN Protection Force
in Bosnia, 1994-5
For critical theory, structural transformation based on social struggles immanent in globalization processes will introduce new forms of democratic peacekeeping in the short term if not rendering it largely obsolete in the long run.
Michael Pugh, Peacekeeping and Critical Theory (2004:54)
In this chapter we examine the role for conflict resolution in the most challenging of environments - in areas of heated conflict where violence has become routine and the prevention of violent conflict has failed. In terms of the hourglass model in chapter 1 (figure 1.3), we noted how higher levels of violence need more robust forms of intervention. We suggested that peacekeeping is appropriate at three points on the escalation scale: to contain violence and prevent it from escalating to war; to limit the intensity, geographical spread and duration of war once it has broken out; and to consolidate a ceasefire and create space for reconstruction after the end of a war. The first of these relates to topics covered in chapter 5, the third to topics covered in chapter 8, so in this chapter we focus on the second: intervention to limit and contain the terrible effects of ongoing war. Here we are examining options at the most narrow part of the hourglass, where political and humanitarian space is most severely constrained. We focus on the changing role of UN peacekeepers in these situations (creating security space), and recognize that this peacekeeping role is integrally linked to the role of NGOs, UN civil agencies and aid agencies in responding to humanitarian needs (creating humanitarian space). There is a growing recognition that these agencies need to work together to link mitigation and relief to the political tasks that are necessary to settle the conflict and resolve it within a sustainable peace process (creating political space). The central argument in this chapter is that peacekeepers and the various humanitarian and development agencies working in war zones need to be aware of the conflict resolution dimension of their work. In short, there is a vital conflict resolution role for peacekeeping to play even during the most intense period of destruction (see table 6.1).
We begin by looking at the emergence and development of peacekeeping as a conflict resolution mechanism, outlining the principles and practices which defined it as it evolved through two phases, generally termed first- and second-generation peacekeeping missions. We then look at the results of research into the dynamics of war zones (the targeting of civilians, the destruction of social and cultural
Phase Mode of peacekeeping       : Negative role . .....Positive role
Violence Prevention (see ch. 5) War limitation
Ceasefire     Stabilization (see ch. 8)
Limit spread        Create security space Limit intensity      Create humanitarian space Limit duration    ; Create political space .......
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institutions, the persistence of 'warlords') which challenged second-generation peacekeeping missions in the 1990s to the point where they were seen, by some critics at least, as inadequate to protect civilians and restore peace. In the light of this, we look at the associated intervention controversy and focus on the current debate about the ways in which UN peacekeeping can be reformed as a more robust conflict resolution intervention mechanism appropriate to the challenges of the twenty-first century. These third-generation operations are sometimes called 'peace support operations' (PSOs) or 'peace operations', to distinguish them from the more circumscribed nature of traditional peacekeeping. We conclude by noting how all of this is contested by critical theoretic transformationists, and look at some of the (admittedly still rather embryonic) policy implications suggested by them.
United Nations peacekeeping and academic conflict resolution have much in common conceptually, and both emerged as distinct areas of theory and practice at about the same time - in the mid-1950s. When the first conflict resolution centres and journals were being established {see chapter 2), UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and UN General Assembly President Lester Pearson were defining the basic principles of peacekeeping in order to guide the work of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I), created in response to the Suez crisis in the Middle East in 1956. Peacekeeping is not mentioned in the UN Charter, prompting the suggestion that it operated somewhere between Chapter 6 (the peaceful settlement of disputes) and Chapter 7 (enforcement) - Chapter 6%. Although The Agenda for Peace in the early 1990s attempted to override the principle of consent and the minimum use of force in certain circumstances, the UNEF I principles served to define the essence of UN peacekeeping at least until the mid-1990s, and were based on the consent of the conflict parties, the non-use of force except in self defence, political neutrality (not talcing sides), impartiality (commitment to the mandate) and legitimacy (sanctioned and accountable to the Security Council advised by the Secretary-General).
During the period of the Cold War thirteen peacekeeping operations were established, mostly deployed in interstate conflicts (although ONUC in the Congo 1960-4 was an exception). Their main function was to monitor borders and establish buffer zones after the agreement of ceasefires. The missions were typically composed of lightly armed national troop contingents from small and neutral UN member states.
These early missions are usually termed 'first-generation peacekeeping' (Fetherston, 1994). Like the categorization used in chapter 2, the use of the idea of 'generations' of peacekeeping development is not intended to be exact and watertight. Some missions elude neat classification, persisting across the generational categories adopted here or incorporating activities that went beyond the traditional monitoring function (UNFICIP in Cyprus and ONUC in the Congo for example). Nevertheless, peacekeeping has evolved to meet the differing challenges of conflict in different periods and contexts; doctrines and practices of peacekeeping have changed as lessons learned from deployment in more complex conflict environments are reflected and acted upon. Thus the expansion of peacekeeping m the deployments into hot civil wars in the Balkans and in Africa especially in the 1990s can be reasonably described as second-generation peacekeeping (what the British military called 'wider peacekeeping). The further development of doctrine from the late 1990s, reflected m the use of the terms 'peace support operations', or 'peace operations', marked a third generation of peacekeeping, where missions operated under a Chapter 7 mandate and where they were more robustly equipped to enforce that mandate. Here, we use this idea of three generations of activity to trace the development of peacekeeping and its function in war zones.
From the late 1980s, and most noticeably following the publication of UN Secretary-General Boutws-Ghatis Agenda for Peace m 1992, there was a dramatic increase in the number and size of peacekeeping operations. At the beginning of 1988, when the Cold War was coming to an end, there were only five operations in the field: three in the fiddle East, a small observer mission in Kashmir, and UNFICYP in Cyprus. Six years later there were three times that number (see table 6.2).
The numerical growth of peacekeeping operations during the 1990s was accompanied by a fundamental change m then- nature, their function and their composition. The single ceasefire maintenance
................			;.3R" 7?:-		
	safe	■f-Tf isÄälipip		— - -	
	IMS	1992	1994	2000	2004
Number of active, missions . :	5	11	17	14	16
: Number of troop-contributing: -	26	56	76	89	103
countries					
Military and pofice	9,605	11,650	75,523	37,338	62,271
-international civilian personnel	1,516	2,606	2,260	3,243	3,949
Annual UN peacekeeping Sb: ■=	2,30	1.69	3.61	2.22	2.82
Source: UNDPK0					
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function associated with traditional operations evolved into a multiplicity of tasks involving security, humanitarian and political objectives. At the same time, the composition of post-Cold War peacekeeping operations became more diverse and complex: peacekeepers were drawn from a wider variety of sources (military, civilian police and diplomatic), nations and cultures. Second-generation peacekeeping was multilateral, multidimensional, and multinational/multicultural. By the mid-1990s the number of countries contributing to peacekeeping missions had almost tripled, from twenty-six in the late 1980s, and this trend has continued to the point that currently there are now more than a hundred different nations contributing forces to UN peacekeeping missions, amongst whom the dominant contributors are not the small neutral nations normally associated with peacekeeping (Canadians, Irish and Scandinavians, for example), nor the world powers or Security Council P5 countries, which became very involved in the mid-1990s in the Balkans (especially British and French troops); but, rather, it is nations in Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan, India) and Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana) that make the major contribution to current missions.
Multilateralism implies the involvement of several levels of actors in an operation: these could be the two or more conflicting parties, the peacekeepers themselves, as well as the UN and other international actors. The new operations were multidimensional, incorporating military, civilian police and other civilian components, all of which fulfilled their distinct functions. The military component, i.e. the land, naval and air forces contributed by UN member states, included both armed and unarmed soldiers (the latter are often referred to as military observers). Essentially, the military component's function was to serve in a supporting role: to guarantee and maintain a secure environment in which the civilian components could conduct their work. Civilian police components (CIVPOL) also became increasingly important players in peacekeeping operations. Operating under the authority of the UN Security Council, international police monitors assisted in the restoration of the rule of law and in the maintenance of public order. Finally, there developed a sizeable civilian component consisting of two main groups. Firstly, there were inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), or organizations which are mandated by agreements drawn up between two or more states. This includes all UN agencies, regional organizations such as the OAU or the OSCE, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (ICRC). Second, there was a wide variety of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), national and international organizations that are constituted separately from the government of the country in which they are founded. In contrast to the military component, which draws its strength from
the effective coercive influence it can exercise over belligerents, the civilian component's power base may be diplomatic, economic, ideological, scientific and technical, humanitarian, and/or legal.
The development and deployment of these second-generation missions took place in the context of a new mood of optimism that conflicts could be managed and resolved peacefully through multilateral initiatives in which the UN, with the decline of superpower rivalry post-Cold War, could take a leading role. The optimism was expressed most clearly in the Agenda for Peace, which placed UN peacekeeping operations as key instruments within a new and broader context of collective human security. This UN vision for security, developed in the early years of the 1990s, was based around the value of positive peace and included a commitment to satisfy basic human needs, to protect human rights, and to promote economic equality and political participation. Significantly, according to Boutros-Ghali: 'in . . . situations of internal crisis, the United Nations will need to respect the sovereignty of states, [but the] time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed . . . [and] it is the task of leaders of states today to understand this and to find a balance between good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world' (Boutros-Ghali, 1992: 9).
However, as table 6.2 shows, the confidence in peacekeeping, at its height in the mid-1990s, began to wane in the closing years of the decade. The number of troops deployed, the number of deployments and the budget committed to peacekeeping all declined (although not the number of troop-providing countries). Peacekeepers faced seemingly insurmountable problems and were frequently exposed as powerless to protect civilians, humanitarian workers and even themselves, in the civil wars in former Yugoslavia, in the genocide in Rwanda and in Somalia.
The debacle in October 1993, when eighteen US soldiers were killed and publicly humiliated as part of the UNOSOMII mission in Somalia, effectively ended any possibility of US troops participating integrally and in significant numbers in UN-led missions in future. At the end of the decade the UN published the reports of inquiries into two other events which marked the nadir of its experience in trying to resolve conflicts. Approximately 800,000 people were killed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda between April and July 1994. A UN peacekeeping mission (UNAMIR) already in Rwanda, but with its force numbers severely reduced, was largely powerless to prevent the killings, despite the pleas of its force commander, because the Security Council was reluctant to intervene so soon after the Somalia disaster. A year later, in one of the worst war crimes committed in Europe since the end of the Second World War, the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica fell to
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a siege by Serb militias, during which 8,000 Muslims were killed under the eyes of the UN peacekeeping contingent deployed when Srebenica had become the world's first civilian safe area in 1993 (Security Council Resolution 819; 18 April). Two UN reports concluded that, faced with attempts to murder, expel or terrorize entire populations, the neutral, impartial and mediating role of the United Nations was inadequate. Both also called for a process of reflection to clarify and to improve the capacity of the United Nations to respond to various forms of conflict, and especially to 'address the mistakes of peacekeeping at the end of this century and to meet the challenges of the next one' (UN Report, 1999,1999b).
When a new set of security challenges manifested themselves in the form of the attack on the USA on 11 September 2001, followed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the world organization appeared even more marginalized. Nevertheless, as the world turned its attention to these new challenges to security, it should be noted that UN peacekeeping has not only continued, it was also revived and even modified. As table 6.2 above illustrates, by 2004 more countries than ever before were contributing to UN peacekeeping missions, and the sixteen missions active in that year deployed numbers of peacekeepers close to the historic highs of the mid-1990s.
Amongst the most challenging situations which confront those wishing to engage in conflict resolution are those where warlords and militias have come to establish their power over civilian populations. In such situations, 'not only is there little recognition of the distinction between combatant and civilian, or of any obligation to spare women, children and the elderly, but the valued institutions and way of life of a whole population can be targeted' with the objective of creating 'states of terror which penetrate the entire fabric of grassroots social relations ... as a means of social control' (Summerfield, 1996:1). Civilians and humanitarian staff are the targets in these wars, not the accidental victims of it. In the First World War over 80 per cent of battlefield deaths were combatants; by the 1990s over 90 per cent of war-related deaths were civilians, lulled in their own homes and communities, which have become the battlefields of many contemporary wars. As Nordstrom has remarked, the least dangerous place to be in most contemporary wars is in the military (1992:271). 'Dirty war' strategies, originally identified with state-sponsored terrorism, are now a feature of a widening band of militias, paramilitaries, warlords and armies seeking control of resources through depredation, terror and force. The threat posed to
civilians is perceived to be greater still following the events of 11 September 2001, when global mass casualty terrorism and the actions of suicide bombers became a new or at least a more persistent concern for the international community (with an estimate of more than 7,000 killed in some 190 terrorist attacks in 2002).
Are these behaviours in contemporary wars senseless and irrational convulsions of violence, expressions of ancient hatreds and regressions to tribal war and neo-medieval warlords, as some argue (Kaplan, 1994)? Or are there more systematic explanations, as those writing from an anthropological and radical political economy perspective suggest? An appropriate conflict resolution response will depend upon what answers are given to these questions.
In a pattern that has been well documented in recent years, for example in parts of Africa such as Tigray, Eritrea, Southern and Western Sudan, Northern Uganda, Angola and Somalia (Macrae and Zwi, eds, 1994: 13-20), scorched earth tactics are common, with livestock seized, grain stores attacked and looted, wells and watering places poisoned. Forced population movements are engineered to perpetuate dependency and control. Actors like the international drug cartels in Central and South America, the Taliban in Afghanistan and rebel groups in West Africa had effectively set up parallel economies, trading in precious resources such as hardwoods, diamonds, drugs and so on. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge leadership profited so much from the smuggling of timber and gems across the Thai border that it saw little incentive to demobilize its forces as agreed under the Paris Peace Accords of 1991, while there is evidence of some collusion between the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Army in mutual profiteering from this trade (Keen, 1995). Although this does not apply to all internal conflicts, there are war-zone economies where civilians are seen as 'a resource base to be either corralled, plundered, or cleansed' (Duffield, 1997:103). Humanitarian and development aid is captured, and humanitarian workers kidnapped, held hostage and killed. These wars can be seen to be both lucrative and rational for those who can take advantage and are prepared to act violently to gain power.
This is the point at which to re-engage with the economic analyses of what perpetuates endemic wars of this land, as discussed in chapter 4. We saw how, through the project on 'The Economics of Civil War, Crime and Violence', Collier and his colleagues at the World Bank have offered important new insights into the difficulties faced by peacekeepers and other agencies active in areas of conflict (Collier et al., 2003).1 They started from a concern that large-scale political and criminal violence was trapping large parts of the developing world in a cycle of poverty and low or negative economic growth. Their suggestion is that a significant element of the motivation for political
140 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
violence does not come from a politics as grievance discourse (the 1 assumption of much conflict research and of the Agenda/or Peace), but from a dynamic where the economic motivation to pursue ;| conflict becomes compelling. World Bank-sponsored research suggests ; | that financial/economic factors explain the onset of civil war more d powerfully than political grievance factors, although as rebel groups mobilize they gain recruits rapidly by the development of ideologies | based on grievances and political claims. From this perspective most civil wars are driven not by ideology or grievance, but by greed and .A predation. In chapters 3 and 4, we argued that there are genuine j identity-based and ideology-based conflicts that are fuelled by failures ;| of existing government structures to accommodate legitimate political aspirations or to satisfy needs, and that economic motives do not :; si explain the deeper dynamics of most major armed conflicts. | Nevertheless, in fragile 'quasi-states', particularly where formal struc- t' tures have hollowed out and war economies have become endemic, : | such analysis is compelling. Cooper (2001) argues that the trade in ---§ conflict goods, generating opportunities to acquire wealth and the * means to continue financing arms acquisition, has significant impli- | cations for peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities in areas of I conflict of this kind. He suggests that the development of strategies | for restricting the trade in conflict goods (such as the controls placed on trade in Sierra Leone's conflict diamonds) may be as significant as | programmes which prioritize arms control and disarmament in peace J processes. Hie development of conflict goods control programmes is " still at a rudimentary stage in war-zone conflict management, 1 although it is becoming increasingly recognized that those who :| benefit from, and who are therefore motivated to perpetuate, war l economies need to be addressed in the early stages of conflict stabili- j zation in peacekeeping. 4 Strategies to achieve this are now beginning to be identified in the * form of a range of policies that can be pursued by governments, < regional organizations and the UN. In identifying some of these I strategies and policies, researchers have pointed to important impli- \ cations for the role of peacekeeping forces. Thus it has been suggested that UN peace operation mandates need to be formulated with an j awareness of the economic reality of particular conflicts, especially | so that peacekeeping forces can be deployed to establish control over resource-rich areas in order to prevent illicit exploitation and j smuggling by factions which wish to use the proceeds to perpetuate I conflict. The UN operation in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) is presently -j deployed in the Kono diamond district in what has proved to date £ to be a successful effort to curtail such activities (Wilton Park i Conference, 2003). '=*|
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping
For analysts like Outram, however, in his account of the civil war in Liberia, theories of economic predation of this land do not go far enough, because they do not explain the extent and absurdity of the violence involved. The violence goes beyond rational expectations of what can be gained economically, for a rational warlord would not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. To explain it, we have to take into account socio-psychological considerations as well as economic motivations. In Liberia, accumulated fears drove people"beyond killing the 'ethnic enemy' into factions which practised a general and undirected vengeance (Outram, 1997: 368). We can understand this phenomenon further by considering the work of Nordstrom. While Outram concentrated on the experience of the warring factions and the political economy which they constructed, Nordstrom has worked on the experiences of the victims of the violence. Following field research in Mozambique and Sri Lanka, she explained the many stories of absurd destruction and the use of terror in warfare as deliberate efforts to destroy the normal meanings that define and guide daily life (Nordstrom, 1992:269). This is the process whereby dirty war becomes the means through which economies of violence merge with what Nordstrom calls 'cultures of violence'. As she puts it, 'violence parallels power', and people come to have no alternative but to accept 'fundamental knowledge constructs that are based on force' (ibid.). So this is yet another dimension of endemic war zones that peacekeepers and conflict resolvers have to try to understand if they venture to intervene in active war zones.
Working in war zones, then, clearly does create serious challenges for conflict resolution, and requires the analyst or intervener to be aware of their particular dynamics. We have commented elsewhere, with reference to humanitarian intervention, how principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and universality are necessary to guide action, but also how they are unavoidably compromised in the intensely politicized environment of active conflict (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1996). Conflict resolvers have to be aware of this, while nevertheless continuing to search for an effective and internationally legitimate antidote to the untold misery inflicted on so many by ongoing war.
In response to such challenges, the search for a doctrine for third-generation peacekeeping begins from the prior question: can there be any role for conflict resolution activities, or indeed for UN peace-
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
keeping, in these circumstances? May it not even be counter-productive? Providing a negative response to these questions, a series of highly critical accounts appeared in the academic literature from the mid-1990s, questioning both the efficacy of UN peacekeeping and the conflict resolution model with which it was associated.
From one direction came criticism of the ineffectiveness of impartial and non-forcible intervention in war zones (Rieff, 1994). The alternatives of either letting the conflicts 'burn themselves out' or of intervening decisively on one side were seen as better options (Luttwak, 1999; Betts, 1994). From the other direction, as noted in chapter 1, came criticism of the inappropriateness of what were seen to be attempts to impose western liberal democratic models, together with associated conflict resolution assumptions, behind which lurked the self-interest of powerful intervening countries (Clapham, 1996b). The requirement for an effective and internationally legitimate third generation of peacekeeping had to meet both these criticisms, somehow combining greater military robustness with commitment to genuine international norms. We can illustrate the attempt to do this by way of two examples. The key UN initiative has been the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, the Brahimi Report (2000). However, the shift in peacekeeping doctrine was initiated from both 'lessons learned' within the Department of Peacekeeping Operations of the UN, and also by the national defence academies of countries that had participated in the larger-scale deployments in the 1990s, and that would no longer agree to send their military forces into conflicts for which they are inadequately prepared and supported. This new way of thinking can be exemplified by looking first at the development of British peacekeeping doctrine.
The British military refers to this new form of peacekeeping as 'peace support operations' (PSO). A PSO is defined as:
An operation that impartially makes use of diplomatic, civil and military means, normally in pursuit of United Nations Charter purposes and principles, to restore or maintain peace. Such operations may include conflict prevention, peacemaking, peace enforcement, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and/or humanitarian operations. (UK, Ministry of Defence, 2004:103)
And here is the most recent UK PSO doctrine statement on The Military Contribution to Peace Support Operations (May 2004):
For the foreseeable future United Kingdom (UK) foreign policy is likely to underpin its conflict prevention activities with the regeneration or sustainment of fragile states. The UK government usually undertakes such operations as part of United Nations (UN) led operations or as part of multilateral endeavours, occasionally it undertakes unilateral
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping
143
actions as in Sierra Leone in 2000. Hie generic title of Peace Support Operations (PSOs) is given by the military to these activities. Typically, the UK's Armed Forces are given responsibility for preventing or suppressing any conflict so that others can undertake activities that will alleviate the immediate symptoms of a conflict and/or a fragile state. Usually, there are associated activities to ensure stability in the long term. (Ibid: 101)
Operational planning no longer separates combat operations from 'operations other than war' (OOTW), but envisages use of military capabilities across the full 'spectrum of tension' from traditional peacekeeping duties through to combat against spoilers and enemies of the peace. At the tactical level, 'where action actually takes place' and formation and unit commanders 'engage directly with adversaries, armed factions and the civil population', there is a similar - and very demanding - requirement to combine combat skills with those of negotiation, mediation and consent-generation. Tire aim of the new doctrine is to create peacekeeping operations that are sufficiently flexible, robust, combat-ready and sensitive to the overall peace-support purpose of the mission:
In PSO, the desired strategic effect, or intent, is to uphold international peace and security by resolving conflicts by means of prevention, conciliation, deterrence, containment or stabilisation. (Ibid.: 3, sect. 3)
Peace support operations can thus be seen to be distinct from traditional UN peacekeeping on the one hand, and traditional war-fighting on the other (see table 6.3).
The PSO concept has, with variations, been embraced by an ever-increasing portion of the international military community, including NATO, and has consequently become the doctrinal basis for the launching of many modern peacekeeping operations. It is arguable that the deployment of KFOR in Kosovo was an early example of the
Traditional peacekeeping
Peace support operations
. if. ___"_,_L_~.
Universal consent
Political neutrality between.. main conflict parties
Impartiality in fulfilling mandate
Non-use of force except in self-defence
Internationalmandate-; : -
General consent of target • -.. populations, not:of-spoilers
No neutrality if a conflict : party, opposes the mandate
Impartiality in fulfilling mandate
Full spectrum of force
needed to fulfil mandate, r,-..
NormallyupholdUNGharter- ■ purposes and principles
No consent Mo neutrality •No impartiality-Full spectrum of; force
National interest;
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Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping 145
application of this strategy. Certainly, the use of Australian forces to lead the peace operation in East Timor in 1999 is a further example, as was the reinforcement of UN forces in Sierra Leone by British forces in the summer of 2000.
Turning now to the Brahimi Report concerning the future of UN peacekeeping, this lesson has been taken on board. The report was produced by a panel convened by Kofi Annan and chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Foreign Minister of Algeria. The panel published its findings in August 2000, laying out a wide-ranging set of recommendations for increasing the United Nations capacity for peace operations. The aim is to avoid the failures of the past by preparing forces in a more calculated way during the pre-deployment phase, and by more realistically appraising the level of forces and resources needed to achieve mandate objectives. The report recommends that forces must only be deployed if and when they have been given realistic and achievable mandates, and only when it is clear that they will be provided with the resources necessary to achieve those mandate objectives. In a clear intention to avoid the weaknesses of the second-generation model which did so much to undermine the credibility of the international organization, Brahimi insisted on the case for robust peacekeeping:
No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of UN peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor.. . . Once deployed, United Nations peacekeepers must be able to carry out their mandate professionally and successfully. This means that United Nations military units must be capable of defending themselves, other mission components and the mission's mandate. Rules of engagement should be sufficiently robust and not force United Nations contingents to cede the initiative to their attackers. This means, in turn, that the Secretariat must not apply best-case planning assumptions to situations where the local actors have historically exhibited worst case behaviour. It means that mandates should specify an operation's authority to use force. It means bigger forces, better equipped and more costly but able to be a credible deterrent. In particular, United Nations forces for complex operations should be afforded the field intelligence and other capabilities needed to mount an effective defence against violent challengers. (Brahimi Report, 2000: x)
The purpose of this robust force structure is not as an end in itself, but to protect a continuum of activity from protecting people from harm to peacebuilding and conflict prevention. From the perspective of conflict resolution, there are several relevant structural changes that need to be made. The report recommends, for instance, that civilian police and human rights experts become better integrated into the peacekeeping mechanism. It also calls for more effective and integrated civilian roles in order to effectively augment and develop the
military security function and, at the same time, to properly address the unique challenges of post-conflict peacebuilding.
To strengthen this process, the report supported efforts to create a pilot Peacebuilding Unit within the UN Department for Political Affairs, and recommended that this unit should be fully funded, subject to a positive evaluation of the pilot programmes. This proposal marks a new and welcome recognition that the civilian elements of peacekeeping operations, which are vital to the prospect of a long-term sustainability of the peace process, need to be adequately resourced, integrated and prepared. In terms of practice in the field, the UN has established peacebuilding support offices (PBSOs) in the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Tajikistan on a pilot basis. These offices are designed to coordinate peacebuilding activities in the field by working with both governments and non-governmental parties and complementing ongoing UN development activities.
Responses to Brahimi have varied. For example, the International Peace Academy has conducted a series of regional dialogues on the Brahimi Report based on meetings in London (Europe), Johannesburg (Africa), Singapore (Asia) and Buenos Aires (Latin America). In summary, they reported that in both Africa and Europe the need for more robust peacekeeping mandates, enabling peacekeepers to deal with spoilers, was strongly supported. The idea of developing better-trained and better-equipped regional or even continental peacekeeping forces in Africa was also supported, with European contributors recognizing a role in supporting this capacity-building. However, in part to overcome suspicions of western interference in the affairs of the countries of the South, participants in the African, Asian and Latin-American dialogues expressed the need:
to make peace-building a focus of peacekeeping activities and for greater local ownership of the processes of peace-building. The UN cannot deliver sustainable outcomes without utilizing the knowledge and experience of local and regional actors. Training and capacity building for local civil society actors, including a large proportion of women, should therefore be a priority. Emphasis should be on building the capacity for local governance, as in the later stages of the East Timor mission, rather than on deploying a vast number of international staff of highly uneven quality. (International Peace Academy, 2001)
This requirement is echoed in a UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) summary of lessons learned from a series of post-mission reports, which identified the support of the local population, sensitivity to cultural context and the need to build inclusive peace constituencies as essential prerequisites for any successful peacekeeping operation (see box 6.1). This is a theme that is looked at further in chapter 9.
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Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping 147
Box 6.1 Conflict resolution, peacekeeping and the local community
The local population should perceive the mission and its staff as.being impartial. When the parties to a conflict attempt to use the mission or some of its staff to their own advantage, as they often do, the mission and its information component must be able to maintain and : project its image of impartiality and neutrality. The effort to maintain impartiality, however, must not promote inaction. On the contrary, peacekeepers, must discharge their tasks firmly and objectively.
The United Nations must also demonstrate a commitment to the principles of transparency: and accountability initsactivities. It must not be perceived as: being 'above the law".     : ; Designating an ombudsman, or a focal point, to consider the grievances ofthe local population against the mission or its staff could be considered.
Respect for thecultural traditions and social mores ofthe local population, is an important;, part of maintaining good relations with the local population. Briefings on history, culture,,:,, and other aspects of life of the host country should be conducted forall staff,-: :; :::;;;,:,;; Efforts at peace-building-such as assistance in the restoration of basiccivie servicesand :.:;,.: support in rehabilitation and reconstruction, of a devastated country-can ^in :: effective way of winning overthe local papulation and increasing grassroots support: for the operation. :
Inits peacekeeping andpeacebuilding.efforts,.the operation isbestadvised to work-::::::;.-: thrdughexisting localauthorities-and.community elders and its peace initiatives mustbe closely tailored to indigenous practices of conflict management; provided these do not;::::::: contradict accepted international standards of human rights and humanitarian law. However; in areas: of recentand: ongoing conflict, the opera tiommust exer.cisegreat- .::..::::;-: caution irvidentifying localcommunity leaders, since it is often unclear astowho. actually: ~ represents the community: B.ue:io strife, population displacements and other.extenuating::;: circumstances, traditional societal.patterns and roles may have become blurred orihave:;;:;:: submerged under new, oftenmilitaristic, hierarchies.
As peacekeeping: missions become more multifaceted, peacebuildingisbecomingan integralpartof their activities: Emphasis should be:placed on support of: processes:   ;7.:.:-; and institutions that reinforce reconciliation between warring parties and reconstruction: of economic and social: infrastructure, so thatonce the missionpulls out it does not-:,:.;.-:..: leave behinda vacuum; buta foundation of.peace and development that the country::.:;:.;.;;.:.: can build on.
The United Nations must gear, the composition of itS:peacekeeping forces: to-the new and:; Changing role theyare expectedto play.The force could consist of mainlytightingtroops :;:;
when theimperative is maintenance ofpeace and security. This can bexhanged   -.......--
gradually, when: theemphasis otthe mission has changed topeacesuppo.rt.and-::: -:-;;-;.-::: peacebuilding, to include more engineering or other units that could assist in the reconstruction of the country.
Discretionary funds for;peaeebuildingshould be madeavailabletotheSRSG (Special::::::: : Representative'of the Secretary-General] to enhancetheSRSG's leveragewiththelocal.;:::::: authorities'and the humanitarian: community. The missioncould usethese;fundsforquicks:: impact projects and infrastructure repairs, among other things.
An integral: part oTUnited Nationspeacekeeping should bethepromotion oKindirect-::. peace-buildingVi-e. the resurredionofa;web: of non-governmental civic, professional,;;;,: :;: business and other associations. .Duringthe liquidation of-.an operation, consideration should be given to. whatresour-ces;;;:.: could be left behind in the country to assist in post-conflict peacebuilding.
: : Source: Multidisriplinary Peacekeeping: Lessons From Recent Experience.. :: Lessons Learned Unit, DPKO website, ^http;//www.un.org./Depts/dpka/:,;:;
dpko/index.asp.
In this section we acknowledge the central criticism that third-generation peacekeeping from a conflict resolution perspective may be an attempt to combine what cannot be combined - greater military robustness with the service of genuinely cosmopolitan international norms. The key danger is that those with the military capacity will take on such intervention roles outside the ambit of the United Nations, and will thereby forfeit the international legitimacy upon which such operations in the end depend. Much of the debate about the evaluation of peacekeeping has been at the level of policy and operational aspects, with more than three hundred recommendations for reform being made in a series of major Jin de siecle assessments and reports published in 2000. In the midst of this detail, commentators like Peou (2003) have suggested that this 'cult of policy relevance' has meant a failure to address the more fundamental critiques of peacekeeping pitched at the meta-theoretical level. Examined like this, third-generation peacekeeping can be understood as a component of a broader and emancipatory theoretical framework centred on the idea of collective human security, in turn situated within emergent institutions and processes of global cosmopolitan governance.
In relation to the UN, the theory was announced in the Agenda for Peace, and developed more recently in the Millennium Report, We The Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the Twenty First Century under the leadership of Kofi Annan (United Nations, 2000). The 2000 Millennium Report was organized around the themes of the quest for freedom from fear (through conflict management and resolution), freedom from want (through economic development and growth) and sustaining the future (through careful husbanding of the earth's resources and ecosystem). According to Thakur, freedom from fear was central to the other two elements in Kofi Annan's trinity of objectives for the UN in the new century, putting peacekeeping and peacebuilding 'at the cutting edge of the UN's core function in the contemporary world' (Thakur, 2001: 117). So the normative basis for all this was the claim that a new security paradigm, collective human security, was emerging which gave sense, value and direction to the mission of the UN in the twenty-first century, and third-generation peacekeeping was integral to it. Similar conclusions were reached by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), initiated by the government of Canada at the UN General Assembly in September 2000 (see box 6.2)
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Box 6.2 Human security
The meaning and scope of the concept of security have become much broader since the UN Charter was signed in 1945. Human security means the security of people - their physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their dignity and worth as human beings, and the protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms: The growrngrecognition worldwide that" concepts of security must include people as well as states has marked an important shift in international thinking during the past decade. Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself put the issue of human security at the centre of the currentdebate, when in his statement to the 54th session of the General Assembly he announced his intention to 'address the prospects for human security and intervention in the new century'.
The traditional, narrow perception of security leaves out the most elementary and legitimate concerns of ordinary people regarding security in their daily lives; It also diverts enormous amounts of national wealth and human resources into armaments and armed forces, while countries fail to protect their citizens from chronic insecurities of hunger, disease, inadequate shelter, crime, unemployment, social conflict and environmental hazard. When rape is used as an instrument of war and ethnic cleansing, when thousands are killed by floods resulting from a ravaged countryside and when citizens are killed by their own security forces, then it is entirely insufficient to think of security in terms of national or territorial security alone. The concept of human security can and does embrace such diverse circumstances.
Source: ICISS, 2001:15
Chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, the ICISS was formed in an attempt to answer the crucial question posed by Kofi Annan at the UN General Assembly in 1999 and again in 2000:
[i]f humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity? (ICISS, 2001: vii)
The outcome of their investigation was to suggest a way of moving forward in the sovereignty/intervention debate by suggesting the use of the term 'responsibility to protect' (rather than the 'right to humanitarian intervention'). This was intended to provide a clearer way forward for the international community in pursuit of international human rights norms and the human security agenda. The principles that are seen to guide military intervention prioritize international legitimacy for the action, and the operational criteria are consonant with third-generation peacekeeping (or PSO) thinking.
The preoccupation with the reform of UN peacekeeping outlined above has been associated with a new phase of expansion in the new millennium, and at times sizeable and ambitious UN operations
have been mounted. There has been a corresponding recovery in the number of UN peacekeepers. By 2001, the number of military and police personnel serving with UN peacekeeping missions, for example, had risen to 47,800 (see table 6.2 for comparison). By 2004 the number had risen again to more than 60,000 peacekeepers (the large majority of these from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana and India) deployed in sixteen missions. Of these sixteen, seven were new missions deployed between 1999 and 2004i in the DR Congo (MONUC, 1999), Eritrea-Ethiopia (UNMEE, 2000), East Timor (Timor Leste) (UNMISET, 2002), Liberia (UNMIL, 2003), Burundi (ONUB, 2004), Ivory Coast (UNOCI, 2004) and Haiti (MINUSTAH, 2004). All of these are sizeable missions with complex mandates and authorized with enforcement powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
While this expansion suggests that peacekeeping remains a vital instrument in pursuing conflict resolution goals internationally, the problem is that in the context of the human security agenda outlined above, and in the light of Security Council Resolution 1296 (2000), which effectively confirmed that the deliberate targeting of civilians in armed conflict and the denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations in war zones constituted a threat to international peace and security, the potential demands on the duty to protect overwhelms the capacity of the UN to act. Robust peacekeeping missions are now being mounted, not under UN command, but by a small number of regional security organizations and coalitions of the willing and capable: such as NATO forces in Bosnia and Kosovo providing enforcement capacity (IFOR, SFOR and KFOR); Nigerian peacekeeping forces (ECOMOG); and a British-led MAT (International Military Advisory Team) in Sierra Leone, working alongside but independently of the UNAMSIL force; and the Australian military providing the leadership of the force in East Timor (INTERFET/ UNTAET).
Chandler notes the danger of this subcontracting of peacekeeping:
The transformation of the UN's peacekeeping role to that of the civilian rather than military tasks of peace operations will confirm the position of the UN as the handmaiden to NATO . . . the pre-eminent 'coalition of the willing', rather than the authorizing authority. While NATO powers will have an increasingly free hand to define the limits of sovereignty in the non-Western world, and intervene when they consider it necessary, the UN will have the task of cleaning up afterwards and will have to take responsibility for the unrealistic expectations raised by the growing internationalization of conflict situations. (2001:17)
The way in which third-generation peacekeeping is in flux remains unclear. From early manifestations of third-generation peacekeeping we can identify two variants of the model. First, unilateral action by a
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1
. i
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping 151
nation, grouping of nations or a regional security organization, justifying intervention through the duty to protect principle {NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo), but subsequently and retrospectively gaining UN legitimacy. Second, the re-enforcement of an existing UN mission by more robust military forces under the command of a national centre, either working alongside the mission while independent of it, or providing its main command component (the British in Sierra Leone). We illustrate each of these below.
Third-generation peacekeeping in Kosovo
The intervention in Kosovo initially took the form of air strikes against Serbian forces in Kosovo and Serbia by NATO forces, while the post-conflict phase was entrusted to the UN with the peacekeeping force still under NATO command, but subsequently recognized by the UN. In June 1999, following an agreement between NATO and the Yugoslav army, and a second one with the Yugoslav government brokered by EU and Russian special envoys, NATO called off its air strikes. Concurrently, the UN Security Council announced its decision to deploy an international civil and security presence in Kosovo under UN auspices. ~v
This resolution to the conflict was to be based on the following principles, adopted on 6 May by the Foreign Ministers of the G8:
• an immediate and verifiable end to violence and repression;
• the withdrawal of all military, police and paramilitary forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY);
• the deployment of an effective international and security presence, with substantial NATO participation and under a unified command;
• the safe return of all refugees;
• initiation of a political process to provide for self-government and for the demilitarization of the KLA;
• a comprehensive effort towards economic development of the crisis region.
The security force, KFOR, authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and commanded by NATO's North Atlantic Council, entered Kosovo on 12 June 1999. The Security Council authorized the Secretary-General to establish an interim civilian administration in the region. By mid-July 1999, the Secretary-General presented a comprehensive framework for the work of what was to become known as the
United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). UNMIK was given authority in Kosovo over all legislative and executive powers, as well as for the . I administration of the judiciary. Its work was to be integrated into five
phases, and encompassed support for returning refugees, the restora-:! tion of public services (including health, education and social services),
| the deployment of civilian police (CIVPOL), the development of an
j economic recovery plan and the development of stable institutions for
' I the promotion of democratic and autonomous self-government.
:i UNMIK was divided into four sections, each of them involved in the
civilian aspects of restoring peace. These sections are known as the 'four pillars'. Pillar One consists of the civilian administration ■ i under UN direction; Pillar Two carries out humanitarian assistance
\ led by UNHCR; Pillar Three is concerned with democratization and
| institution-building led by the Organization for Security and
! Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); and Pillar Four, led by the European
1 Union, is charged with economic reconstruction.
This structure serves as a good example of just how a coalition of organizations is working to implement the broader goals of conflict resolution and peacebtiilding. While it is still too early to comment on how well this project in Kosovo will work, it does seem clear that military interventions alone do not in themselves restore peace. We must, therefore, come to understand, first, how to mobilize and utilize local and international resources effectively for peacekeeping and peacebuilding under the auspices of the UN and/or other regional organizations working in partnership with the UN. Second, we must find more effective ways to improve and coordinate links between the control and containment of violence in war-tom regions (the security and policing function) and the development of processes whereby trust and cooperation can be sustained or restored and peacebuilding activities realistically supported (the civilian conflict resolution function). These issues are taken up again in chapters 8 and 9.
Third-generation peacekeeping in Sierra Leone
British involvement following the near collapse of the UN Mission in j Sierra Leone presented an early example of UK PSO doctrine in practice.
The UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) was deployed to help imple-I ment the 1999 Lome Peace Agreement between Sierra Leonean warring
i parties. The UN force was mandated to assist in the demobilization of
! armed groups, to monitor adherence to an agreed ceasefire, and even-
tually to provide electoral support towards establishing a lasting peace. However, there was a strong likelihood of violent non-compliance by some of the parties, notably the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), not least due to acknowledged flaws in the Lome agreement. Indeed, the
T
152 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
RUF duly violated the ceasefire, continued to abuse human rights and opposed demobilization. Ultimately, widespread fighting resumed, with which UNAMSIL proved unable to cope, resulting in the seizure of 500 of its peacekeepers by RUF militias.
According to Willdnson (2000:18), some of UNAMSIL's fundamental shortcomings included:
• a consensual peacekeeping and not peace enforcement mandate;
• poorly equipped and trained troops;
• the lack of a 'lead nation' to coordinate command and control structures;
» inadequate support from the Department of Peace-keeping Operations (DPKO) at UN Headquarters in New York.
Doctrinal confusion was a major contributing factor in UNAMSIL's problems. The operational environment clearly demanded an enforcement capability, but, despite UNAMSIL's Chapter VII mandate, agreement over such a robust approach within the UN system has proved much harder to achieve and many of the original troop-contributing countries (TCCs) to UNAMSIL did not, in fact, subscribe to PSO doctrine. An effective enforcement capacity requires a common 'doctrine, standard operating procedures, joint and combined operational planning and common training standards and experience' amongst TCCs, which was not the case in Sierra Leone. In May 2000 the RUF took 500 UN peacekeepers hostage. At the time of the kidnappings, UNAMSIL was a disparate collection of contingents from more than thirty countries, with no consistent operational infrastructure. Moreover, they arrived piecemeal and many had neither been trained nor equipped to cope with the rigours of enforcement. The British army had also learned that enforcement requires an accomplished military formation based on the lead-nation concept. Finally, UNAMSIL's operational support was supplied by planning capacity within the DPKO in New York, whose already insufficient capability had been further eroded by the withdrawal of 'gratis' officers for political reasons by the General Assembly in 1999.
UK PSO doctrine highlights three fundamental features of what was required to support peace in Sierra Leone effectively:
1 The threat to peace was multidimensional, demanding a multifunctional political approach, including national and regional diplomatic activities, military initiatives, humanitarian assistance and economic and development programmes.
2 The volatility of operational environment meant that it was injudicious to take parties' commitments at face value.
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping 153
3 As these same parties only appeared to respect the use offeree, so only an enforcement-capable force could establish the necessary stability to facilitate peacebuilding.
The UK's commitment of a balanced and capable combat force to assist UNAMSIL enabled the conduct of operations across the entire PSO spectrum (Wilkinson, 2000). UK intervention at such a critical juncture in Sierra Leone ultimately saved both the mission arid the peace process. Bernath and Nyce (2002) describe how UNAMSIL was initially doomed until after the hostage crisis, which in fact spurred the UK and the international community not to ailow another peacekeeping failure. In May 2000 UK forces were landed to evacuate UK citizens, to secure the airport for UN personnel, and subsequently to release eleven British soldiers taken hostage by rebel militias in August 2000. This decision to take robust action in defence of the peace process was linked to all of the subsequent success factors associated with the UN's peacemaking efforts in Sierra Leone (Langholtz et al., eds, 2002). Indeed, British interest in Sierra Leone and its position as a permanent member of the Security Council was likely to have been a major catalyst in the Council's agreement to expand UNAMSIL's strength to 17,500. The depth of the UK's contribution to UNAMSIL was summed up by Defence Minister Hoon, who declared that the UK was 'to all intents and purposes running the day-to-day operation of UN forces'. Although the UN and the wider international community were grateful for the UK input, there was some discontent that the UK had not been prepared to place the majority of its troops within UNAMSIL's command and control structure. The British troops' rescue of UNAMSIL, and their combined success in getting the peace process back on track, ultimately enabling 'free and fair' elections to return President Kabbah to power the following year, suggests the effectiveness of UK PSO doctrine in practice.
In chapter 1 we announced as one of the leitmotifs of this book the current debates within the conflict resolution field across the containment, settlement, transformation spectrum. We conclude this chapter by illustrating this in relation to peacekeeping.2 Excellent summaries of the transformationist critique can be found in Bellamy and Williams, eds (2004) and in Bellamy et al. (2004).
We noted in chapter 1 how the transformationist agenda usually begins by invoking Cox's distinction between conservative problem-solving theory and radical critical theory (1981). It then classes most existing practice under the former, criticizing it as objectivist,
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
non-reflexive and instrumentalist. It is seen to lack awareness of its own epistemological and ontological assumptions, condemned to reproduce existing power imbalances and inequalities even if it thinks that it is acting impartially. In contrast, radical critical theory sees its own stance as constructivist, reflexive and normative, conscious of the epistemological and ontological institutions and discourses that underpin existing exclusions, and therefore able to serve genuinely emancipatory purposes (Fetherston, in Woodhouse and Ramsbotham, eds, 2000:190-218).
The advantages of the transformationist approach are self-evident in this account. Awareness of the normative underpinnings of existing power structures makes it possible to challenge them in the name of those who are excluded and exploited, thus opening up the possibility of a genuinely emancipatory agenda whose aim is to eliminate human insecurity. This casts a critical light on the role of powerful stabilization forces operating on the margins of or outside the UN, questions the effect of traditional peacekeeping within the existing global order, and requires the new doctrine of peace support operations to become more aware of its own assumptions. It insists that a critical peacekeeping agenda must be set within wider policy approaches that question existing practice in security, development and governance.
Nevertheless, despite critiques of this kind, newer UN operations such as those in Sierra Leone and in East Timor also met the requirements called for by Brahimi in being robust, complex and multidimensional operations. Thus within both the transformationist peacekeeping critique, and amongst those developing doctrine relating to peace support operations, analysts have suggested that a constructive and emancipatory role for peacekeeping may be fashioned both from the continued application of reforms coming out of the Brahimi process, and from the opening of theory and policy to the reflexive insights of critical theory (Bellamy and Williams, eds, 2004: 183). Suggested changes range" across the ideas that these should be international civilian peacekeepers (non-military peacekeeping); that peacekeepers should be released from an overly state-centric control system; that they should be made 'answerable to a more transparent, democratic and accountable institutional arrangement' based on 'a permanent military volunteer force recruited directly among individuals predisposed to cosmopolitan rather than patriotic values' (post-Westphalian or democratic peacekeeping); and that 'in so far as a goal of transformation is to remove the injustices that give rise to conflict, the need for military-civilian interventions might be expected to fade' (Pugh, in Bellamy and Williams, eds, 2004: 53).
The types of peacekeeping associated with the four main theoretical perspectives identified above are outlined in table 6.4, where modes of
Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping 155
1 2_____3_ _f_
Cosmopolitan..
;UfJ:efhefgency;; peace sen-ice
Highmilitary/;
high civilian u'fCR capacity
{ peacekeeping are linked with both the theoretical perspectives and
"j with the levels of intended conflict resolution (CR) capacity built into
the model.
We suggest that the current debate is now between realists who reject the whole concept of enhanced UN peacekeeping, phiralists who i are only prepared to countenance traditional first-generation peace-
keeping, the pragmatic solidarists who favour the incremental development of existing arrangements and those transformationists who [ argue for enhanced mulitidimensonal UN rapid reaction capability,
■ which combines military robustness with civilian peacebuilding
• expertise, including sophisticated conflict resolution capacity
j (Langille et al., 1995; Kinloch, 1996; Langille, 2000; Hansen et al., 2004).
r We apply the term 'cosmopolitan' to the transformationist end of the
spectrum for reasons which are elaborated (Held, 2004; Woodhouse | and Ramsbotham, 2005). Needless to say, critics of this idea see it as
\ inappropriate if controlled by an as yet unreformed United Nations. In
the final part of this chapter we explore the implications for the development of peacekeeping emerging from perspectives linked with i columns 3 and 4 in table 6.4.
' In the 1990s a series of initiatives were suggested by the pragmatists.
For example, a 'Friends of Rapid Deployment' group worked with the ! DPKO to secure support for developing a rapidly deployable mission
headquarters (RDMHQ). Since 1994 a DPKO team has organized the UN j Stand-by Arrangement System (UNSAS) to expand the quality and quan-
! tity of resources that member states might provide. To complement
: this arrangement, the Danish government, in cooperation with thir-
j teen regular troop contributors, organized a multinational Stand-by
| High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG). Further studies were conducted by
! governments keen to move the concept on. The December 2004 Report
of the UN High Level Panel included proposals along these lines:
Deploying military capacities - for peacekeeping as well as peace enforcement - has proved to be a valuable tool in ending wars and helping to secure States in their aftermath. But the total global supply
Theory Practice .
CR capacity
Quasi-realist
Stabilization forces •
Zero or low CR capacity
Pluralist......
Traditional peacekeeping
Limited passive CR capacity
Solidarist
Enhanced peace support: operations
High military/ low civilian CRcapacity
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
of available peacekeepers is running dangerously low. Just to do an adequate job of keeping the peace in existing conflicts would require almost doubling the number of peacekeepers around the world. The developed States have particular responsibilities to do more to transform their armies into units suitable for deployment to peace operations. And if we are to meet the challenges ahead, more States will have to place contingents on stand-by for UN purposes. (Executive Summary: 5)
At the same time, towards the more radical end of the spectrum, a number of national studies focused on attempts to define the measures necessary to institutionalize a permanent UN standing peacekeeping capability. In 1995 the government of the Netherlands issued A UN Rapid Deployment Brigade: A Preliminary Study, which argued that developing crises could only be met by dedicated units that were instantly deployable: 'the sooner an international "fire brigade" can turn out, the better the chance that the situation can be contained' (cited in Langille, 2000). The report recommended that, rather than develop the existing Stand-by Arrangements System, a permanent, rapidly deployable brigade would guarantee the immediate availability of troops when they were urgently needed.
Another report was issued by the government of Canada, which, in September 1995, presented the UN with a study entitled, Towards a Rapid Reaction Capability for the United Nations (cited in Langille, 2000). Among the elements deemed necessary were an early warning mechanism, an effective decision-making process, reliable transportation and infrastructure, logistical support, sufficient finances, and well-trained and equipped personnel. The final section of the report outlined the case for 'A UN Standing Emergency Group' composed of volunteer military, police and civilian elements (Canada Report, 1995: 60-3). In making the case for dedicated volunteers, who would be selected and then employed by the UN, the Canada Report acknowledged that, 'UN volunteers offer the best prospect of a completely reliable, well-trained rapid-reaction capability. Without the need to consult national authorities, the UN could cut response times significantly, and volunteers could be deployed within hours of a Security Council decision.... No matter how difficult this goal now seems, it deserves continued study, with a clear process for assessing its feasibility over the long term' (Canada Report, 1995:62). Further, it noted the establishment and costs of a UN Standing Emergency Group would warrant further consideration should the more pragmatic short-to-mid-term options (the existing arrangements) prove inadequate.
In many of these and similar proposals the assumption was that any rapid deployment capability should assume responsibility for the
|
':I Containing Violent Conflict: Peacekeeping :.! —-
initial stages of a peacekeeping mission and that the deployment should be both proactive and preventive (Langille, 2000).3
These ideas for a permanent UN capability, located at the 'visionary' end of the spectrum of policy options, echo the call made by Lester j Pearson in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech quoted at the head
.j of this chapter.4 This may seem to be a tall order given the overt hostil-
1 ity of the currently most powerful military power to any such idea, the
:| unwillingness to participate of a number of other countries, and the
;i suspicions harboured by many non-western states. But it is not an
j impossible aspiration. And the conflict transformationists who
■ espouse such a vision are both patient and persistent. Langille suggests
that the development of a UN Emergency Peace Service is no longer 'mission impossible', but an initiative that links and expands upon the work provided by the report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations (the I Brahimi Report), the ICISS report The Responsibility to Protect, earlier
j multinational efforts to enhance UN rapid deployment, the ongoing
j emphasis on the prevention of deadly conflict, and the recent estab-
lishment of an International Criminal Court. The development of a UN Emergency Peace Service, or of a mechanism similar to it, is then a logical progression of the idea of the collective human security agenda to which the UN is committed (see box 6.3). Linking up with the critical peacekeeping agenda discussed above, this does indeed require
Box 6.3 Proposal for a UN emergency peace service
The future roles and potential tasks of the new service should include the provision, of; reliable early warning with on-site technical reconnaissance; rapid deployment for preventive action and protection of civilians at risk; prompt start-up of diverse peace operations, including policing, peacebuilding and humanitarian assistance.
A UM Emergency Peace Servce must include a robust military composition; one capable of deterring belligerents, defending the mission, as well as civilians at risk. Notably, recent UN peace operations have included mandateswith authorization under Chapter VII for the limited use of force. While the proposed UN service would not be another 'force' for war-fighting, deployable military elements must have a capacity for modest enforcement to maintain security and the safety of people within its area of operations.
Three further requirements in the majority of recent UN operations are the prompt.provision of incentives to restore hope, useful services to    : ' address critical human needs and civilian police to maintain law and order. Even at the outset of a deployment; there will be a need for prompt disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, as well as conflict resolution teams, medical units;;peacebuildrng advisory teams and environmental : crisis response teams.:.
Source: Langille, 2002
158
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
new ways of thinking about the nature and roles of peacekeeping and
about the function of peace operations in the emerging global order. i As the critical theorists argue, in the end the touchstone should be to
develop forms of peacekeeping that serve, not primarily the interests j
of the powerful, but mainly the interests of what Edward Said called i
'the poor, the disadvantaged, the unrepresented, the voiceless, the |
powerless' (quoted in Bellamy and Williams, eds, 2004: 7). We will ' [
carry these ideas forward in Part II of this book. ![
■■!
Recommended reading
Bellamy et al. (2004): Goodwin (2005); Woodhouse and Ramsbotham (2000, 2005).
J i
i CBAPTSJR
7
Ending Violent Conflict:
^^e3.cem3.1dn^j v
Friends, comrades, and fellow South Africans. I greet you all, in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.
Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, li February 1990
I knew that the hand outstretched to me from the far siile-ofthe podium was the same hand that held the knife, that held the gun, the hand that gave the order to shoot, to kill. Of all the hands in the world, it was not the hand that I wanted or dreamed of touching. I would have liked to sign a peace agreement with Holland, or Luxembourg, or New Zealand. But there was no need to. That is why, on that podium, 1 stood as the representative of a nation that wants peace with the most bitter and odious of its foes. Yitzhak Rabin, Memoirs, 1996, with reference to shaking hands with Yasser Arafat in Washington on 13 September 1993
In this chapter we turn from the question of the role of conflict resolution in ongoing wars to the question of war endings. We will focus especially on efforts to bring armed conflicts to an end in the post-Cold War era, and the factors that have contributed to their success and failure. Having examined the nature and difficulties of ending violent conflict, we will move on to explore 'transformers' of conflict, and the place of de-escalation, pre-negotiations, mediation, negotiations and peace talks in ending violence and restoring peace. We illustrate these themes with examples of successful peace processes and of peace processes that have failed or coexisted uneasily with protracted conflict.
Conflict resolution is broader than conflict termination, and the relationship between conflict resolution and the ending of violent conflict is not necessarily direct. The root causes of conflict may persist without either war or a peace settlement doing anything to address them. Wars often generate additional conflicts, which add to and confuse the original issues. It is quite possible that efforts to resolve a conflict may not end a war, and efforts to end a war may not resolve the underlying conflict.
159
160
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking
161
How have major post-Cold War armed conflicts ended, and what are the obstacles to conflict resolution?
How major post-Cold War conflicts have ended
Although there have been significant cases of conflicts that have come to an end through peace agreements, this is not the normal pattern. More often, conflicts fizzle out, dropping below the thresholds that researchers used to classify them as armed conflicts. The underlying reasons for the conflict remain, and they are prone to break out again. This is consistent with the pattern of protracted social conflicts identified by Azar (see chapter 4). Between 1989 and the end of 1999. Wallensteen (2002b: 29) and his co-researchers counted a total of 110 armed conflicts; an additional 6 have been fought up to 2002x(Eriksson et aL, 2003). Of these 110, 75 had fallen below the threshold of 25 battle-deaths a year by 2000, but only 21 ended in peace agreements, 22 ended in victories and in 32 the conflict became dormant. Nevertheless the post-Cold War era has seen some significant peace agreements, as well as some less well known ones (see box 7.1).
What constitutes a war 'ending' is itself a tricky question. Wallensteen and his colleagues use a miminal definition that no armed violence occurred in the following year; but peace settlements often break down, and repeated violence occurs. Cambodia, which produced a 'comprehensive political settlement' in 1990, was again
Box 7.1 Peace agreements in armed conflicts, T988-2000
Ethiopia-Somalia 1988 Iran-Iraq 1988 . Namibia 1988 Morocco-Western Sahara 1989 Chad-Libya 1990 Nicaragua 1990 Lebanon 1990 CambadiaT991 Chad 1992 Mozambique 1992 El Salvador 1992 Djibouti 1994 India, Jharkand 1994 Bosnia-Croat Republic 1994 Mali, Air and Azawad 1995 ...
Niger, Air and Azawad 1995 Bosnia-Serb Republic 1995 Croatia-Eastern Slavonia 1995 Guatemala 1996 Liberia 1996
Philipines, Mindanao 1996 Tajikistan 1997
Cental African Republic 1997 Bangladesh, Chittagong Hill Tracts 1997
Northern Ireland, 1998 Guinea-Bissau 1998 Ecuador-Peru 1998 East Timor, 1999 Eritrea-Ethiopia 2000
Source: Wallensteen, 2002b
a high-intensity conflict in late 1996 (Schmid, 1997: 79). The Lome peace agreement of July 1999 in Sierra Leone broke down in renewed fighting which the intervention of UNAMSIL and the elections of May 2002 largely brought to an end. A war ending is not usually a precise moment in time, but a process. A violent conflict is over when a new political dispensation prevails, or the parties become reconciled, or a new conflict eclipses the first.1 Perhaps for; this reason, interstate peace agreements have been easier to conclude than intrastate agreements: only a quarter to a third of modern civil wars have been negotiated, whereas more than half of interstate wars have been (Pillar, 1983; Licklider, 1995).2 However, armed conflicts do end eventually, if we take a long enough time period (Licklider, 1995).
Licklider finds that civil wars ended by negotiated settlements are more likely to lead to the recurrence of armed conflicts than those ended by military victories; on the other hand, those ended by military victories are more likely to lead to genocide. His findings point to the need for continuing peacebuilding efforts to resolve the underlying conflicts.3
Obstacles to conflict resolution
Chapter 4 has indicated some of the reasons why contemporary international-social conflicts are so hard to end. Sources of conflict, which usually persist in intensified form into the ensuing war, were identified at international, state and societal levels, and were also located in the factional interests of elites and individuals. To these are added the destructive processes and vested interests engendered by the war itself, as described in chapter 6. The economic destruction wrought by wars makes societies more likely to suffer war again (Collier et al., 2003). Violence spawns a host of groups who benefit directly from its continuation. Soldiers become dependent on warfare as a way of life, and warlords on the economic resources and revenue they can control (King, 1997: 37; Berdal and Keen, 1998). Even in low-intensity conflicts, protagonists may depend, economically or psychologically, on the continuation of the conflict, such as the people in Belfast who sustain paramilitary operations through protection rackets. Leaders who have become closely identified with pursuing the conflict may risk prosecution, overthrow or even death once the war is over, and have strong incentives for intransigence (for example, Karadzic in Bosnia, Savimbi in Angola, Vellupillai Probhakaran in Sri Lanka). Local and regional party officials or military officers who have made their careers in the conflict may develop a stake in its continuation (Sisk, 1997:84). For such protagonists, peace may bring loss of role and status, and thus directly threaten their interests (King, 1997).
162 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
It would be easy to draw the conclusion that conflict resolution is not possible, and that political groups, like nations, will fight to the death to achieve their ends. However, we need to keep the obstacles in proportion. Most violent conflicts impose massive costs on the societies concerned, and so there is usually a large segment of the population which will benefit from the conflict ending. This is a shared interest across the conflicting communities, affecting security and economic welfare. Moderate politicians and constituencies, who may have been silenced or displaced by the climate of violence, will be keen to re-establish normal politics. Ordinary people will welcome a return to peace and wish to put the distress of war behind them. There is, therefore, a large reservoir of potential support that peacemakers should be able to foster.
We can point to a number of cases where conflicts have been settled by negotiation: examples include the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the ending of the internal conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the settlements in Mozambique and Namibia and the Ta'if Accord which brought the civil war in Lebanon to an end. Given political vision, engaged peacemakers, moderation and the right conditions, conflicts can be brought to a negotiated end. It is, therefore, worth trying to identify the ingredients of an effective conflict resolution approach, and the conditions under which attempts to end conflict are likely to succeed.
In looking at the scope for conflict resolution in ending violent conflict, we will follow Vayrynen in adopting a broad approach which recognizes the fluidity of the conflict process. Conflicts are inherently dynamic and conflict resolution has to engage with a complex of shifting relations:
The bulk of conflict theory regards the issues, actors and interests as given and on that basis makes efforts to find a solution to mitigate or eliminate contradictions between them. Yet the issues, actors and interests change over time as a consequence of the social, economic and political dynamics of societies. Even if we deal with non-structural aspects of conflicts, such as actor preferences, the assumption of stability, usually made in the game theoretic approach to conflict studies, is unwarranted. New situational factors, learning experiences, interaction with the adversary and other influences caution against taking actor preferences as given. (Vayrynen, ed., 1991:4)
The requirements are best seen as a series of necessary transformations in the elements which would otherwise sustain ongoing violence and war.
Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking 163
; Vayrynen (ed., 1991) identifies a number of ways in which conflict
> transformation takes place. His ideas complement those of Galtung
\ (1984, 1989, 1996, 2004), who has developed his views on the resolu-
; tion of inter-party and intra-party conflicts, in their structural, attitu-
■ dinal and behavioural aspects, into a full theory of non-violent conflict 1          transformation. From these sources, and informed by Burton, Azar,
Curie and the related theorists mentioned in chapter 2, we outline five \ generic transformers of protracted conflict which correspond to the
\ outline framework for the analysis of contemporary conflict offered in
S chapter 4.
First, context transformation. Conflicts are embedded in a social, regional and international context, which is often critical to their continuation. Changes in the context may sometimes have more \ dramatic effects than changes within the parties or in their relation-
ships. Tile end of the Cold War is the prime recent context transformation which has unlocked protracted conflicts in Southern Africa, Central America and elsewhere. Local conflicts which are fuelled by global forces may not be resolvable at the local level without changing the structures or policies which have produced them.4
Second, structural transformation. The conflict structure is the set of actors and incompatible goals or relationships which constitutes the I conflict. If the root causes of the conflict lie in the structure of rela-
tionships within which the parties operate, then a transformation of s this structure is necessary to resolve the conflict. In asymmetric
\ conflicts, for example, structural transformation entails a change in
the relationship between the dominant and weaker party. [ Empowerment of the weaker side (for example through international
support or recognition or mediation) is one way this can be achieved. Another is dissociation - withdrawal from unbalanced relationships,
■ as for example in the Kosovar Albanians' decision to boycott the elections in Serbia and set up a 'shadow state'.
Third, actor transformation. Parties may have to redefine directions, abandon or modify cherished goals, and adopt radically different perspectives. This may come about through a change of actor, a change . of leadership, a change in the constituency of the leader, or adoption
of new goals, values or beliefs. Transformation of intra-party conflicts | may be crucial to the resolution of inter-party conflict. Changes of
[ leadership may precipitate change in protracted conflicts. Changes in
i the circumstances and interests of the constituency a party represents
f also transform conflicts, even if such changes in the constituency take
i place gradually and out of view. Splitting of parties and formation of
new parties are examples of actor transformations.
Fourth, issue transformation. Conflicts are defined by the conflicting positions parties take on issues. When they change their positions, or
164
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking
165
when issues lose salience or new ones arise, the conflict is trans- * formed. Changes of position are closely related to changes of interest j and changes of goals, and hence to actor transformation, and also to 1 the context and structure of the conflict. Refraining the issues may | open the way to settlements.
Fifth, personal and group transformation. For Adam Curie, this is at the heart of change.5 The former guerrilla leader, committed to victory j through any means, becomes the unifying national leader, offering f reconciliation; the leader of an oppressive government decides to accept I his opponents into the government. Excruciating suffering leacjs in j time through mourning and healing to new life (Montville, 1993).  \ i
Transformations of this kind do not necessarily move in a benign |' direction. It is characteristic of conflicts that they intensify and widen, \ power passes from moderate to more extreme leaders, violence intensi- | fies and restraint and moderation wither. These five types of transformation are useful, however, as a framework for analysing steps toward conflict resolution and for thinking about interventions in conflict.
The middle three transformers (structure, actor, issue), correspond to the conflict-level factors identified in our typology of conflict causes in chapter 4: context transformation corresponds to the global, : regional and state levels, and individual and group transformation to the individual-elite level. |
In many cultures conflicts are explained as 'tangles' of contradic- t tory claims that must be unravelled. In Central America, the phrase -; 'we are all entangled', as in a fisherman's net, best describes the [ concept of conflict, and the experience of conflict is 'enredado' (to be \ tangled or caught in a net) (Duffey, 1998). At the root of conflict is a I knot of problematic relationships, conflicting interests and differing ; world-views. Undoing this knot is a painstaking process. Success [ depends on how the knot has been tied and the sequencing of the untying. The timing and coordination of the transformers is crucial f (Fisher and Keashly, 1991). They need to develop sufficient energy and \ momentum to overcome the conflict's resistance. i
This broad view of conflict transformation is necessary to correct j the misperception that conflict resolution rests on an assumption of harmony of interests between actors, and that third-party mediators can settle conflicts by appealing to the reason or underlying human- j ity of the parties. On the contrary, conflict transformation requires real changes in parties' interests, goals or self-definitions. These may be forced by the conflict itself, or may come about because of intra-party changes, shifts in the constituencies of the parties, or changes in the context in which the conflict is situated. Conflict resolution must therefore be concerned not only with the issues that divide the main parties but also with the social, psychological and political changes
that are necessary to address root causes, the intra-party conflicts that may inhibit acceptance of a settlement, the global and regional context which structures the issues in conflict and the thinking of the parties, and the social and institutional capacity that determines whether a settlement can be made acceptable and workable. The response must be 'conflict-sensitive' at a number of different levels.
Having outlined the main general requirements for ending violent conflicts in terms of conflict transformers, we now apply this in more detail, first to the issue of the conditions under which conflicts do end, second to the role of mediation and third-party intervention in war ending, and third to the nature of successful negotiations and peace settlements. We examine the significance of turning points and sticking points in peace processes, and the challenge of securing peace against the wishes of sceptics who may reject the terms of a particular peace agreement and spoilers who may want to wreck any settlement.
The end of the Cold War itself was a significant factor in transforming the context of many conflicts. It contributed to the ending of a significant number of post-Cold War conflicts. A notable factor was the reduction in the capacity or willingness of external powers to support fighting factions. In Central America, South Africa and South-East Asia, geopolitical changes, the end of ideological justifications for intervention and reductions in armed support for rebel groups contributed to conflict endings (for example, in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mozambique and Cambodia). Even Northern Ireland's long conflict was positively influenced by the end of the Cold War, as the Republican belief that the UK had a strategic interest in Northern Ireland fell away.
As Hegre (2004: 244) shows, the global incidence of civil wars has fallen significantly since the end of the Cold War, reversing a forty-year increase to 1990. The rise before 1990 was mainly due to an increase in the duration of wars, rather than new starts; and the decline since 1990 has been due to changes in duration. A central factor has been the capacity of rebel groups to finance their struggles. Rebel groups have increasingly turned from external state support to contraband and plunder of natural resources. There remain a group of insurgencies in the peripheries of weak states, in the 'global badlands', which remain very resistant to the ending of violent conflict (Fearon, 2004).
Although external interventions are usually important and sometimes decisive in conflict endings, a crucial factor is the willingness of the conflicting parties themselves to consider a negotiated agreement.
166
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking 167
A host of significant factors may bring about this willingness, and it is difficult to generalize across the heterogeneous group of post-Cold War conflicts (for discussions of de-escalation, conciliatory gestures and the factors influencing feasibility of settlement, see, for example, Mitchell, 1999, 2000; Downs and Stedman, 2002). In armed conflicts, parties become willing to consider negotiated outcomes when they lose hope of achieving their aims by force of arms. Even then, their ability to carry sceptical factions and constituencies is essential for a settlement. In Northern Ireland, for example, the decision of leading Republicans to pursue a political strategy as well as an armed strategy gradually led to involvement in political negotiations and a political outcome. But this alone did not bring about the ceasefire. Other preconditions included the change in the position of the UK and Irish governments, from opposing protagonists to cooperating mediators, and the realization on the part of the Unionists that their preferred outcome, devolved government, also depended on multiparty negotiations.
Zartman (ed., 1995:18) argues that conflicts are ripe for negotiated settlements only under certain conditions. The main condition is a 'hurting stalemate'. Both sides must realize that they cannot achieve their aims by further violence and that it is costly to go on.
The concept of 'hurting stalemate' is widely accepted in policymaking circles, and some diplomats, such as Chester Crocker, have deliberately attempted to bring about a 'hurting stalemate' in order to foster a settlement. Others refer to the need for a 'ripening process' to foster 'ripe moments' (Druckman, 1986).
Zartman argues that for negotiations to succeed, there must also be valid spokespersons for the parties, a deadline, and a vision of an acceptable compromise. Recognition and dialogue are preconditions, and for these to take place both parties have to be accepted as legitimate. In conflicts between a government and an insurgency, for example, the government must reach the point where it recognizes the insurgency as a negotiating partner. Similarly, a more equal power balance between the parties is held to favour negotiation: when the asymmetry is reduced, negotiations may become possible. Druckman and Green suggest that changes in relative legitimacy as well as relative power between regimes and insurgents affect the propensity to negotiate (Druckman and Green, 1995).
The 'ripeness' idea has the attraction of simplicity, but a number of authors have suggested modifications or criticisms. Mitchell (1995) distinguishes four different models of the 'ripe moment': the original 'hurting stalemate' suggested by Zartman; the idea of 'imminent mutual catastrophe', also due to Zartman; the rival model suggested by games of entrapment such as the 'dollar auction' (Rapoport, 1989), where a hurting stalemate leads to even greater commitment by the
parties; and the idea of an 'enticing opportunity', or conjunction of favourable circumstances (such as, for example, the conjunction of " conditions which encouraged the first IRA ceasefire in Northern
iIreland: a Fianna Fail Taoiseach, a Democratic President with strong American Irish support, and an understanding between the Northern Irish Nationalists and Republicans). Others argue that the concept is tautological, since we cannot know whether there is a hurting stalemate until the actions that it is supposed to trigger takes place ' (Licklider, ed., 1993: 309; Hampson, 1996: 210-14). If a stalemate that
', hurts the parties persists for a long time before negotiations, as it
: often does, the value of the concept as an explanation for negotiated
settlements must be qualified.
It has been argued that the simple 'hurting stalemate' model gives too much weight to the power relationship between the parties, and fails sufficiently to take account of changes within the parties or [ changes in the context which may also foster a propensity to negotiate
; (Stedman, 1991). Moreover, although it is possible to point to cases of
| successful negotiations which have followed hurting stalemates, it is
j also possible to point to hurting stalemates which do not lead to
| successful negotiations, for example Cyprus. It may be argued in these
[ cases that the stalemate is not hurting enough; but then there is no
f clear evidence from case studies as to how long a stalemate has to last
or how much it has to hurt before it triggers successful negotiations. And stalemates are likely to hurt the general population more than the i leaders who in the end make the decisions. We should distinguish, too,
\ between ripeness for negotiations to start and ripeness for negotiations
[ to succeed; in Angola and Cambodia, for example, the conditions for
f settlement 'unripened' after negotiated agreements had been made,
[ because one or other of the parties was unwilling to accept the settle-
: ment terms, even though the condition of 'hurting stalemate' still
Iobtained. A model that sees conflicts moving from 'unripeness' through a ripe moment to resolution is perhaps too coarse-grained to take account of the many changes that come together over time and t result in a settlement: redefinitions of parties' goals, changes in the
parties' constituencies, contextual changes, shifts in perceptions, attitudes and behaviour patterns. 'Ripeness' is not sudden, but rather a complex process of transformations in the situation, shifts in public attitudes, and new perceptions and visions among decision-makers.
While the primary conflict parties have the most important role in determining outcomes, a feature of the globalization of conflict has
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been the increasing involvement of a range of external agencies in mediation efforts and third-party interventions of all kinds. These are not necessarily benign. Intervention in general (including by interested parties and outside powers) has tended to increase the duration of civil wars. Nevertheless, both domestic and external third parties are often important catalysts for peacemaking.
Conflict resolution attempts involve different kinds of agency (international organizations, states, non-governmental organizations, individuals), address different groups (party leaders, elites, grassroots), and vary in form, duration and purpose. Chapters 1 and 2 referred to this developing practice, including Track I, Track II, Track III and multitrack diplomacy, employing a spectrum of 'soft' and 'hard' intervention approaches, ranging from good offices, conciliation, quiet or 'pure' mediation at one end, through various modes of mediation and peacekeeping, to peace enforcement at the other. There have been fierce debates over whether third-party intervention should be impartial or partial, coercive or non-coercive, state-based or non-state-based, carried out by outsiders or insiders (Touval and Zartman, eds, 1985; Curie, 1986; Mitchell and Webb, eds, 1988; van der Merwe, 1989; Lederach, 1995; Bercovitch, ed., 1996). Attempts to integrate different approaches, such as Fisher and Keashly's (1991) 'contingency model'6 and life-cycle models of conflict (Creative Associates, 1997: 3-4) suggest appropriate responses at different phases of conflict, though such models do not resolve the ethical issues involved, or the practical issues of coordination (Webb et al., 1996). They do, however, point to the conclusion that third-party interventions usually need to be coordinated (Jones, 2002) and continued over an extended period, and that 'third parties need other third parties' (Hampson, 1996: 233).
At the softer end of the spectrum third parties are often essential in contributing to issue transformations. They typically help the conflicting parties by putting them in contact with one another, gaining their trust and confidence, setting agendas, clarifying issues and formulating agreements. They can facilitate meetings by arranging venues, reducing tensions, exploring the interests of the parties and sometimes guiding the parties to unrealized possibilities. These are tasks that are usually contentious and even dangerous for the conflictants to perform themselves. By allowing the parties to present their cases, exploring them in depth, framing and ordering the discussion, and questioning the advantages and disadvantages of different options, before the parties have to make a commitment to them, mediation can sometimes perform a valuable role in opening up new political space.
Mediation is especially important at a stage when at least some of the conflicting parties have come to accept that pursuing the conflict is unlikely to achieve their goals, but before they have reached the
stage of accepting formal negotiations. At this point, face-to-face meetings may be very difficult to arrange, and mediation and 'back-channels' become important. They played a large role in the peace processes in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the Israel/Palestine conflict. In the Northern Ireland case, for example, the SDLP, Sinn Fein and the Irish government established communications by sending secret messages through representatives of the Clonard monastery, a religious community which ministers to Republican families living on the 'front line' in Belfast; this prepared the ground for the Hume-Adams proposals (Coogan, 1995). In the South African case, the contacts arranged between the ANC and the government by third parties enabled preliminary communication between the two sides, before they were ready to negotiate openly.
International organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) all play a role at this stage. Although they usually have limited resources, NGOs are also able to enter conflicts. NGOs (such as the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), the Berghof Research Centre for Constructive Conflict Management, the Carter Center, the Community of Sant'Egidio, the Conflict Analysis Centre at Kent, the Harvard Centre of Negotiation, the Institute for Multi-track Diplomacy, International Alert and Search for Common Ground) have gained experience of working in conflict (van Tongeren, 1996; Serbe et al., 1997). They use a variety of approaches, including facilitation (Fisher and Ury, 1981), problem-solving workshops (de Reuck, 1984; Burton, 1987; Kelman, 1992; Mitchell and Banks, 1996) and sustained mediation.
It is possible to point to a number of cases where mediators from NGOs have contributed to transformation at key moments, usually in conjunction with governments and international organizations -the Community of Sant'Egidio in Mozambique (Hume, 1994; Msabaha, 1995: 221), Jimmy Carter in Ethiopia/Eritrea (Ottoway, 1995:117), the Moravians and the Mennonites in Central America (Wehr and Lederach, 1996: 65, 69), the Norwegian organization FAFO in the Oslo talks between Israel and the PLO (Corbin, 1994) and the Conflict Analysis Centre in Moldova.
NGOs have sometimes been able to adapt their methods to the local culture, and can work usefully with one or several parties rather than with all. John-Paul Lederach, for example, found in his work in Central America that the parties look for confianza (trust) rather than neutrality in third parties, and that an 'insider-partial' would be more acceptable than impartial outsiders (Lederach, 1995; Wehr and Lederach, 1996).
The current trend in NGO interventions is away from entry into conflict situations by outsiders, towards training people inside the
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society in conflict in the skills of conflict resolution and combining these with indigenous traditions. We noted in chapter 2 how the constructions and reconstructions which took place in conflict resolution thinking placed great stress on the need to bring into the discourse of conflict resolution the ideal of a global civic culture which was receptive and responsive to the voices often left out of the politics of international order. Thus Elise Boulding envisaged the evolution of a problem-solving modus operandi for civil society, and Curie and Lederach defined the priorites and modalites of indigenous empowerment and peacebuilding from below. Indeed, it is in the encounter with local traditions that important lessons about conflict resolution are being learned, particularly about the limitations of the dominantly Euro-American model defined in chapter 2. In the study of the Arab Middle East, mentioned earlier, Paul Salem has noted a 'rich tradition of tribal conflict management [which] has thousands of years of experience and wisdom behind it' (ed., 1997: xi). Such perspectives are now beginning to emerge in contemporary understandings and practices of conflict resolution. Rupesinghe (1996) emphasizes the importance of building capacity to manage conflict within the affected society, a process which will necessarily involve the need for knowledge about the traditions of conflict management to which Salem referred. Kelman, Rothman and others have used an elicitive model in their workshops in the Middle East, drawing on the wisdom of local cultures to stimulate creative dialogue and new thinking at elite or grassroots levels. Participants in their workshops have gone on to play significant decision-making roles in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (Rothman, 1992; Kelman, 1997). Similarly, community relations organizations in Northern Ireland have built networks of people across the communities who are a long-term resource for peace-building, and are changing both the society and the actors. Thus the encounter between conflict resolution ideas and social and political forces can subtly transform the context of conflict. NGOs also work towards structural transformation, for example by acting to empower the weaker side (van der Merwe, 1989; Lederach, 1995; Curie, 1996).
Of course, international organizations and governments still play much the largest role in managing conflicts in the post-Cold War world. The UN Secretary-General and his representatives exercise good offices in many parts of the world (Findlay, 1996), and made important contributions to the settlements in El Salvador, Cambodia, Mozambique and Namibia. The UN's legitimacy contributes to its special role, and its resolutions sometimes play a defining role in setting out principles for settlements (as in the case of Resolutions 242 and 338 in Palestine). It is true that the UN has also faced some dreadful failures in the post-Cold War world, including Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia.7 Nevertheless, as
the instrument through which the international community arranges ceasefires, organizes peacekeeping, facilitates elections and monitors disengagement and demilitarization, the UN has an acknowledged corpus of knowledge and experience to bring to bear.8
Governments also play a prominent role as mediators. For example Portugal (with the UN) facilitated the Bicesse Accord in Angola (Hampson, 1996: 87-127), the ASEAN countries took a leading role in Cambodia, and the United States in Central America, Northern Ireland, India-Pakistan and elsewhere. The United States is especially significant in post-Cold War conflicts, given its unique international position, although its willingness to act as a mediator, rather than an interested party, diminished in the late 1990s. Governments are not always willing to shoulder a mediating role when their national interests are not at stake, and where they are, mediation readily blurs into traditional diplomacy and statecraft.
When governments bring coercion to bear to try to force parties to change position, they become actors in the conflict. Forceful interventions clearly can bring forward war endings in some circumstances, as in the case of Bosnia, where after many months of abstention the USA tacitly built up the Croatian armed forces and sanctioned NATO air strikes on Serb positions in order to force the Dayton settlement. The question is whether such interventions can lead to a stable ending of conflict, and whether imposed settlements stick.9 We have discussed the dilemmas involved briefly in the previous chapter, and elsewhere (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1996).
Conflict transformation maybe gradual or abrupt; perhaps more typically, a series of rapid shifts are punctuated by longer periods of inertia and stalemate. If this process is to go forward, the parties and third parties must identify an acceptable formula for negotiation, commit themselves politically to a process of peaceful settlement, manage spoilers who seek to block the process, and return after each setback to fresh mediation or negotiation.
This suggests that there is a range of appropriate actions and interventions at different stages of the conflict, depending on the situation. If the parties are not ready for mediation or negotiations, it may still be possible to support constituencies which favour peacemaking, to work for changes in actors' policies and to influence the context that sustains the conflict. The international anti-apartheid campaign, for example, gradually increased the pressure on international businesses
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
involved in South Africa, to the point where sanctions and disinvestment became a significant factor. External and internal parties can contribute to the structural transformations which enable parties to break out of asymmetrical relationships, by the process of conscienti-zation, gathering external support and legitimacy, and dissocation as a prelude to negotiation and conflict resolution on a more symmetrical basis (see chapter 1, figure 1.11).
Once a peace process has begun, a dilemma arises as to whether to address first the core issues in the conflict, which tend to be the most difficult, or to concentrate on the peripheral issues in the hope of making early agreements and establishing momentum. A step-by-step approach offers the parties the opportunity to test each others' good faith and allows for reciprocation (see box 7.2), in line with the finding from experimental studies of conflict and cooperation that small tension-reducing steps are easier to sustain than one-off solutions in two-party conflicts (Osgood, 1962; Axelrod, 1984).10 Since durable and comprehensive agreements are difficult to establish ail at once, interim agreements are usually necessary in practice. They do need to address core issues, however, if the parties are to have confidence that the process can deliver an acceptable outcome. Interim agreements raise risks that parties may renege, or refuse to reciprocate after obtaining concessions. Agreements that give the parties some incentives to stay in the process (for example, transitional power-sharing arrangements), that are supported by external guarantors and that mobilize domestic support are therefore more likely to succeed (Hampson, 1996; Sisk, 1997).
The fate of the Oslo agreement in the Israel-Palestine conflict illustrates that both 'turning points' and 'sticking points' are characteristic of peace processes. 'Turning points' occur not only at single ripe moments, but at critical points when parties see a way forward through negotiations, either by redefining their goals, opening new political space, finding a new basis for agreement, or because the conjunction of political leaders and circumstances are favourable. 'Sticking points' develop when elites are unfavourable to the process (as in Israel), when parties to agreements defect (as in Angola, Cambodia, Sri Lanka), or when political space is closed or conditions are attached to negotiations which prevent forward movement. At turning points, the aim must be to find ways to capitalize on the momentum of agreement and the changed relationships that have led to it, building up the constituency of support, attempting to persuade the critics, and establishing process with a clear goal and signposts to guide the way towards further agreements and to anticipate disputes. At sticking points, the aim is to find ways around the obstacles, drawing on internal and external support, establishing procedures and learning from the flaws of previous agreements.
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Box 7-2 Strategic dilemmas in peace processes
The obstacles to a peace process are almost always formidable. The parties to a violent conflict aim to win, and so they are locked in a process of strategic interaction which; makes them acutely sensitive to prospects for gain and loss; Any concession that involves abandoning political ground, any withdrawal from a long-held position, is therefore resisted bitterly. This is reminiscent of aspects : of Prisoner's Dilemma described in chapter 1.
5inn. Fan/IRA-
Continue violence
: Ceasefire:.
/ V
unionists
Concede
■nothing-.
	' Make
	peace
The strategic risks iniieionl ir. peacc-M-uking tan be illjstidted us the tableau above, which is^based oh; a simplified, view of the Northern Ireland situation: . brforp the IRA ceasefire, but could apply to many other conflicts. Sinn fein/IRA face.a choice between declaring a ceasefire or continuing the violence. We assume they prefut a peace settlement 10 continuing die violence, bui prefer to continue the violence than to stop if the Unionists hold out. the Unionists, too, we assume, prefer a settlement to a continuing conflict, but prefer holding out to settling. Sinn řein/IRA have to choose first whether to cease fire, then; the : Northern Ireland Unionists choose:between agreeing a settlement and holding : out: Sinn Fein/IRA's dilemma istháťif.they: declare a céásefířě;the Unionists; will continue to concede nothing; so the 'rational' strategy for the SI /IRA ;s to continue to fight.
The way out of this dilemma is fór both parties to agree to move together to the ojxion of peaceful settlement and so reach ,in option they ear.h prefer to :; continued conflict; in order to dp this, the parties have to create sufficient trust, or guarantors, that they will commit themselves to what they prornisě..::For both sides, the risk that tne. other will renege n ever present. One way of making the commitment is for leaders on both sides to lock their personal political fortunes so strongly to one option that they could not go down the other path without resigning. (This is an equivalent of throwing away the steering wheel in the game of Chicken.) Another method is tp.diyjdethe number of.'moves', available to the parties into many steps, so that both parties can have confidence that. :: each is.taking the agreed route::lrf real peace;processes, confidence-building measures; agreement on procedures or a timetable for moving forward, and -republic commitments by leaders are among the methods of building and sustaining a peace process.
174 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION ■ --
As a negotiated agreement comes into sight, or after it has been negotiated, intra-party conflicts over the proposed settlement become very important. Lynch (2002) argues that 'sceptics', as well as 'spoilers', are crucially important. Sceptics are factions who reject the terms of the proposed settlement but are not against a settlement in principle. Spoilers are fundamentally opposed to any agreement and attempt to wreck it. Stedman (1997) suggests the former may be managed by offering inducements and incentives to include them into the agreement, or by offering means to socialize them. The latter, he argues, have to be marginalized, rendered illegitimate or undermined. It may be necessary to accelerate a process for example by a 'departing train' strategy, that sets a timetable on negotiations and hence limits the time for spoilers to work. In successful peace processes, the moderate parties ' come to defend the emerging agreement, and spoilers can even serve to consolidate a consensus in the middle ground.
Peace processes involve learning (and second-order learning), with the parties gradually discovering what they are prepared to accept and accommodate. Elements of an agreement may surface in early talks, but they may be insufficiently comprehensive, or sufficiently inclusive to hold. They then fall apart; but the main principles and formulas of agreement remain, and can be refined or simplified, until a final agreement is devised. Negotiators and mediators learn from each other and ; from previous attempts and other peace processes." Eventually they may reach fruition in a negotiated settlement; but even this is only a step, and not the last one, in the conflict resolution process. " |
What types of negotiated outcome are likely to resolve protracted conflicts? It is difficult to generalize here, since different types of conflict are associated with different families of outcomes (Horowitz, 1985; Falkenmark, 1990; Montville, ed., 1991; Miall, 1992: 131-63; McGarry and O'Leary, eds, 1993; Sisk, 1997).
Negotiation processes are often slow and gradual. They start from pre-negotiations (Harris and Reilly, eds, 1998: 59-68). Successive rounds of negotiations are typically punctuated by continuing conflict. Framing and reframing issues and changing parties' perceptions and understandings of the conflict and the potential outcomes are a crucial part of the process (Aggestam, 1999).
As regards outcomes of negotiations, we saw in chapter 1 how theorists distinguish integrative (or positive-sum) from bargaining (or zero-sum) approaches. Integrative approaches attempt to find ways, if not to reconcile the conflicting positions, then to meet the underlying
Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking 175
interests, values or needs (Fisher and Ury, 1981; Galtung, 1984; Pruitt and Rubin, 1986; Burton, 1987). Examples of integrative approaches are: setting the issue into a wider context or redefining the parties' interests in such a way that they can be made compatible, sharing sovereignty or access to the contested resource, increasing the size of the cake, offering compensation for concessions or trading concessions in other areas, and managing the contested resources on a functional rather than a territorial or sovereign basis. Bargaining divides a fixed cake, sometimes with compensations by linkage to other issues. In practice, negotiations combine both approaches.
Albin (1997) offers examples of several of these approaches in her study of options for settling the status of Jerusalem. Both Israelis and Palestinians agree that the city is indivisible, but the dispute over control remains at the core of their long-standing conflict. Both parties claim control over the holy places and claim the city as their capital. Proposals for settling the conflict have included suggestions for increasing the city boundaries of Jerusalem and dividing the enlarged area between the two states, each with a capital inside it (resource expansion); establishing decentralized boroughs within a Greater Jerusalem authority elected by proportional representation (no single authority: delegation of power to a lower level); Israeli sovereignty in return for Palestinian autonomy (compensation); dual capitals and shared access to the holy sites (joint sovereignty); or their internationalization, return to a federated one-state solution with Jerusalem as the joint capital (unification of actors) and transfer of control to a city authority representing both communities, but organized on functional rather than ethnic or national lines (functional).
In ethnic conflicts, integrative solutions are especially elusive (Zartman, ed., 1995b); nevertheless, consociationalism, federalism, autonomy, power-sharing, dispersal of power and electoral systems that give incentives to inter-ethnic coalitions all offer ways out of conflict in some circumstances (Lijphart, 1968; Horowitz, 1985: 597-600; Sisk, 1997).
Good settlements should not only bridge the opposing interests, but also represent norms and values that are public goods for the wider community in which the conflict is situated. Quite clearly, justice and fairness are crucial attributes for negotiations (Albin, 2001). In a more cosmopolitan world, outcomes are expected to meet wider criteria than those that might have been accepted in bargains between sovereign groups. At the same time, the criteria of justice have become more contested.
Some negotiated settlements are more robust than others. Although generalization is treacherous, successful settlements are thought to have the following characteristics (Hampson, 1996: 217-21). First, they
Ending Violent Conflict Peacemaking 177
should include the affected parties, and the parties are more likely to accept them if they have been involved in the process that reaches them - this argues for inclusiveness and against imposed settlements. Second, they need to be well-crafted and precise, especially as regards details over transitional arrangements, for example demobilization assembly points, ceasefire details, voting rules. Third, they should offer a balance between clear commitments and flexibility. Fourth, they should offer incentives for parties to sustain the process and to participate in politics, for example through power-sharing rather than winner-take-all elections. Fifth, they should provide for dispute settlement, mediation and, if necessary, renegotiation in case of disagreement. And, sixth, they should deal with the core issues in the conflict and bring about a real transformation, incorporating norms and principles to which the parties subscribe, such as equity and democracy, and at the same time creating political space for further negotiations and political accommodation. To this we might add, seventh, they should be consistent with cosmopolitan standards of human rights, justice and respect for individuals and groups.
i
We now turn to contrast two of the peace processes which have been I central stories in post-Cold War conflict resolution. Their uneven -> progress and dramatic reversals offer insights into the difficulties encountered in ending protracted conflicts, and the various kinds of j transformations that shape their course.
First, South Africa. The transition from apartheid to multiparty e tions in South Africa was one of the most remarkable cases of conflict resolution in the post-Cold War period, How did the white minority, which had been so determined to hold on to power, come to agree to =j majority rule? How was this extraordinary reversal in government j achieved without a bloodbath?
Second, Israel-Palestine. When Israel's Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin   . i shook the hand of PLO leader Yassir Arafat on 13 September 1993 to seal the signing of the Oslo Accords, it seemed that they were cele-   . j brating a historic breakthrough in the protracted conflict. The Accords I opened the way to a self-governing Palestinian authority, mutual I recognition of Israel and the PLO, and final-status talks on other dividing issues. Yet the failure to implement the Accords and Israel's continuing subordination of the Palestinians living in the occupied H territories raise troubling questions about whether it was ever appro- | priate to attempt conflict resolution in the first place between such unequal parties. I
South Africa
The structure of the conflict lay in the incompatibility between the National Party (NP) government which was determined to uphold white power and privileges through the apartheid system, and the black majority which sought radical change and a non-racial, equal society based on one-person one-vote. Transforming this conflict involved first the empowerment of the majority through political mobilization and the campaign of resistance against the apartheid laws. The revolt in the townships, political mobilization and movements like Steve Biko's 'Black Consciousness' all expressed the refusal of the majority to acquiesce in a racially dominated society. Externally, the international pressure on the South African regime partly offset the internal imbalance of power, through the anti-apartheid campaign, international isolation, sporting bans, partial sanctions and disinvestment.
Changes in the context cleared significant obstacles. While South Africa had been involved in wars in Southern Africa with Cuban-supported and Soviet-supplied regimes, it had been possible for white South Africans to believe that their regime was a bastion against international communist penetration, and for the ANC to believe that a war of liberation based in the front-line states might eventually succeed. With the waning of the Cold War and changes in the region, these views became unsustainable. This separated the question of apartheid from ideological conflicts, and concentrated the struggle in South Africa itself.
Another crucial contextual factor was economic change. It had been possible to run an agricultural and mining economy profitably with poorly paid black labour. But as the economy diversified and modernized, a more educated and skilled labour force was necessary. The demands of the cities for labour created huge townships, such as Soweto, which became a focus for opposition to the regime. The more the government relied on repression to control the situation, the more exposed it became to international sanctions and disinvestment.
Significant changes of actors also made a crucial impact in the process of change. On the side of the National Party, the change in leadership from Vorster to P. W. Botha brought a shift from an unyielding defence of apartheid to a willingness to contemplate reform, so long as it preserved the power and privileges of the white minority. The change in leadership from Botha to F. W. de Klerk heralded a more radical reform policy and the willingness to abandon many aspects of apartheid. Changes at constituency level supported these shifts. For example, the businessmen in South Africa were among the first to see the need for a change in the policy of apartheid, and took a leading role in maintaining contacts with the ANC at a time when the peace
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Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking 179
process seemed to have reached a sticking point, for example ! 1985-6. The bulk of the white population gradually came to accept the inevitability of a change, and this influenced the result of the j').ss elections and the referendum in favour of reform in March 1992.1 split in the white majority in 1992 created an intra-party conflict between white extremists and the NP.
On the side of the black majority, the most important actor change was the split that developed between the ANC and Inkatha, starting in 1976 and growing gradually more serious, until it became a reiv source of internal armed conflict that threatened the peace process in 1992-4. It seemed that Inkatha and the white extremists might prevent a settlement, but in the end they helped to cement Hi; alliance of the government and the ANC behind negotiated change. We return to this below.
With regard to the issues, both parties in the conflict made significant changes in their positions and goals.12 On the NP side, a series of shifts can be identified in the mid- and late 1980s. First there was Botha's shift from the defence of apartheid to the pursuit of limited reforms. He proposed a tricameral parliament which would include whites, Indian and coloured people, but exclude blacks. Botha also sought negotiations with Mandela, but Mandela refused to negotiate until he was released. The reforms failed in their intention to broaden the base of the government's support, and instead led to intensified opposition in the townships. This led to the government's decision to declare the Stale of Emergency, which contributed in turn to further international pressure and disinvestment. By 1985 the process had reached a sticking point, with the government unwilling to make further reforms, and the black population unwilling to accept the status quo.
It was at this point, with confrontation and no talks between the two sides, that third-party mediators made an important contribution.n A group of businessmen met with ANC leaders in Zambia, and afterwards issued a call for political negotiations and the abandonment of apartheid. Botha made a new shift in September 1986, offering blacks resident outside the homelands a vote on township councils, but they were boycotted. Botha's reforms had stalled. By 1987-8 the situation had reached a second sticking point. The white electorate now showed that it was unhappy with the pace of change in the 1988 elections, and F. W. de Klerk's win in the election for the leadership of the NP brought a change of direction.
On the ANC side, too, there was change. Before 1985, the ANC saw itself as a national liberation movement and expected to establish a socialist government by seizing power after a successful armed strug-gle. By 1985 it had begun to accept that this goal was unrealistic, and that a compromise was necessary.
turning-point came in 1989-90. De Klerk shifted decisively ards a policy of negotiations: he began to end segregation, lifted ''rTban on the ANC, and finally released Mandela on 11 February 1990. r ethe Groote Schuur Minute of May 1990, the government agreed to 'work toward lifting the state of emergency', while the ANC agreed to •curb violence'. The ANC had now accepted that the NP would remain in power while negotiations were carried out, and the NP that it would nave 10 Sive up its monoPoly of Power'Tne government's aim was now
nower-sharing agreement, in which its future role in a multiracial government would be guaranteed. In February 1991 the parties took a further step towards each others' positions when the government agreed to tolerate the continued existence of an ANC militia force, and in return the ANC agreed not to activate it. The government released political prisoners in April 1991 and in September the parties signed the National Peace Accord, which set up a code of conduct for the security forces and mechanisms for dispute settlement during the course of negotiations. This was followed by the establishment of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), which agreed on a list of principles for a new constitution and set up working groups to workout the details.
There was still a wide gulf between the parties' positions. The National Party sought to sustain white power by arriving at a federal constitution based on power-sharing, a bicameral parliament, proportional representation, protection of group rights and strong regional governments. The ANC in contrast wanted to see a short-lived interim government of national unity followed by elections based on one-person one-vote, and a constitution based on individual rights and a centralized government. After further negotiations, the parties compromised on a Transitional Executive Council which would oversee the government, and an elected constituent assembly which would produce a new constitution. But they could not agree on the proportion of votes which would be required for a majority in the constituent assembly.
Meanwhile, the 'spoilers' were becoming active on both extremes. White extremists, who regarded the National Party's position as an unacceptable compromise, and the Inkatha Freedom Party, which feared that an ANC-dominated government would override the Zulu regional power base, found a shared interest in wrecking the negotiations. At first, their pressure caused a hardening of positions. After winning a referendum among the whites approving his conduct of the negotiations, de Klerk refused to make concessions on the voting issue. The ANC, facing escalating violence in the townships, which Inkatha was suspected of fomenting with the connivance of the police, decided to break off negotiations.
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This was the third and most dangerous sticking point. Violence was i rising and the threat of breakdown was clear. The ANC called a general strike and mass demonstrations. The police cracked down and twenty- , eight marchers were killed in Bisho, Ciskei in September 1992. This disaster reminded both sides of the bloodbath that seemed likely if negotiations failed. Roelf Meyer, the Minister of Constitutional Development, and Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC's lead negotiator, coi n: tied to meet unofficially in hotel rooms as violence rose. In September 1992 the parties returned decisively to negotiations when de Klerk :.nl Mandela agreed a 'Record of Understanding'. This spelt out the basis on which power would eventually be transferred: an interim, elected parliament to agree a new constitution, and an interim power-sharing -government of national unity, to be composed of parties winning more than 5 per cent of the vote, to last for five years. The ANC had shifted to accept power-sharing and a long transition; the National Party had \ shifted to accept that the continuation of white power would not be guaranteed. By now the NP was fearful of losing support to the right   ~ r unless it acted quickly, and it stepped up progress, accepting a dead- 1 line for elections in April 1994. The Transitional Executive Council, set : up in September 1993, gradually took on more and more of the key political functions of government, and the NP and the ANC found themselves jointly defending the settlement against Inkatha and the white extremists, who now supported a confederal alternative providing autonomy for the regions in which they lived.
The six months leading up to the elections were thus a struggle between the NP-ANC coalition and the spoilers, with the conduct of the elections as the prize. Inkatha left the Transitional Executive Council and violence against ANC supporters in Natal intensified. Negotiations between the ANC and Chief Buthelezi, leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, came to nothing and Buthelezi prepared to exercise his threat of boycotting the elections. At the last moment the ANC offered King Goodwill of the Zulus a major concession over the trusteeship of land in Natal. Buthelezi's followers refused to follow him into the wilderness, and he was forced to accept a last-minute deal and participate in the elections. The elections thus proceeded legitimately, and returned a parliament in which the ANC fell just below the two-thirds majority required to pass laws. Power-sharing would be a fact. Mandela became president of the government of national unity, with de Klerk and Buthelezi as ministers.
In the end, a process of negotiations and elections had replaced apartheid and white power (Waldmeier, 1998; Harvey, 2003). The legitimation of the black opposition had transformed the structure of the conflict, turning an asymmetrical relationship between minority and majority into a symmetrical relationship between parties and their
followers. Though many tensions remained, and real socio-economic transformation was slow to come, the elections conveyed 'participation, legitimation and allocation, the three elements necessary to the settlement of internal conflicts' (Zartman, ed., 1995b: 339). The parties in South Africa had achieved an agreed and legitimate constitutional settlement, in a situation so unfavourable that many observers had previously judged it to be impossible.
The Oslo Accords: the elusive search for peace in the Middle East
Of all the peace processes of the 1990s, the Israeli-Palestinian process has rightly gained the most attention. It is therefore important to review how the setbacks to the process reflect on the thinking and practice of conflict resolution. When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, it was widely believed that the Norwegian facilitation had brought about a breakthrough in the long conflict. Ten years later, most of the provisions of the Accords were suspended, the key 'final status' issues of the conflict remained unresolved, the violent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank continued and Palestinian suicide bombers were retaliating by blowing up Israeli civilians. What had gone so wrong?
We will take two separate narratives of the events to illustrate some of the contested views. First, the view that Oslo was indeed a breakthrough, but the prospects for conflict resolution were destroyed by 'spoilers' on both sides, and by the fundamental asymmetry of the parties. We shall rely here on accounts by Shlaim (2000) and Smith (2004), and a variety of conflict research perspectives from Aggestam (1999), Gaining (2004) and Kriesberg (2001).
The second perspective is that the attempt at conflict resolution was fundamentally flawed from the outset, in the context of Israeli-Palestinian asymmetry. As an example of this viewpoint we will quote Jones (1999:130), who argues that the peace process became a means whereby 'a stronger party slowly and deliberately crushes the aspirations of the weaker party'. In Jones's view (1999:160), the Oslo Accords, and the process that led to them, 'reproduce structures of inequality and domination', implying that conflict resolution in such contexts is fundamentally problematic.
In favour of the first perspective, the choice of a facilitative, back-channel approach made possible a breakthrough, where the official diplomacy at Madrid was stalled. The Norwegian intervention was made in good faith, with the intention of reducing the suffering caused by the conflict. It opened the way to mutual recognition and to a partition of Palestine as a possible solution to the long conflict. The Accords aimed to reconcile the needs of the two peoples to live side-by-side, to give autonomy in Gaza and Jericho as a first step
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Ending Violent Conflict: Peacemaking 183
towards what the Palestinians and many outsiders saw as a two-state solution. The two sides agreed to resolve the major 'final status' issues in the conflict within three years. It is only through negotiation and exploration that two sides can reframe their views of a conflict and create a new reality which opens the potential for a new relationship (Aggestam, 1999:173).
In favour of the second perspective, the Oslo process was launched at a time when the PLO was weak and desperate, and the Israeli government overwhelmingly strong. The outcome has certainly been one in which the stronger party has crushed and humiliated the weaker, and the arrangements imposed by Israel have ended up in a dismembered and impoverished Palestinian entity, lacking not only statehood but even autonomy (Said, 2002). The denoument of this process was the construction of what the Arabs call 'the apartheid wall', symbolizing the Sharon government's intention to keep the Palestinians down and out. There is no road to peace in this direction.
However, responsibility for the fact that events took the course they did should not be laid at the door of the Norwegian facilitators. The 'spirit of Oslo' dissolved even before the Accords were signed, as lawyers from the Israeli government hedged the agreement with restrictions and caveats (Corbin, 1994). Neither Rabin nor Peres were prepared at that time to accept a Palestinian state, and both lost opportunities to expedite the negotiations (Shlaim, 2000; Smith, 2004). Significant constituencies on both sides opposed the agreement. Violence on both sides followed the Accords: the Hebron massacre, attacks by Hamas, the assassination of Rabin. With the election of Netanyahu, the Israeli government turned decisively away from the Oslo process, stalling on implementation of the Accords and accelerating the construction of settlements in the occupied territories.
It may be argued that an incremental process necessarily left the cards in the hands of the Israeli government, and therefore exposed the weaker to the risk that the process would never proceed further. This indeed turned out to have been so. Nevertheless, subsequent developments suggest that a two-state solution may still be a possibility. At the Camp David talks in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Barak went further than any of his predecessors in appearing to accept Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and being willing to return 91 per cent - but not all - of the West Bank to the Palestinians (for a lively debate on what went wrong at Camp David, see Agha and Mulley, 2001; Morris, 2002). In October 2003, the unofficial Geneva Accords, between Beilin and other members of the Labour opposition and former Palestinian ministers, brought the Oslo process to an unofficial conclusion by agreeing a comprehensive settlement to the conflict. Under this peace plan, Israel would withdraw to the internationally recognized 1967 borders (save for
a few territorial exchanges); Palestine would become a state. Jewish settlements, except those included in exchanges, would revert to Palestinian sovereignty; Jerusalem would be divided, with Palestinian sovereignty over Arab parts of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. In return, the Palestinian negotiators were prepared to concede the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. It was a painful concession, abandoning a pillar of faith of the Palestinian struggle. Most Palestinians rejected the Geneva Accords on this "account, while the Israeli government rejected the territorial proposals out of hand.
Nevertheless these negotiations, and significant steps by Arab states, have revealed at least the contours of a possible two-state solution that - if a right of return were accepted - could, potentially, become the centrepiece of a more comprehensive settlement for the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole (International Crisis Group, 2002).
But a number of preconditions are required before such a settlement is feasible. First, evidently, the Israeli government would have to agree it. External and internal changes are necessary for that to happen. A weakness of the conflict resolution attempts, arguably, has been their narrow basis. Only politicians from the Israeli Labour Party and the PLO have been able to come somewhere close to - but still some way from - a framework for an agreement. It will require changes of perspective and discourse for the Sephardic jews and others who have supported Likud and the religious parties to accept a two-state solution, and also for Islamists on the Palestinian side to cometo terms with a Jewish state. Indeed, the exclusively Jewish basis that Israelis claim for their state appears difficult to reconcile with the rights of Palestinian refugees and Arabs within Israel.
This analysis highlights that conflict resolution cannot be left to the conflict region alone, but must also address the wider context in which the conflict is situated. Following Etzioni's (1964) idea of encapsulated conflict, the conflict transformation process must reach out from the local level to the wider levels in which it is embedded. To put the same thing in another way, the task of mediation is only a part of conflict resolution, broadly conceived. Overcoming the asymmetry of the conflict is also essential and this may sometimes require advocacy and support for one side, as Curie and Francis suggest (see chapter 1, figures 1.8 and 1.11). People in the role of mediators should not be advocates, but mediation and advocacy are complementary. Peace and justice are indivisible and have to be pursued together (van der Merwe, 1989: 7).
Galtung (2004: 103-9) suggests that the conflict must be balanced, by placing Israel and Palestine within a Middle Eastern community. Another way of balancing is to modify the US economic, military and political support for Israel, which remains a lynchpin of the conflict. Perhaps a stage will come when American support becomes
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more even-handed in implementing the road map towards a peaceful settlement. This seems far off at present: but such a change in context would have a transforming impact on the conflict. The precedent of disinvestment from South Africa is strong. The task of conflict resolution here goes beyond what facilitators and mediators can achieve, and raises issues of how the world society is to implement cosmopolitan standards of justice and human rights, in an even-handed way.
c i: a   , r i
8
Post-War Reconstruction
We have identified the characteristics of a conflict resolution approach to ending conflicts, while acknowledging that in many contemporary conflicts, such an approach is not applied. We argued that conflict resolution is more than a simple matter of mediating between parties and reaching an integrative agreement on the issues that divide them. It must also touch on the context of the conflict, the conflict structure, the intra-party as well as the inter-party divisions, and the broader system of society and governance within which the conflict is embedded. This suggests that interventions should not be confined to the 'ripe moment'. Peace processes, we argued, are a complex succession of transformations, punctuated by several turning points and sticking points. At different stages in this process, transformations in the context, the actors, the issues, the people Involved and the structure of the conflict may be vital to move the conflict resolution process forward.
Even when settlements are reached, the best-engineered political arrangements can collapse again later, if new life is not breathed in to them by the will of the parties, their constituencies and external supporters to make them work. For this reason, reconstruction and peacebuilding remains a constant priority, especially in the post-settlement phase. The next three chapters tackle the question of how settlements can be sustained without a return to fresh violence.
Recommended reading
Collier et. al, (2003); Harris and Reilly, eds (1998); Stedman et al. (2002);
Wallensteen (2002b). Online sources on peace accords: ACCORD<http://www.c-r.org/accord/index.shtml> USIP <http://www.usip.org/Iibrary/pa.html> INCORE <http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/cds/agreements/>
Peace agreements provide a framework for ending hostilities and a: guide to the initial stages of post-conflict reform. They do: not create conditions under which the deep cleavages that produced the war i are automatically surmounted. Successfully ending the divisions . that lead to war, healing the social wounds created by war,: arid creating a society where the differences among social groups are resolved through compromise rather than violent conflict requires that conflict resolution and consensus building shape all interactions among citizens and between citizens and the state,
Nicole Ball (1996:619)
When wars have ended, post-conflict peacebuilding is vital. The UN has often devoted too little attention and too few resources to this critical challenge. Successful peacebuilding requires the deployment of peacekeepers with the right mandates and sufficient capacity to deter would-be spoilers; funds for demobilization and disarmament, built into peacekeeping budgets; a new trust fund to fill critical gaps in rehabilitation and reintegration of combatants, as well as other early reconstruction tasks; and a focus on building State institutions and capacity, especially in the rule of law sector. Doing this job successfully should be a core function of the United Nations.
Report of the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change-A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004)
This chapter and the next consider the contribution that the conflict resolution field can make to peacebuilding at the fragile stage when war ends but peace is not yet secure. We have seen in chapter 7 that there are many ways in which wars come to an end either temporarily or permanently: through military victory, through formal peace agreements, or when the fighting reaches a stalemate or peters out into a precarious stand-off punctuated by sporadic localized violence. Having brought a war to an end, the next task is to prevent a relapse into violence and secure a self-sustaining peace. This involves demobilization of the warring parties and decommissioning of their weapons, the
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re-establishment of a functioning political system, restoration of essential services, return of refugees and other urgent priorities.
At the end of the Second World War, post-war reconstruction in the defeated Axis powers was carried out by the occupation forces following their outright victory in the war. Having disarmed the defeated, the occupying forces installed new governments with democratic constitutions, supported physical and economic reconstruction and gradually handed power to new indigenous governments. During the Cold War, outright victories became rare and many conflicts became protracted and difficult to end. Most conflicts did not end in agreed settlements and agreements frequently broke down at the implementation stage. The period from shortly before the end of the Cold War to the 1990s proved to be a high point for post-settlement peacebuilding. The UN organized sustained peacebuilding operations that went beyond peacekeeping. The UN saw its task as facilitating a process in which the parties to a violent conflict would secure the peace and then reach agreement on a new political system. Since the end of the 1990s this has given way to a new period in which 'coalitions of the willing' have attempted to restore stable conditions after wars which have not ended in peace agreements, not necessarily with the authority of the United Nations or the agreement of the formerly fighting factions. The term 'post-war reconstruction' is now widely used to include these interventions.
This term indicates a shift of meaning from the earlier term, 'post-settlement peacebuilding'. johan Galtung invented the term 'peacebuilding' and meant it to characterize progression towards positive peace following the ending of war. The main priority of international efforts, however, has been to secure sufficient stability to avoid the recurrence of war - and sometimes also to introduce a democratic system. As a result the term 'reconstruction' is problematic for some. For example, in Northern Ireland, Mari Fitzduff says, 'reconstruction is a "no go" term - it implies that one reconstructs society to resemble what it was like before the conflict. .. [this] implies going back to a past which exemplifies the very factors that created the conflict' (in Austin, 2004:375). For others, however, the term reconstruction implies righting a moral wrong done to the victims of violence. In Norbert Ropers's words, 'giving up the perspective of re-construction might also be interpreted as giving up the right to return, to resettle and to rebuild the homes and livelihoods for all those affected by the war' (in ibid.: 376).
In the first edition of this book we looked particularly at cases of post-Cold War settlements in which the United Nations played a major role in supporting the implementation of peace settlements, including Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia and El Salvador. In this edition we widen our analysis to assess a cluster of other attempts at
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post-war reconstruction undertaken since then, not necessarily after a formal peace settlement and not necessarily under the aegis of the United Nations. What all these cases have in common is that external interveners have played a leading role in post-war reconstruction, that they have declared their sole aim to be to stabilize the host country and lay the foundations for sustainable peace, and that they have then said that they would withdraw. For this reason they might collectively be called 'intervention, reconstruction and withdrawal' (IRW) operations to distinguish them from other post-war peacebuilding efforts (see chapter 9) - though clearly there is a sharp difference between operations conducted by the UN following civil wars and those carried out by major powers which were parties to the preceding conflict and continue to deploy their own forces in the aftermath.
At this point we lay ourselves open to misunderstanding. Whereas in the first edition our sample of UN-led post-settlement peacebuilding operations might be more easily seen as attempts at conflict resolution, the broader sample of post-war reconstructions considered in this second edition are more controversial. We do not suggest that recent episodes such as the attempts to reconstruct Afghanistan post-2001 and Iraq post-2003 should be seen as conflict resolution, nor are we concerned with the question of whether these interventions were justified in the first place. Our aim is to review the development of thinking and practice about post-settlement peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction and to offer an assessment of it from a conflict resolution perspective.1 In chapter 9 we balance this with a survey of the genuinely conflict resolution concept of peacebuilding from below, and in chapter 13 we discuss the principles that should guide legitimate intervention in conflicts from a conflict resolution perspective.
Our focus in this chapter is primarily on external interventions. We do not wish to suggest, however, that external intervenors are necessarily the prime actors involved in determining outcomes. The internal actors and domestic constituencies are almost always the more important. But it is a feature of modern armed conflict that the devastation is so great and the civil population's need for support is so pressing that external support for reconstruction is often badly needed (though this is not always the primary motive for outsiders to intervene). Whether interventions turn out to be in the interests of the civil population or not is a matter for investigation. In what follows we wish to assess what types of external intervention are helpful and what types are unhelpful from a conflict resolution perspective, recognizing that as conflict persists in the post-war phase, so too must efforts at conflict resolution. We will conclude that the effectiveness of peacebuilding in contributing to conflict resolution depends heavily on its legitimacy in the eyes of the domestic population.
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The 1978 Settlement Proposal in Namibia, devised by the Contact ; Group of western states, mandated the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) under Security Council Resolution 435 to assist a Special Representative appointed by the UN Secretary- 1 General 'to ensure the early independence of Namibia through free    . | and fair elections under the supervision and control of the United I Nations' (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1999:167-72). The transil i. n phase was to last a year. This unexceptional decolonization arrange-    . *■ ment unexpectedly turned out to be the template for international post-war intervention and reconstruction programmes when it was revived ten years later in 1988-9 in very different circumstances. The ending of the Cold War drew a line under what had been an almost automatic backing of rival sides and regimes by the superpowers, and opened up the possibility of concerted external action to end debilitating wars or overthrow repressive and dangerous regimes, and subsequently help to create or rebuild domestic political capacity to the point where power could be safely handed back to a viable and internationally acceptable indigenous authority in the host country.
This remarkable era in world politics has unfolded in two main -phases so far. First came the period between the Namibia Accords and the Dayton agreement in Bosnia (1995), in which it seemed to suit the major powers to encourage the United Nations to assume a lead coordinating role (this was the theme of the first edition of this book). This was followed by a period in which, in different permutations, the [ norm has become one of multilateral coalitions under a lead nation or nations, supported by regional alliances or organizations, international financial institutions, G8, and a number of relief and development bodies, with the United Nations and its agencies playing a variety of more or less central or peripheral roles. What has been characteristic of both periods has been that the shape of intervention policy has been decided by the politically and militarily more powerful states. This is natural - strong states intervene in weak states, not vice versa, which is why some commentators are opposed to the entire enterprise, a point to be considered later.
As suggest in table 8.1, at least five distinct types of intervention can be distinguished: transitional assistance for postcolonial independence, backing for a previously democratically elected government or to restore a disrupted democracy, post-settlement peace support, humanitarian intervention in ongoing conflict and/or weak states,
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Post-War Reconstruction
and the rooting out of perceived threats to national and international peace and security (including the war on terror).
Before we go further, one general conclusion can already be drawn from table 8.1. There are good discussions in the literature on factors conducive to success in post-war peacebuilding (for example, Licldider, ed., 1993: 14-17; Downs and Stedman, 2002: 54-61). What table 8.1 adds to this is the difference that intervention types (a) to (e) make to the difficulty of the task. With due allowance for all the other variables, we can suggest that the first phase of the post-war reconstruction process tends to be easier to complete successfully: (a) in decolonization wars where the former master has agreed to independence, and (b) in support of already democratically elected governments with near unanimous international recognition.2 The record of (c) post-settlement peace support operations has been mixed, but not nearly as poor as has sometimes been made out. Angola was a failure given the inability of the interveners to handle Jonas Savimbi. while Rwanda was disastrous in view of the unwillingness of the international community to reinforce the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) when it became plain that genocide was being planned. But Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mozambique are usually classed as successes, with Cambodia more controversial - but for many analysts a partial success despite the defection of the Khmer Rouge before the elections and the subsequent subversion of the election result by Hun Sen. It is (d), humanitarian intervention in ongoing civil wars and weak states as in Liberia 1990-6 (despite repeated ceasefires), and particularly post-1992 Bosnia and Somalia, that proved much more difficult to manage, with the latter two examples fatally (and unfairly) discrediting all types of comparable intervention under the aegis of the UN as a result. This should not have been surprising had decision-makers in the UN Security Council considered the very different circumstances between a postcolonial independence operation (Namibia), a post-settlement peace process support operation (Mozambique) and a humanitarian intervention in ongoing conflict (Somalia). In the case of UNPROFOR, the peacekeepers were already in Bosnia to support the Croatia agreement before the Bosnian war started - they were subsequently loaded with successive Security Council mandates out of proportion to their force configuration.
Among the peace support operations, a significant factor has been whether an agreement among the warring factions to settle the conflict has been made, and the extent to which external third parties have the consent of internal parties. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mozambique there was external support for negotiations but little
external coercion; the parties were the main driving force in reaching a settlement and the settlements stuck. In other cases, as in Bosnia and Cambodia, settlements were imposed and needed continuing external coercion or they became unstuck. Rwanda was a case where a settlement was agreed among the major parties, but badly needed external support to sustain it did not arrive.
At the time of writing the final outcome is uncertain in (e), the fifth category of'defensive' intervention and regime-cnange in order to preempt perceived threats to national and international peace and security, but it seems evident that this is a highly challenging environment. The international 'footprint' in Afghanistan is relatively light given US reluctance to become enmeshed in post-war nation-building there and the resistance of Northern Alliance commanders (given a decisive role from November 2001) to the arrival of more sizeable intervention forces. Even the large-scale troop deployment committed to Iraq is scarcely adequate for pacification in hostile areas given the size of the country and continued armed resistance to the occupying forces. In both cases, the fact that there was ongoing war after the formal cessation of large-scale hostilities has, for obvious reasons, played a major role in complicating the task for interveners. It is significant from a conflict resolution perspective that the perceived legitimacy of the intervention among the host population seems to decrease concomitantly in general terms as we move from case (a) through to case (e).
Finally, we can also now see that none of these cases approximates to the post-1945 context of total defeat and unconditional surrender after a classic interstate war as in Germany and Japan, which is how many in the US administration seem to have seen the task of rebuilding Iraq after the March 2003 intervention. In 1945 the political conflicts were decided on the battlefield and were emphatically over before reconstruction began. This is not the situation in most 1989-2004 cases. Despite common parlance, these are precisely not 'post-conflict' contexts, as will be elaborated below. Nor is this an accidental feature, but is part of the transformation in the nature of major armed conflict in the latter part of the twentieth century. It is also the difference between, say, the Northern Ireland peace process involving the accommodation of undefeated conflictants, and the peace process in South Africa where the outcome of the main conflict had already been decided by the irrevocable defeat of apartheid. This does much to explain why, despite the much greater long-term difficulties facing the reconstruction process in South Africa, it has been the Northern Ireland peace process that has seemed to encounter the greater initial problems.
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Another important point about the 1989-2004 post-war reconstruc- r' tion experience from a conflict resolution perspective is the fact that .{ no one operating model can fit the needs and complexities of each 1 country's situation. The crucial negotiations are ultimately those f between domestic parties, their constituencies and the affected popu- | lations, but these are not always well supported by conflict-sensitive external policies. The United Nations lacks adequate capacity in this , area and nationally organized interventions tend to be strongly influ- I enced by national priorities and short-term political interests of the | intervening states. There are extensive institutional bases and plan- | ning structures for relief and disaster work atoneendof the spectrum, J and for longer-term international development at the other end of the spectrum, both within national administrations and within inter- j national organizations including the United Nations. But there is nothing much in between, which is exactly where the requirements for support for reconstruction and peacebuilding are located. This means that those who look for enhanced international planning, coordination and implementation capacities of this kind tend to call for the building up of a new international agency 'that specializes in conducting postconflict peacebuilding missions and administering war-shattered states' (even including perhaps an ability to assume a   - p 'temporary directorship' over affected countries) (Paris, 2001: 774-81). Short of this there are the kinds of incremental changes recommended in the August 2000 report of the Panel on United Nations , Peace Operations - the Brahimi Report (2000) - such as the setting up of a Peacebuilding Planning Unit in the Department for Political . Affairs. Although the UN has probably made more concerted attempts to learn from past experience than other major interveners, this has tended to coincide with the relative loss of its leading role in post-war reconstruction since the mid-1990s (see successive United Nations Reports). The December 2004 Report of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on building consensus about the UN's role summarized its recommendations in this area as follows:
The report recommends the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission -a new mechanism within the UN, drawing on the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council, donors, and national authorities. Working closely with regional organizations and the international financial institutions, such a commission could fill a crucial gap by giving the necessary attention to countries emerging from conflict. Outside the UN, a forum bringing together the heads of the 20 largest economies, developed and developing, would help the coherent
management of international monetary, financial, trade and development policy. (Executive Summary: 6)
At national level attempts to bridge this planning gap require either efforts to build greater 'inter-agency cooperation' between the relevant planning components within government, or the creation of new structures and procedures. As we saw in chapter 5, the United Kingdom, for example, has attempted to remedy this in the area of prevention through the setting up in 2001 of African and Global 'Conflict Prevention Pools' to coordinate the efforts of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UKFCO), Ministry of Defence (UKMOD) and Department for International Development (UKDFID) (GCPP, 2003). But it is only in the wake of the 2003 Iraq war that anything comparable has been created for post-war reconstruction - what is at the time of writing planned to be a forty-strong interdepartmental Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit. The intention is that the Unit, resourced through an independent budget, will provide the institutional continuity required to support a pool of some two hundred key personnel with expertise across the sectors relevant to post-war reconstruction ready to operationalize the UK's contribution at short notice.
In the USA a Joint Interagency Cooperation Group (JIACG) attempted something similar in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war, although the vast discrepancy in planning capacity between the military planning resources of the Department of Defense (USDODj, with a total personnel of nearly 1.3 million, and those of the Agency for International Development (USAID,) with a personnel of 1,000, made this difficult. The incoming Bush administration tore up the Clinton Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 56 on Interagency Planning for Complex Contingencies, and there was a reluctance to think that anything could be learnt from previous UN experience in post-war reconstruction - hence the inadequacy of the original Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in 2003 Iraq, run from the Pentagon and almost immediately abandoned. A new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization was set up in August 2004 with an apparent brief to draw up 'post-conflict' plans for up to twenty-five countries seen to be at risk and a capacity to coordinate three reconstruction operations 'at the same time', each lasting 'five to seven years'. Many commentators are alarmed at the prospect of such grandiose national plans to reshape 'the very social fabric' of target countries, linked as they are to huge potential contracts for western (and in particular US) businesses.3 This is linked to control of the World Bank, whose investment in 'post-conflict' countries has risen from 16 per cent of its lending in 1998 to 20-25 per cent.
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In short, there is a dearth of institutional memory or learning capacity among those with the resources to organize large-scale interventions and post-war reconstruction operations of this kind. There is no alternative to complex international cooperation, a major lesson to be learnt with important conflict resolution implications.
Another surprising aspect of the 1989-2004 post-war reconstruction experience has been the extent to which there have been commonalities in the reconstruction and withdrawal components across the dataset, despite huge discrepancies in conflict contexts, types of intervention and intervener, and whether these were forcible or non-forcible operations. This is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's locomotive cabin, in which, despite the different functions that they perform, the driver is faced with a uniform set of handles. In particular, a major claim in this chapter is that what we may loosely call the TRW blueprint' can broadly be seen to have been shared across the pre-1995 and the post-1995 periods, so that what we wrote in the first edition of this book can still be seen to apply, even where interventions may have been motivated by the 'war on terror'.
We can see this best by observing the continuing relevance for current IRW operations of definitions of the programme from the earlier period. In response to the request from Security Council Heads of Government meeting on 31 January 1992 to draft general principles that would 'guide decisions on when a domestic situation warrants international action', the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) defined 'post-conflict peacebuilding' as 'actions to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict' (Boutros-Ghali, 1992:11). This was at first largely identified with military demobilization and the political transition to participatory electoral democracy, but was progressively expanded in subsequent versions to include wider political, economic and social dimensions, In the 1995 Supplement to An Agenda for Peace it was envisaged that post-conflict peacebuilding would initially be undertaken by multifunctional UN operations, then handed over to civilian agencies under a resident coordinator, and finally transferred entirely to local agents (Boutros-Ghali, 1995). In 1997 the new UNSG, Kofi Annan, used similar language, defining post-conflict peacebuilding as 'the various concurrent and integrated actions undertaken at the end of a conflict to consolidate peace and prevent a recurrence of armed confrontation'. He distinguished this from ongoing humanitarian and development
activities in 'countries emerging from crisis', insofar as it has the specific political aims of reducing 'the risk of resumption of conflict' and contributing to the creation of 'conditions most conducive to reconciliation, reconstruction and recovery' (Annan, 1997c). The same body of ideas has been drawn on to inform what is now more usually termed 'post-conflict reconstruction' in the innumerable reports, policy papers and studies that are produced almost weekly by national capitals, regional organizations, international firiancial institutions, think-tanks and non-governmental organizations engaged in IRW operations - although, as we have noted, the context of intervention changes significantly when there is no peace settlement and when the intervenors are one of the formerly warring parties.
Four features common to these reconstruction and withdrawal programmes will enable us to draw up a summative matrix that we can then carry forward to the rest of the chapter.
First, we can note that at the heart of the definitions just given is the fact that post-war reconstruction is made up of the 'negative' task of ending continuing violence and preventing a relapse into war, and the 'positive' task of constructing a self-sustaining peace. In the words of the 2000 Brahimi Report:
History has taught that peacekeepers and peacebuilders are inseparable partners in complex operations: while peacebuilders may not be able to function without the peacekeepers' support, the peacekeepers have no exit without the peacebuilders' work.
In other words, the negative and positive tasks are mutually interdependent. Yet they are at the same time mutually contradictory. The logic inherent in the negative goal is at odds with important elements in the positive goal, while key assumptions behind the positive goal are often at cross-purposes with the more pressing short-term priorities of the negative goal. The task of mopping up a continuing war or preventing an early relapse back into war is likely to demand uncomfortable trade-offs that might jeopardize the longer-term goal of sustainable peace - for example, deals with unscrupulous power-brokers, or the early incorporation of largely unreconstructed local militia to shore up a critical security gap. Conversely, measures adopted on the assumption that it is market democracy that best sustains peaceful reconstruction long-term may en route increase the risk of reversion to war. On the governance front, conflictual electoral processes may exacerbate political differences and favour the 'wrong' politicians. On the economic front, the competitive nature of free-market capitalism may engender instability. On the social front, there are the well-known tensions between stability and justice. Both democracy and the market economy are inherently conflictual processes
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
197
which may offer a greater measure of political stability in the long run, but, as is often noted, are likely to increase political instability during the transition phase, particularly where there is little or no prior experience of them (Mansfield and Snyder, 1995, 2001; Snyder, 2000; Boyce, 2002). Unlike the situation in pre-war prevention, these tasks cannot be temporarily sequenced, but must all be undertaken at the same time - a major headache for IRW planners.
The second feature to be noted is the commonality of sectoral tasks across the IRW database. This can be illustrated in terms of both announced programmes and components of missions. In 1992 the UN Secretary-General outlined the sectoral tasks as:
disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction ofweapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation. (Boutros-Ghali, 1992: 32)
In 1997 they were seen to involve: 'the creation or strengthening of national institutions, the monitoring of elections, the promotion of human rights, the provision of reintegration and rehabilitation programmes and the creation of conditions for resumed development' (Annan, 1997c). This was reflected in the make-up of UN missions (see box 8.1).
Third, we must include commonality in planned temporal phases of IRW operations. Here there is no obvious formal pattern since different missions define phases differently. For example, UNTAC in Cambodia operated in terms of four phases and the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNM1K) envisaged five phases, whereas the early phases of
Box 8.1   Components of the UN Transition Authority in Cambodia
1: ' Military component-verify withdraws! of foreign fbrces.-rnonitor ceasefire violations; ; ■ organize cantonment and disarming of factions; assist mine-clearance.
2 ■ Civilian police .component: supervise local civilian police; training::.:
3 ; Human rights component: secure signing of human rights conventions by Supreme
; National Council; oversee human rights record of administration; initiate education and. :: ■ ■ training programmes. .'
4 OkI. administration componentsupervae administration.to ensure neutral.ehvironment. for election in five areas - foreign affairs, national defence, finance, publicsecurity, . . information;
5 Electoral component: conduct demagraphicsurvey; register and educate voters; draft : electoral law; supervise and verify election process.
6 Repatriation component: repatriate 360,000 refugees.
-7:; Rehabilitation component see to immediate food,health arid housing neects; begin:
essential restoration work on infrastructure; development work in villages with returnees. In addition, there was an information division.
Source:• United Nations, !S96: <!<l7--8-",
the 2003 Iraq operation included phases of the war. Nevertheless, in general terms it seems best to work in terms of three broad reconstruction phases: an immediate post-war intervention phase (phase one) when the tension between the negative and positive tasks is likely to be at its sharpest; a political stability phase (phase two) when a host government has attained sufficient legitimacy and control to allow the first stage of international withdrawal; and a normalization phase {phase three) when the country is seen to have attained 'normal' levels of autonomy and viability sufficient to enable the final stage of intervention withdrawal (UK Ministry of Defence, 2004). Beyond this, it is worth identifying a fourth stage that includes progress towards further declaratory goals articulated by IRW interveners, but shared by most or all other countries and therefore no longer strictly part of the post-war reconstruction process. It is important to note that the temporal phases in post-war reconstruction and de-escalation are also not sequential, but are nested within each other, so that the transition to phase two evidently has to be achieved in phase one and so on (see figure 8.1).
Fourth, and finally, there is the staged withdrawal of the international intervention presence itself, which, as just indicated, should be seen as a function of the prior phased sectoral changes in the domestic situation in the host country.
Talcing these four features together, we can draw up a matrix of the
international post-war reconstruction project since the.....end-sf-the
Cold War in order to evaluate it from a conflict resolution perspective. Box 8.2 offers a summative matrix of its main rhetorical provisions in order to clarify what we are trying to assess. It can be seen to be an awe-inspiring undertaking.
In evaluating this gigantic international post-war reconstruction enterprise from a conflict resolution perspective, we will look first at the literature on sectors and phases, and then at the literature on specific interventions. Most studies concentrate on either one or other of these, although some cover both (see works listed in note 1),
A sectoral assessment from a conflict resolution perspective
The matrix in box 8.2 should be understood as a framework model. The sectors intersect and there are cross-cutting issues such as gender or the environment. Its main usefulness, perhaps, is that it allows us to
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
Phase 4
Continuing
transformation
Post-intervention
Desired end-state
Intervention
Withdrawal Stage 2
Withdrawal Stage 1
Structural \ Cultural peacebuilding
Note: Compare with the hourglass model (chapter 1, figure 1.3),
Source: Ramsbotham, 2004; for nested paradigms, see Dugan, 199S: 9-20 and Lederach, 1997: 73-85. Figure S.l   IRWoperations: nested phases, nested tasks and withdrawal stages
discriminate within the sectors according to temporal phases. This is the most helpful format both for conflict resolution assessment and for IRW planners, because it brings out the phased cross-sectoral inter-dependencies more clearly in the ways and sequences in which they are experienced. Under phase one (intervention) we focus on the tradeoffs between the negative and positive priorities and note that this is where the security and law-and-order sectors are at their most significant. Under phase two (stabilization) we offer a brief analysis sector by sector of the interlocking requirements for political stability and note
Box 8.2 Post-war reconstruction/withdrawal matrix
phases in host country post-war reconstruction Sector A Security..
phase 1        International forces needed to control armed factions; supervise :
: DDR; help reconstitute national army; begin demining. Phase 2        National armed forces under home government control stranger than challengers.
Phase 3/4:     Demilitarized politics; societal security; traxisformedculturesof :
■■ ■ violence. .....■■..... .
Sector B       Law and Order
phase 1        international control of courts, etc.; break grip of organized
crime on government; train civilian police; promote human
rights/punish abuse, phase 2        Indigenous capacity to maintain basic order impartially under .:
the law. ..... .......
Phase 3/4     Non-politicized judiciary and police; respect for individual and
minority rights; reduction in organized crime. : Sector C Government
Phase 1        International supervision of new constitution, elections, etc.,
prevent intimidation; limit corruption, phase 2        Reasonably representative government; move from.winner-take-. all to power-sharing system; stable relationship between centre :
and regions.
Phase 3/4     Manage peaceful transfer of power via democratic elections;
development of civil society within genuinepolitical community;.
integrate local into national politics.
Sector D       Economy --------- -
Phase 1 r;ir. International provision of humanitarian relief; restore essential:-.;;:
services; limit exploitation of movable resources by spoilers. Phase 2        Formal economy yields sufficient revenue for government to
provide essential services; capacity to re-employ many former.... ■
combatants; perceived prospects for future improvement (esp.
employment).
Phase 3/4     Development in long-term interest of citizens from all backgrounds.
Sector E .....Society........ .................................
Phase 1        Overcome initial distrust/monitor media; international
: protection of vulnerable populations; return of refugees under way.
Phase 2        Manage conflicting priorities of peace and justice; responsible
.....................media......... ■
Phase 3/4. .. . Depoliticize social divisions; heal psychological wounds;
progress towards gender equality; education towards long-term
reconciliation. International intervention transitions
Phase 1        Direct, culturally sensitive support for the peace process. Phase I-.-.-.      Phased transference to local/civilian control avoiding undue
interference/neglect. Phase 3/4     Integration into cooperative and equitable regional/global
structures. ■ ■................ ........... .........
200
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
201
the critical significance of the government sector at this point. Under phase three (normalization) we note the increased relative importance of the economic and socio-cultural sectors, and also discuss briefly the controversial relationship with phase four aspirations. The difficult trade-offs and dilemmas uncovered in this way show why many conflict resolvers have deep misgivings over the assumptions behind interventions of this kind - and why in some cases they disagree among themselves.
Phase one: intervention
Putting together the phase one tasks from across all five sectors of the matrix in box 8.2, we can observe at a glance what a daunting prospect the initial phase of the intervention is:
Control armed factions; supervise DDR (disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation); help restructure and integrate new national armed forces; begin de-mining; reconstitute courts and prisons; break grip of organized crime; train police; promote human rights and punish abuse; oversee new constitution, eliv rions and restructuring of civil administration; prevent intimidation; provide humanitarian relief; restore essential services; limit exploitation of movable primary resources by spoilers; overcome initial distrust between groups; monitor and use media to support peace process; protect vulnerable populations; supervise initial return of refugees.
In this immediate post-intervention phase it can be seen that security (peacekeeping) and elite bargaining (peacemaking) predominate in ensuring the negative task of preventing a relapse into war. At the same time a transition has to be achieved from emergency relief towards the phase two political stability requirements. Three features determine the core challenges in phase one.
First, there is the fundamental/act of continuing conflict. Short of total prior military victory for one of the contending parties, the surviving undefeated conflictants are still intent upon achieving their preexisting political goals. In the first edition of this book we called this 'Clausewitz in reverse', because in this sense the peace is best seen as a continuation of the war 'with the addition of other means'.4 This is an insight that comes directly from the conflict resolution tradition. Where the war has been brought to an end by a peace process, its essence lies precisely in the effort to persuade undefeated conflict parties that their persisting and no doubt undiminished political aims can best be served by non-violent politics rather than by a perpetuation or a resumption of violence. Where the main power struggle has initially been decided by military means (as in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq) the same still applies, inasmuch as surviving conflict parties continue to vie for post-war influence and additional actors and sub-actors emerge as the reconstruction process unfurls to complicate
\        the situation further. What Grenier and Daudelin, drawing on experi-f       ence in El Salvador, have called the peacemaking or post-war recon-»        struction 'market place' is focused around a series of trade-offs in !j       which cessation of violence is traded for other commodities such as i       political opportunity and economic advantage (Grenier and Daudelin, \       1995: 350). In phase one of the post-intervention process it is the I       interveners who usually play the key role in ensuring that there are }       incentives to discontinue violence by creating what the UN Secretary-^       General has termed negative and positive inducements (under the I        latter distinguishing the two conflict resolution approaches of 'civic ,        action' and 'peace initiatives') (Annan, 1997c). This pattern can be seen :       across the range of IRW cases from international pressure to corral the South African administration and South-West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) leaders into the Namibian elections in November 1989, through to the complex manoeuvring in Afghanistan from the time of the Bonn negotiations in November 2001, and on to the effort to keep all legitimate parties involved in the post-November 2003 preparations for a phased transfer of sovereignty in Iraq. In the words of the Brahimi Report (2000) with reference to the earlier ■       period, 'United Nations operations did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried to create them'. Even when armed conflict comes to I        an end, political conflict continues, which is why we should strictly refer to 'post-war' reconstruction rather than employ the usual 'post-conflict' misnomer. In Afghanistan and Iraq post-war reconstruction attempts began while the war was still continuing, albeit at a less ;       intense level.
[ The second key feature is the fact of the cost of war, the fact that in the
course of the preceding war (or under the preceding regime) the instruments of governance in all five thematic dimensions are likely to have been much debilitated if not destroyed. It is difficult to convey the scale of devastation: from huge loss of life (in the millions in countries
; like Cambodia and Afghanistan); hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people (a quarter of the population in
[ Mozambique); ruined economies even in naturally rich countries (Angola's budget deficit 23 per cent of GDP; El Salvador per capita income 38 per cent of pre-war figures); the destruction of pre-existing political structures even in quite developed systems (in Kosovo with the collapse of Serb institutions; in Iraq with the instantaneous flight of public employees at all levels); and the substitution for all this of predatory warlords, criminalized economies and institutionalized 'klepto-cracies' (Cranna, ed., 1994). In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the four and a half years to autumn 2003, up to 3.5 million are estimated to have died as a result of the violence (International Peace Committee), with 3.4 million internally displaced and 17 million
202
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
203
without food security out of a population of 53 million (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance) (Swing, 2003: 25). In the first phase, intervening military forces are often the only large-scale organization with the capacity to respond, as in Basra (Iraq) from April 2003, when British troops found themselves having to run emergency services and begin rebuilding the whole of the local infrastructure. Bernard Kouchner, head of UNMIK in Kosovo, describes how the UN was initially dependent on NATO for much of its logistics and personnel ! (Kouchner, 2001). This raises critical questions about civil-military relations at many levels, including the staged handover to host-country civilian authorities that defines phase two (Williams, 1998). Faced with the task of disarming militias and beginning to reconstruct a national army, of training police and rebuilding courts and prisons, of producing electoral rolls and overseeing the creation of a new constitution . followed by 'free and fair elections', of repatriating and resettling refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), of restoring emergency services and beginning to revive the economy, of introducing- - - - -human rights training and safeguards for threatened minorities - all in the face of severe time constraints - it is little wonder that Gareth Evans, Australian foreign minister and one of the architects of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords in Cambodia, described the UNTAC mandate as 'overly ambitious and in some respects clearly not achievable' (Evans, 1994: 27). It remains to be seen what verdicts will be passed on the comparable efforts of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) in Afghanistan, and of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its successors in Iraq. [
The third key feature is the fact that there are enemies of the reconstruction process - especially where wars are ongoing and parties see the interveners as combatants. In peace processes, the spoilers range from ideologically implacable enemies, through disappointed political interests, to unscrupulous exploiters who profited from the previous dispensation and are reluctant to accept its demise (Stedman, 1997). Here there has been an evolution of experience since 1989, when the military component of IRW operations was still conceived as a variant on traditional peacekeeping, since the early cases were seen as the implemen- ": tation of agreed settlements in which all the main players concurred. Bitter experience in Angola, Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda taught that provision had to be made for the Savimbis, Karadzics, Aideeds and Interahamwe militias. As a result intervening forces have been asked to combine what had hitherto often been seen to be incompatible combat/enforcement and peacekeeping/consent-creating roles. As we have seen in chapter 6, combat troops are likely to find themselves in peacekeeping situations, while peacekeepers have been compelled to
evolve also into peace-enforcers: 'neutrality' has been reinterpreted as robust 'impartial' support for the peace or reconstruction process. But one of the main conflict resolution insights applies here - in intense conflict zones no intervener will be seen as impartial. This has been a steep learning curve exacerbated by problems of coordinating best practice across what are often widely divergent national contingents, the lack of experience of such roles in some forces (including those of the United States), and the rapid turnover of trodps just when such experience has been gained. Depending upon the type of spoilers involved, it is now generally recognized to be essential to make provision in advance for transforming spoilers into stakeholders in a peace process (as has happened for example in Northern Ireland) or failing that by accommodating those who are biddable without serious damage to the reconstruction process (a difficult question of judgement); for reducing the scale and significance of their support constituencies (a demanding exercise in 'winning hearts and minds'); and for defeating or marginalizing those who remain irreconcilable (a challenge for robust enforcement). This may be easier said than done. Spoilers have become increasingly sophisticated at deliberately exploiting the tensions and contradictions between the negative and positive tasks pinpointed above - for example, squaring the discrepant priorities of assuring the security of interveners and 'winning the hearts and minds' of the host population, or attempting to reduce initial expectations while at the same time being seen to be 'iiiakim; a difference'. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge succeeded in forcing the abandonment of the cantonment and demobilization plan in November 2002, but, surprisingly, not the 23 May 2003 national elections. In Afghanistan and Iraq, opponents of the post-war outcome have targeted UN and international aid workers with devastating effect, as well as those engaged in economic reconstruction and the nascent reconstituted police, armed forces and administration, using violence to frustrate the objectives ofwhat they see as occupying forces.
In short, the main problem for conflict resolution in phase one is the fact that these are unavoidably militarized environments in which longer-term conflict resolution goals may be sacrificed to shorter-term security and emergency requirements. They also tend to be 'top-down' and 'external-actor-driven' processes in contradiction to the conflict resolution principles of 'bottom-up' and local-empowerment' peace-building.
Phase two: stability
Phase two is defined as the point at which enough progress has been made in stabilizing the domestic political situation to enable a safe
204 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
handover of power to a host government and to undertake the first j{ stage of international withdrawal. Reading across the sectoral phase two stipulations from the matrix in box 8.2 we can summarize I he requirements as:
National armed forces under home government control stronger than challengers; sufficient indigenous capacity to maintain basic order impartially under the law; adequate democratic credentials of elected government with system seen to remain open to those dissatisfied with the initial result; a reasonably stable relationship between centre and regions; a formal economy yielding sufficient revenue for government to provide essentia! services (with continuing international assistance); economic capacity to absorb many former combatants and progress in encouraging general belief in better future employment prospects; adequate success in managing conflicting priorities of peace and justice, protecting minority rights and fostering a reasonably independent yet I responsible media. f
Given the non-sequential and nested nature of post-war reconstruction 1 phases, the attainment of these demanding phase two requirements is -1 initially a task for phase one. Their consolidation, accompanied by further progress towards phase three goals, is the proper task for phase two. Here it is the 'structural peacebuilding' aspect of post-war recon-struction that predominates in general and the 'government' sector around which the other sectors can be seen to hinge in particular. This phase evidently poses particular problems for conflict resolution, because of the severe compromises that have to be made on conflict ,* resolution principles in the name of stability. In order to clarify this, -| we will outline the phase two stability requirements here without 1 criticism, and then summarize these difficult issues when we come on to consider phase three.
The literature on the security sector tasks is large, covering as it does the ponderously termed 'disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, resettlement and reintegration' (DDRRR) operations, and the (re)construction of national armed forces under the control of the ■ government (Collier, 1994; Cillers, ed., 1995; Berdal, 1996; Ball, 1997: Kingma, 1997, 2002). This can be seen to include a wide range of more specific issues, from control of small arms and light weapons (UNIDR. 1996) to the reintegration of child soldiers (Goodwin-Gill and Cohn, 1994; McCalin, 1995), and demining (TJSDOD, 1998). In 1992-3 in Angola some 350 UNAVEM II military observers were expected to supervise the process for more than 150,000 combatants - and unsurprisingly failed (Anstee, 1996). Since then, the international commu- . nity has acquired a better understanding of what is required in these ■ more challenging cases. For rebel forces or warlords to disarm is to \
give up their trump card, so there are huge incentives to cheat, and .....;
the interveners need clear vision, steady will and skill in applying
Post-War Reconstruction
the right combination of pressure, independent verification and positive political and economic inducements. The key point is reached when reconstituted national forces are, first, under secure host government control, and, second, decisively stronger than remaining undemo.bilized forces or private armies. Until this stage is reached, the situation is too volatile to contemplate withdrawal by intervening military forces (short of effective abandonment of the whole project), although current planning in Afghanistan appears to be prepared to risk this.
The law and order sector is equally well covered in the literature, with particular focus on the related topics of civilian policing (Call and Barnett, 1999), transitional justice (Kritz, 1995; Mani, 2002), and human rights (O'Flaherty and Gisvold, eds, 1998). Once courts and prisons have been rebuilt and the judiciary and police reconstituted and trained, the phase two requirement is that politically volatile elements should not be tempted to gain significant advantage through incitement to violence, and that criminal elements should not be able to operate with impunity. The 'impartiality' requirement is crucial, since otherwise the judicial and policing systems lose legitimacy, but this cannot be expected to go unchallenged, because disappointed interests will interpret the maintenance of order as suppression. As most of the 1989-2004 IRW cases suggest, law and order issues tend to get worse before they get better. The crime rate soars, as the peacetime economy is unable to absorb large numbers of unemployed ex-soldiers and their families as well as hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, while a continuing wartime black economy, a ready availability of weaponry, and the destabilizing effects of what has usually been an abrupt introduction of free market conditionalities further destabilize the situation. In El Salvador, for example, there were more killings per year in 1998 than there had been during the war. The lesson is that this must be expected and planned for. Negotiating acceptable conditions for justice and policing may involve issues that go to the heart of divided societies, as in post-conflict Rwanda, South Africa and Northern Ireland.
It is with the phase two government sector requirements that the heart of the post-war reconstruction challenge is reached. The literature on constitutional arrangements and elections is extensive and controversial (Kumar, ed„ 1998; Sisk and Reynolds, eds, 1998). Unfortunately, this also tends to be the most testing and intransigent of the challenges, because it concerns the fundamental question over which all major political conflicts are in the end waged - who rules? Agreements have to be made on constitutional frameworks and electoral processes where domestic political interests want to secure advantages for themselves, and a process is needed to establish a
206
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
structure that is in the interests of the population as a whole. The interveners have to tread warily, therefore, and this is where the international legitimacy provided in cases where the main domestic players have already agreed to the process in outline, and where it has been endorsed by regional organizations and the United Nations, is so beneficial. Evidently there are numerous possible constitutional arrangements that work in different circumstances, and there is no space to discuss the permutations here (Shain and Linz, 1995). But the phase two requirements are clear: first, sufficient perceived democratic legitimacy for the government of the day, and, second, enough general confidence in the continuing openness of the system to encourage losers to continue their struggle non-violently within the constitution. This is absolutely critical to success in consolidating phase two and moving on to phase three, as we note in the next two paragraphs on the economy and the social sectors. In cases where there is little or no previous experience of such practices, or where there is a new state, or where central government has had little control over the provinces or has only imposed itself by authoritarian or tyrannical means, these requirements become very daunting indeed. For this reason some have questioned the wisdom of a 'rush to elections' in intense and volatile political environments of this land. Further discussion would include questions about the legitimacy of international democratic norms in relation to the power and interest of those promoting them and to the different cultures into which they are to be transplanted, about the role that external actors can or should be expected to play, and about the relative effectiveness of top-down government assistance programmes or those that work more from the bottom-up with civil society and non-government groups (see chapter 9).
In the economy sector the phase two benchmarks are determined by three main linked factors (Ball and Halevy, 1996; Kreimer et al., 1998; Pugh, 2000; Ball, 2001). The first is that the official economy should yield sufficient revenue for the government to be able to provide essential services (with continuing support from international donors where needed). This is a major requirement that is closely dependent upon success in the 'government' sector because it presupposes progress in taming or pegging back the unofficial economy, and in many cases in overcoming the continuing reluctance of regional authorities to hand over revenues to the central government. The second requirement is to have understood and made strenuous provision to begin dismantling the entrenched war economy (or authoritarian kleptocracy) that allows exploiters to continue to resist reconstruction. We have seen that is likely to include an international regime to control exploitation of movable assets such as diamonds,
drugs or oil. The third requirement is harder to measure because it involves the broad development of the economy as a whole. The phase two need is, first, to absorb enough of those previously employed in disbanded militia as will reduce disaffection to containable levels, and, second, more generally for there to be a sense that, however difficult and indeed miserable material conditions may be now, there is sufficient evidence of likely future improvement - particularly in employment prospects. Fortunately, the withdrawal of most or all of the intervening armed forces at this stage does not preclude longer-term engagement and commitment from external development agencies. Experience from 1989-2004 IRW teaches that it is the management of future expectation that is, if anything, even more important than the delivery of present gain. Several commentators advise that market conditlonalities should not be imposed too precipitately, as was, by common agreement, the case to begin with in Mozambique. Paris is one who recommends a shift to 'peace-oriented adjustment policies' that recognize the priority of stimulating economic growth even at the risk of inflation, and that target resources at those hardest hit during the transition period (1997: 85-6). The central phase two aim in this sector is to persuade as many as possible that things will improve so long as they continue to participate in the reconstruction process.
Finally, in the social sector, the phase two benchmarks are not so clear-cut, beyond the aim of containing intergroup antagonism below levels that might threaten the reconstruction process and preventing its exploitation by unscrupulous political interests (UNRISD, 1995). This means adequate reassurances for threatened minorities (Gurr, 2000), the settlement of refugees (Stein et al., 1995; Black and Coser, eds, 1999) and the management of conflicting priorities of peace and justice (Boraine et al., 1997; Schuett, 1997; Skaar, 1999; Baker, 2001). Measurements of social divisions are very difficult to make, but most of the deeper recourses for overcoming them, including the healing of trauma and reconciliation, can only be expected to come to fruition over the longer term (see chapter 10). One key dimension now widely recognized as vital is what Luc Reychler calls 'the education, information and communication system':
Here we look at the degree of schooling, the level of discrimination, the relevance of the subjects and the attitudes held, the control of the media, the professional level of the journalist, the extent to which the media play a positive role in the transformation of the conflicts, and the control of destructive rumours. (Reychler and Paffenholz, eds, 2001:13)
Turning to the sixth part of the matrix in box 8.2, 'International intervention transitions', it should now be evident that the sectoral
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Post-War Reconstruction
developments listed above, taken together, make up the demanding requirements for an ordered stage one military withdrawal. This should not be seen as an 'exit strategy' so much as a 'safe handover strategy' to indigenous civilian control. Interveners who are not prepared to see it in these terms should not intervene in the first place. As it is, the familiar tension between short-term 'negative' and long-term 'positive' goals now plays right through to the withdrawal process itself. On the one hand, the message to the wider population of the host country (as also no doubt to domestic constituencies in the intervening countries) is: 'We are not permanently occupying forces; we will be leaving very soon and handing over to you.' But at the same time the message to would-be spoilers has to be: 'It is no good waiting for us to go so that you can resume your old ways; we are here for the duration and will only pull out when the situation is secure. You had better realize this and join in the peace process on the best terms available to you while there is still time.' It is clearly easier to resolve the tension between these positions when the forces involved have international and domestic legitimacy.
As to the length of time that the stage one military-civilian transition takes, there are evidently no fixed rules. It depends upon the depth and complexity of the challenge in each case. In the heroic days of the early 1990s, for example, swift transitions were envisaged: for example, UNTAG in Namibia from April 1989 to March 1990; ONUSAL in El Salvador from July 1991 to April 1995; UNTAC in Cambodia from March 1992 to September 1993, etc. In some cases there was a handover to follow-on missions (UNAVEM II to UNAVEM III in Angola), in some there was a handover to a beefed-up intervention force (UNPROFOR to IFOR in Bosnia), and in some there was almost unconditional withdrawal (UNOSOM II in Somalia and UNAMIR in Rwanda). In the post-1995 period there has been a greater readiness to stay longer in Bosnia and Kosovo, since these were new political entities under effective international trusteeship (and in Kosovo with the added continuing uncertainty about future status). The operation in East Timor (now Timor Leste) lasted from 1999 to 2002. With Afghanistan and Iraq we seem to have returned to the breakneck pace of earlier transitions - at any rate in terms of announced timetables. The planning framework for the UK's Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit being set up in 2004 is for eighteen months.
Phase three: normalization - and beyond
A cross-sectoral conspectus from the matrix in box 8.2 shows that many of the longer-term phase three requirements, commonly listed among the rhetorical aims of the intervention, constitute desiderata beyond the present capacity of many post-war countries (though
they are very relevant to the current stage in Northern Ireland, for example):
Demilitarized politics; societal security; transformed cultures of violence; non-politicized judiciary and police; respect for individual and minority rights; reduction in organized crime; peaceful transition of power via democratic elections; development of civil society within genuine political community; equitable integration of local and national politics; development in the long-term interest of citizens from all backgrounds; depoliticization of social divisions; the healing of psychological wounds; progress towards gender equality; education towards long-term reconciliation; integration into cooperative and equitable regional/global structures.
Here we reach a major difference of opinion among commentators between those who suggest that goals such as local empowerment, gender equality or reconciliation are better postponed in the interest either of stability or of conceptual and operational clarity, and those who insist that they are what justify the intervention in the first place and must therefore be forefronted from the start. This issue cuts across the conflict resolution community. For example, Michael Lund argues in the first direction: 'It is laudable to wish to improve society by eliminating as many of its deficiencies as possible... but such an approach risks making peacebuilding into a grab bag of unfulfilled human wants' (2003: 26). But others argue the opposite way (Lederach, 1997; Reychler and Paffenholz, eds, 2001).
We can now sum up conflict resolution criticisms of international post-war reconstruction efforts since the end of the Cold War, ranging from those who object to particular aspects of current practice or to particular interventions, through those who advocate a reformed international intervention capacity, to those who reject the whole idea of outsider intervention on the grounds that it inevitably serves the interests of the most powerful (see box 8.3). Paris describes the central tenet of peacebuilding as the assumption that the surest foundation for peace is 'market democracy, that is, a liberal democratic polity and a market-oriented economy':
Peacebuilding is in effect an enormous experiment in social engineering - an experiment that involves transplanting western models of social, political, and economic organization into war-shattered states in order to control civil conflict: in other words, pacification through political and economic liberalization. (1997: 56)
This view merges with the radical critiques from international political economy and elsewhere as discussed in chapters 1, 4 and 6. We may note again here that from a conflict resolution perspective the primary aim is not to secure western norms but to reach agreements with parties aimed at reconciling differences in a way that is sensitive to local cultural and political conditions and in the interest of the
210 CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Box 8.3 A transformationist critique of IRW practice
At least eight components can be discerned in transformationist critiques over
the 1989-2004 period: :
1 An insistence on greater emphasis on 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down' initiatives and
the empowerment of indigenous grassroots participation. Sift
2 Criticism of the refative neglect of the social-psychological dimension. :a
3 Unhappiness about sequenced and foreshortened time frames that fail to dovetail short-,"1 ■ . medium-and. long-term priorities properly. ;* '
4 A questioningof the motives, of powerful interveners and an insistence that they be made: : : accountable to hostpeoples and the international community.. : :?*'[
5 A demand formore emphasis on gender equality .... i
6 An.insistence on greater cultural sensitivity.
7 Unease about, if npt opposition to,:militaiy involvementin and often: control of .What' m should be non-military .tasks: - .   ■■. ..-^i
8 Disquiet at the way what were UNTed operations in the early J990shave ndweome to --* be controlled bythe militarily more powerfulcountries.vvith the UN increasingly sidelined"    -m ■
. and used as little more than a rubber stamp.
domestic population, and to mitigate the conflict-fuelling effects of external influences on the conflict.
In general from a conflict resolution perspective it can be seen that, whereas in phases one and two it is peacekeeping, elite peacemaking and structural peacebuilding that predominate, in order to secure the more far-reaching and deeply rooted declared sectoral goals of phase three normalization it is social and cultural peacebuilding that becomes more important. In other words, over time 'software' becomes relatively more significant than 'hardware'. Until this socio-cultural transformation happens, therefore, much of the formality of, say, an apparently independent judiciary or an electoral democracy or declaratory instruments on minority rights remains just that - a formality, behind which authoritarianism and partisan discrimination will continue to prevail.
As to the next stage of withdrawal of intervention personnel associated with phase three normalization, this is also less clear-cut than stage one withdrawal. It varies widely from case to case and merges into what might be termed 'normal' international presence and intrusion in developing countries, where it has been said, for example, that 'UNDP never leaves'. The sixth section of the matrix in box 8.2 describes the aim as 'integration into cooperative and equitable regional and global structures'. This emphasizes the importance of regional stability in IRW operations as noted in chapters 4 and 5. It also evidently begs the big questions about global equity and the global distribution of power that forms an important sub-theme of this book.
Post-War Reconstruction 211
Lack of space demands brevity in this section, even though it covers the other half of the extant literature, that on evaluating individual cases. The literature on individual post-war reconstruction cases is too large and diverse to select usefully here, although many of the general accounts already referenced also include specific cases (see works listed in note 1).
In general terms there is, unsurprisingly, a range of opinion here. The complexity of the intervention debate is shown in general terms through the fact that both proponents and opponents of intervention are found along the conservative, liberal, radical spectrum: Wolfowitz vs Luttwak, Wheeler vs Chandler, Kaldor vs Chomsky. A similar lack of agreement can be seen when it comes to evaluating individual interventions. For example, as Lund notes, Cambodia 1992-3 is variously classed as a 'success' (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000J, a 'partial success' (Hampson, 1996) and a 'failure' (Durch et al„ 2003).
One particularly useful feature of analysis of the kind undertaken in this chapter is that it clearly distinguishes phases when assessing the success of individual interventions. For example, in the literature the most common criterion used to evaluate success is the phase one negative security criterion (avoidance of a relapse into war), because this is the easiest to quantify:
Surprisingly, once we have examined the many studies that take an interest in the restoration of minimum, physical security, it is much harder to find rigorous, data-based analyses of the other desired outcomes of macro-level peacebuilding, especially using comparative data across several countries. (Lund, 2003:31)
If a particular case drops out of readily available annual 'major armed conflict' assessments, as described in chapter 3, it can be classed as a success. From this perspective, 1992 Angola and 1993 Rwanda were spectacular failures because the loss of life in 1993 and 1994 respectively was far worse than before the intervention. Most of the others, however, are seen as successful - including Haiti right through to the end of 2003 (Lund, 2003: 30). The second most common criterion is the phase two stabilization government sector criterion of 'free and fair' immediate post-intervention elections. If this is taken as the yardstick, then another set of judgements is made, but once again this indicates success in most cases - despite continuing controversy about what constitutes a 'free and fair election' (Goodwin-Gill, 1994). And again this has tended to include Haiti after the 1995 elections.
That the two most popular criteria for measuring success are defective and could be misleading is shown, first, by noting the phase
212
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
three normalization government sector criterion of a non-violent democratic transfer of power and, second, by talcing into account all the other sectors, The phase three government criterion of a peaceful transfer of power delivers a dramatically altered - and sobering -result. Durch et al. (2003) suggest the survival of the political system through a second election as the criterion for 'effective transition', Doyle and Sambanis (2000) employ a standard of 'political openness' (see Lund, 2003: 31). A peaceful democratic transfer of power seems a more searching criterion. Very few IRW cases, even from the earlier period, pass this test. In Namibia, Cambodia and Mozambique, for example, all variously described as successes in the literature in the 1990s, the initial electoral winners are still clinging on to power 10-15 years later. In two of these cases (Mozambique and Cambodia) the incumbent was already in situ before the intervention took place. In one (Cambodia) the current leader even lost the initial election.
Similarly different results obtain if all the box 8.2 sectors are considered in evaluating success. In Haiti, for example, whereas phase one cessation of violence and phase two government first election criteria suggested success, it was evident from other criteria that this was precarious. Taking the five sectors in turn - the arming of President Aristide's own Chimeres militia instead of reliance on national armed forces and civilian police; the failure to prosecute political murders; the fiasco of an opposition boycott and 5 per cent turnout for the 2000 presidential election; the failure of the government to begin to provide essential services (exacerbated by the blocking of foreign aid); and the deepening social rift between Aristide's populism and business and professional interests - all clearly showed that, far from consolidation of phase two and progress towards phase three normalization, even the phase one achievements of the 1994-6 IRW effort were unravelling.
Finally, we must address the key question: 'Whose success?' Who decides on the overall criteria and the extent of their implementation? This will prove a decisive principle for conflict resolution intervention as discussed in chapter 13. It includes an evaluation of the motives of the interveners, but two other even more important criteria are international legitimacy, however difficult to evaluate, and, above all from a conflict resolution perspective, the opinion of the host populations themselves. Are those who are the targets of the intervention better off than they would have been without it? Have benefits outweighed costs? How can such responses be reliably elicited - particularly in highly contested political post-war environments? These are the questions that have to be satisfactorily answered if there is to be a reliable evaluation of post-war reconstruction efforts.
Post-War Reconstruction
213
Setting aside intense disagreement about specific interventions, the argument in this chapter is that the success of post-settlement peace-building and post-war reconstruction efforts must be judged according to conflict resolution and conflict transformation principles. We have stressed the importance of domestic opinion within the host countries as the true arbiter, however hard it may be to ascertain, and have suggested that the perceived legitimacy of interventions appears to decrease as we move across the spectrum of intervention types in table 8.1. We have argued that the shift from UN-led post-settlement peacebuilding to mixed or non-UN interventions where there is no settlement or the settlement is imposed has compounded the problems of legitimacy. We have drawn attention to the reconstruction 'planning gap', which dictates that IRW enterprises have to be international. Whatever the initial war-fighting requirements may be In some cases, the overall post-war reconstruction effort requires coordinated efforts across national agencies, across civil-military operational divides, and across domestic-multinational/multilateral partnerships. Winning the peace makes even greater demands than winning the war. We have produced a matrix of the phased sectoral tasks that constitute the post-war reconstruction programme according to the principles of complementarity and contingency (box-&-2), and noted how, from a conflict resolution perspective, both phases and sectors are 'nested' (figure 8.1). The sectors interconnect, and the admittedly ambitious goals of phases three/four must imbue the entire undertaking from the start. This places a huge onus on effective cooperation between domestic parties and the interveners. In phase one (immediate post-intervention) when there is a situation of ongoing conflict, we have seen how the peacekeeping and elite peacemaking components tend to predominate. But, as elaborated in chapter 6, in a post-war reconstruction context military forces are there to support the peace process within an overall conflict resolution scenario. In phase two (stabilization) we noted how there is an unavoidable tension between the political stability requirements that enable a safe withdrawal of intervening armed forces, and the longer-term normalization and transformation norms that legitimized the intervention in the first place. It is the government sector and the political and economic tasks of structural peacebuilding that predominate in this phase. The key requirement of the intervening military at this point is that their withdrawal should be seen as a function of political stability in the host country orientated towards the construction of a sustainable peace. At all these stages it is important to draw parties
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
into negotiations, hold open political space, and continuously develop and reframe the grounds for agreement. Finally, it is in phase three (normalization) and beyond that the full conflict resolution and conflict transformation goals can be attained. Cultural peacebuilding and the social-psychological sector come into their own here. We elaborate on this in the next chapter.
■  c II ,'i P T h ft
9
Peacebuilding
Recommended reading
Cousens and Kumar, eds (2000); Griffiths, ed. (1998); Hampson (1996); Kumar, ed. (1997); Lund (2003); Paris (2004); Reychler and Paffenholz, eds (2001); Stedman      -I -     -J- -
et al., eds (2002); Woodward (2003). ! ?
I =
The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons ... is possible only because dehumanizatibn, ..... although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. Because it is a distortion of becoming more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning the oppressed must not, in seeldng to regain their humanity become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
During the past ten years the literature on post-conflict peacebuilding has burgeoned, while within the conflict resolution field a number of scholar-practitioners have led a revision of thinking about the complex dynamics and processes of post-conflict peacebuilding, including the idea that effective and sustainable peacemaking processes must be based not merely on the manipulation of peace agreements made by elites, but more importantly on the empowerment of communities torn apart by war to build peace from below. This complements the account of international intervention and reconstruction offered in chapter 8. The revision of thinking has led to clearer understanding in three areas. First, in the recognition that embedded cultures and economies of violence provide more formidable barriers to constructive intervention than originally assumed. In these conflicts, 'simple' one-dimensional interventions, whether by traditional mediators aiming at formal peace agreements or peacekeepers placed to supervise ceasefires or oversee elections, are unlikely to produce comprehensive or lasting resolution. Second, in the specification of the significance of post-conflict peacebuilding and of the idea that formal agreements need to be underpinned by understandings, structures and long-term development frameworks that will erode
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Peacebuilding
Economic-social
Political-constitutional
(Source: Reynolds Levy, 2004, developed from Lederach, 1995,1997) Figure 9.1   Framework for peacebuilding from below
cultures of violence and sustain peace processes on the ground. Third, in the related idea of the significance of local actors and of the nongovernmental sector, and the links with local knowledge and wisdom. This alliance is to enhance sustainable citizen-based peacebuilding initiatives and to open up participatory public political spaces in order to allow institutions of civil society to flourish. The framework within which peacebuilding from below might operate, and examples of the peacebuilding constituencies involved, are shown in figure 9.1.
In this section we trace the emergence of this perspective, examine the development of peacebuilding theory and policy, and also examine the progress made in sustaining peace processes via authentic strategies based on the peacebuilding from below approach. We conclude the chapter with some reflections on the difficulties of implementing peacebuilding from below strategies, illustrated with reference to a case study of Kosovo. The conclusion is that peacebuilding from below cannot be seen in isolation from the broader process of cosmopolitan conflict resolution, acting to confront the global and higher level forces that impact on local communities.
Much of the development of thinking about peacebuilding came during the course of experience gained in supporting local groups trying to preserve or cultivate cultures of peace in areas of armed conflict in the 1990s. The wars in former Yugoslavia, for example, provided challenging situations for local peacemakers, and approaches to peacebuilding were developed, representing what Fetherston (1998) called anti-hegemonic, counter-hegemonic and post-hegemonic peacebuilding projects, and what Nordstrom referred to as 'counter-lifeworld constructs' that challenge the cultures of violence (1992:270). The idea of peacebuilding from below also echoes Elise Boulding's insight, noted in chapter 12, that cultures of peace can survive in small pockets and spaces even in the most violent of conflicts.
These shifts in thinking moved the emphasis in conflict resolution work from an outsider neutral approach towards a partnership with local actors, and it is this relationship which is one of the key characteristics of peacebuilding from below. In this section the emergence of the approach is illustrated in the work of two scholar-practitioners, Adam Curie (see chapter 2) and John Paul Lederach. Throughout his academic career (which ended formally in 1978 when he retired from the Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford), and also through the period of his 'retirement', Curie, a Quaker, has been deeply involved in the practice of peacemaking. In the 1990s much of this involvement took the form of supporting the activity of the Osijek Centre for Peace, Non-Violence and Human Rights, the site of the most violent fighting of the Serb Croat War from 1992. This involvement with the people of Osijek, who were trying to rebuild a tolerant society while surrounded by the enraged and embittered feelings engendered by the war, caused Curie to reflect about the problems of practical peacemaking. It was apparent, for example, that the model of mediation specified in his earlier book on mediation (In the Middle, 1986) and distilled from his experiences in the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s was very difficult to apply on the ground in the confusion and chaos of the type of conflict epitomized by the wars in former Yugoslavia. It was still the case that the use of mediatory techniques would be much more likely to produce the shift in attitudes and understanding necessary for a stable peace, a resolution of conflict, than the use of conventional diplomacy alone: 'solutions reached through negotiation may be simply expedient and not imply any change of heart. And this is the crux of peace. There must be a change of heart. Without this no settlement can be considered secure' (Curie, 1992:132). However, Curie realized through his involvement with the Osijek project that the range of
21 i
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
conflict traumas and problems was so vast that the model of mediation based on the intervention of outsider-neutrals was simply not : powerful or relevant enough to promote peace. As a result he made two important revisions to his peace praxis (Woodhouse, 1999). First, Curie concluded that:
Since conflict resolution by outside bodies and individuals has so far proved ineffective [in the chaotic conditions of contemporary ethnic : conflict - particularly, but not exclusively, in Somalia, Eastern Europe and the former USSR], it is essential to consider the peacemaking potential within the conflicting communities themselves. (1S94:96)
He now saw the role of conflict resolution in post-Cold War conflicts as providing a variety of support to local peacemakers through an advisory, consultative-facilitative role via workshops and training in a wide variety of potential fields, which the local groups might identify as necessary. The task is to empower people of goodwill in conflict-affected communities to rebuild democratic institutions, and the starting point for this is to help in 'the development of the local peacemakers' inner resources of wisdom, courage and compassionate non-violence' (1994:104). This in turn was linked in Curie's thinking to a deeper transformative quest to 'tame the hydra' of violence by understanding nor only the politics of conflict but the deeper spiritual and philosophical:: sources of wisdom which would favour peace (Curie, 1999).
Second, Curie recognized an important role for the UN in this process of empowerment and in this sense sees the need to make connections between the official mandates of the UN agencies, including peacekeeping, and the unofficial roles of the NGOs in conflict zones. The approach of Curie has been to transform his original idea of active mediation as an outsider intervention process into an empowering approach, which is much more context-sensitive and which works to both empower civil society and to deepen its capacity for non-violent social change. In post-conflict peacebuilding, David Last has suggested that we face two challenges: first, to control violence (to stop violent behaviour) and, second, to link the control of violence to the rebuilding of relationships at the community level. At present we are faced with a model and practice where top-heavy military security mechanisms and political-administrative structures do not reach ordinary people, and where there are small, dispersed and under-resourced civilian NGOs frequently without the capacity to make a noticeable impact, beyond the symbolic, in conflict areas. The ideal is to seek for a complementary strategy in which peacekeeping missions and other IRW actions more broadly work to build local capacity, as indicated in figure 9.2.
John Paul Lederach, working as a scholar-practitioner within a Mennonite tradition which shares many of the values and ideas of the
Peacebuilding
219
Military and police
peacekeeping
Civilian
peacebuilding
Catalytic and organizing
Training and education Nurturing and mentoring
Year 3 Local
facilitators
Source: adapted from Last, 2000
Figure 9.2   Local-international and military-civilian sequences of a mission
Quakers, and with practical experience in Central America, has also stressed the importance of this approach, which he calls 'indigenous empowerment'. Both Curie and Lederach acknowledge the influence of the radical Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in 1970, in the development of their ideas. Freire, working with the poor in Brazil and Chile from the 1960s, argued against the 'banking' or teacher-directed nature of education as a form of oppression, and in favour of 'education as liberation'. Freire was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1969, during the period when Adam Curie was director of the Harvard Center for Studies in Education and Development and beginning his own journey towards peace education. Curie's Education for Liberation was published in 1973, with strong influences from Freire, and his Making Peace (1971) represented his attempt to integrate his ideas on education and peacemaking in the broader project of liberating human potential and transcending violence. For Lederach, cognate ideas were explored and advanced in a series of highly influential publications from the mid-1990s (1995,1997,1999, 2003; Lederach and Jenner, 2002).
Within the conflict resolution field, then, peacebuilding from below became linked with the idea of liberating communities from the oppression and misery of violence in a project whose main goal Was the cultivation of cultures and structures of peace (in Galtung's terms, positive peace). The pedagogy appropriate for this was defined
220
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Peacebuilding 221
Prescriptive Training as transfer
Elicitive .
Training as discovery
Resource: model and knowledge of trainer
Training as.content-oriented:: master
approach and technique i
Empowerment as learning new ways :   and strategies for facingxonflict. -:-;:
Trainer as expert, model and facilitator
Culture as technique
Source Lederach, 1995. 65
Resource: within-setting knowledge
: Training as process-oriented: .:. participate in model creation
Empowerments validating : and buildingfromcontext.
Trainer as catalyst and facilitator
Culture as foundation and seed bed
as elicitive and transformative, rather than prescriptive and directive : (see table 9.1). Thus for Lederach:
The principle of indigenous empowerment suggests that conflict transformation must actively envision, include, respect, and promote the human and cultural resources from within a given setting. This involves a new set of lenses through which we do not primarily 'see' the setting and the people in it as the 'problem' and the outsider as the 'answer'. Rather, we understand the long-term goal of transformation as validating and building on people and resources within the setting. (1995: 212)
The approach also suggests that it is important to identify the 'cultural modalities and resources' within the setting of the conflict in order to evolve a comprehensive framework which embodies both short-term and long-term perspectives for conflict transformation. Tli.-importance of cultural relevance and sensitivity within conflict resolution theory has emerged, partly in response to learning from case experience and partly as an explicit critique of earlier forms of conflic-resolution theory where local culture was given marginal significant.* (see chapter 15). In the former case both Lederach and Wehr, reflecting on their work in Central America, found that the 'western' model of outsider neutral mediators was not understood or trusted in manv Central American settings, while the idea of insider partial peacemaking was. What has emerged then is the recognition of a need for what Lederach has called a comprehensive approach to conflict resolutior that is attentive to how short-term intervention which aims to halt violence is integrated with long-term resolution processes.
This long-term strategy will be sustainable if outsiders/experts support and nurture rather than displace resources which can form part of a peace constituency; and if the strategy addresses all levels of the population. So here is another critical element in the programniv-Lederach describes the affected population as a triangle (see chapt-.T 1. figure 1.10). At the apex are key military and political leaders - thos"
who usually monopolize media accounts of conflict. In the middle, at level two, are regional political leaders (in some cases more powerful than central government in their areas), religious and business leaders, and those who have extensive influence in sectors such as health, education and also within the military hierarchies. Finally at the grassroots level, level three, are the vast majority of the affected population: the common people, displaced and refugee populations, together with local leaders, elders, teachers, church groups and locally based NGOs. At this level also, the armed combatants are represented as guerrillas and soldiers in militias. Most peacemaking at the level of international diplomacy operates at level one of this triangle, but for conflict resolution to be successful and sustainable, the coordination of peacemaking strategies across all three levels must be undertaken. In this new thinking, peacebuilding from below is of decisive importance, for it is the means by which, according to Lederach, a peace constituency can be built within the setting of the conflict itself. Once again this is a departure from conventional practice where peacemaking resources from outside the conflict (diplomats, third-party interveners, etc.) are valued more highly than peacemaking assets, which may exist within the community.
In much the same way that both conflict prevention policy and gender-sensitive approaches became 'mainstreamed' in the agendas of international organizations in the 1990s (as noted in chapters 5 and 12), post-conflict peacebuilding also emerged as an explicit policy objective of a wide variety of key actors concerned to define their role in the resolution of international conflict. As we saw in chapter 8, the process of post-conflict peacebuilding as far as the UN was concerned was defined in the Agenda for Peace in 1992. The Supplement to An Agenda for Peace in 1995 extended this definition as follows:
comprehensive efforts to identify and support structures which will tend to consolidate peace and advance a sense of confidence and well-being among people. Through agreements ending civil strife, these may include disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation. (Boutros-Ghali, 1995)
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Peacebuilding 223
During the 1990s most of the large international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations published their own definitions and guidelines. In 1997 the Development Cooperation Committee (DAC) of the OECD produced its guide on Conflict, Peace and Development Co-operation on the Threshold of the 21st Century in which it argued that donor agencies working in the area of economic development should use peace and conflict impact assessments in order to link development policy with the task of building sustainable peace in conflict areas.
The World Bank has also emerged as a leading player in post-conflict peacebuilding. It has established a Conflict Prevention and : Reconstruction Unit (CPRU), which in turn has administered a Post-Conflict Fund (PCF) since 1997. Established in 1944 as one of the Bretton Woods institutions to lead world recovery following the Second World War, it has evolved its role from rebuilding infrastructure to one dedicated to:
a comprehensive approach which includes the promotion of economic recovery, evaluation of social sector needs, support for institutional capacity building, revitalization of local communities, and restoration : of social capital, as well as specific efforts to stipport mine action, demobilize and reintegrate ex-combatants, and reintegrate displaced populations. (World Bank, 2003)
Recognizing that on average a country coming out of civil war has a : 50 per cent chance of relapsing into conflict in the first five years of peace, and that it can take a generation to return to pre-war living standards, the World Bank devotes about 16 per cent of its total funding on projects that address the effects of war. During 2003, $13 million was disbursed to support countries in transition from conflict to peace, while a total of $61.5 million was approved for 120 grants for the period 1998-2005.
These initiatives have been paralleled by a host of other IGO, INGO and NGO peacebuilding initiatives since the 1990s. Within this wide and disparate constituency, attempts have been made to draw out-common guidelines for ethical and effective practice, one example of which is given in box 9.1.
■ -K
In applying a peacebuilding from below approach the way in which <i conflict is viewed is transformed: whereas normally people within the conflict are seen as the problem, with outsiders providing the sohri ion to the conflict, in the perspective of peacebuilding from below, sn u-tions are derived and built from local resources. This does not di-r.1
Box 9.1 Preliminary peacebuilding checklist
Development and relief NGOs planning to incorporate peacebuilding into their programmes need a perspective and determination which:
. : regards conflict and peaceas multifactorial dynamic processes, often moving.in and out of phases of peace and violence, and with actors who change over time; this means conflict is not linear and predictable;
..  whilst seeing particular conflicts as unique and specific, looks at the experience of other violent situations and: learns from peacebuilding and conflittresblution attempts in thoseT> places; a mix of appropriate, 'western':and'non*western' methods should be utilized where possible, incorporating local and traditional conflict resolutionand peacemaking processes;
> gives equal importance to relational influences as well asstructural factorsof conflict when designing:programmes(especiallypsychological,socialandculturalfactors);. ;;i
::-   incorporates in-depth surveying, analysis and understanding of the social fabric and
:   relationshipSiWithi.n a community where a peace-related programme is planned in order to;: ensure that more harm than good is not likely to result from such an intervention;
• engages and involves: local peoples! the beginning of peacebuilding prdjeas'a'nci" ;:ri' -: programme design, and identifies indigenous sources of social energy and leadership;
.. ensures that interventions are contingent and complementary with other official (track I) ..   and non-official (Track.ll) initiatives—cooperative and coordination mechanisms should-be' established, and peacebuilding networks supported;
• is clear about 'normative views' of society, about positions on human rights and justice, and :.: -encourages discussion of possible tensions between advocacy work and peace-related
work like conflict resolution and peacebuilding programmes;
trains andpreparestheirstaff andthose oftheir partners in non-violent conflict resolution:-.:; ,:.  methods and techniques appropriate to local conditions (an elicitive approach);
• sees peacebuilding as an integrated process; this has implications both for funding and longitudinal research and evaluation plans;
I,r  is not afraid to take an eclectic approach, and to draw freely from different disciplines; , •  is based on internationally accepted codes of eonductand operational behaviours """'."».■..:
Source: Lewer, 1999:24-5
a role for outsider third parties, but it does suggest a need for a reorientation of their roles. Non-governmental organizations are decisive actors in the work of grassroots peacebuilding. There are more than 4,000 development NGOs in the OECD countries which work mainly overseas, and an estimated 20,000 other national NGOs outside the OECD countries which may become the field-based partners of the larger NGOs (that is, the international NGOs, or INGOs, which can operate in many countries and regions and which, like Oxfam and Save the Children, have a multinational organization). Finally there is a myriad of grassroots and community-based organizations (grassroots organizations or GROs, and community-based organizations or CBOs) which represent local interests, local opinion and local cultures. In the course of the most extreme conflict emergencies, the number of NGOs m the field can escalate dramatically; in Rwanda, for example, there were more than 200 NGOs active at the height of the crisis in 1994. imilarly, the number of NGOs active in former Yugoslavia went
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CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Peacebuilding 225
through a remarkable expansion as the crisis unfolded. Between February and September 1993 the number of NGOs virtually doubled, from 65 to 126, and while the majority of them were internationally based with more or less well-known reputations (90), a number were indigenous NGOs (the GROs and CBOs referred to above), often developed in response to the war (36).
Picking up a theme from the end of the previous chapter, how are we to assess the effectiveness of all these peacebuilding efforts? We saw in chapter 8 with reference to Lund's (2003) review of research literature on post-conflict peacebuilding that assessments of success and failure vary depending upon the criteria used. For example, Doyle and Sambanis (2000), using criteria of absence of major or lower-level violence and uncontested sovereignty two years after the war, found fifty-three successful and seventy-one unsuccessful peace processes since 1945, a success rate of 41 per cent. More demanding criteria, such as human security, increased gender equity, social healing and reconciliation, evidently lead to lower estimations of the success rate. Within this burgeoning literature on post-conflict peacebuilding there has developed a concern with developing methodologies for measuring the impact of international action in conflict-affected communities. Peace and conflict impact assessments (PCIAs) now form established methodological elements of policymaking (see box 9.2), and are used to minimize the likelihood of negative impacts of policy and to capitalize positive impacts (Bush, 1998; Menold, 2004).
What comes out of these studies is still being debated. There is criticism of the plethora of 'amateur' organizations that are drawn to conflict areas in competitive pursuit of funding and often refuse to be coordinated into the more formal post-war reconstruction efforts described in chapter 8 (often, they would argue, with good reason, as our case study below confirms). There is suspicion of the rubric of elicitive approaches where these simply mean reinforcing undemocratic, authoritarian, androcentric and at times corrupt local power structures. This is a highly complex and contested field in which, for example, advocates of gender sensitivity (see chapter 12) frequently find themselves at odds with advocates of cultural sensitivity (see chapter 15). There are the familiar criticisms that well-meaning peace-builders often unwittingly prolong or worsen the conflict, serve the ends of those intent on 'pacification' in the interest of the powerful, distort local economies and encumber rather than empower local initiatives. Cases that confirm all these criticisms can be found, but those with experience are aware of all these pitfalls and insist that peacebuilding from below of the kind advocated by Curie and Lederach and as outlined in this chapter is essential as the only secure
Box 9-2 Peace and conflict impact assessment
An important element in assessing 'peacebuilding from below1 is evaluating the effects of particular projects on the overall conflict dynamics. This raises methodological issues similar to those discussed in chapter 5 in relation to conflict prevention. How can we determine whether a particular intervention has positive or negative effects? There are two issues here: first, how to trace the chain of effects of a particular intervention in conflict; second, how to attribute any changes in the situation (such as a reductions violent incidents) to a particular intervention.
Attempts to develop a methodology for peace and conflict impact assessment (PCIA) have developed rapidly in recent years. The main impetus for thistool has been the need of development agencies and donors to assess projects, and in particular to screen the positive or negative impacts on conflict of proposed projects. One approach, for example; is to develop indicators of the conflict, indicators of the project's effectiveness, and then to map the factors or variables that lie between the project and the conflict in an effort to trace connections.
Impacts can be checked by interviews, questionnaires or focus groups with...........
stakeholders. This micro-appraisal approach tends to relate a project to its immediate effects (for example, a workshop project might strengthens -■■ particular constituency for peace; a cross-community training project might improve inter-ethnic relations in a particular locality). The next, demanding stage is then to assess how these low-level effects influence the overallconflict.
Another approach is pitched at analysing the overail impact of external interventions on a conflict's parties, dynamics and structure. Conflict analysis andconflict mapping are the main tools. DFID's Conflict Assessment approach, for example, combines conflict analysis, assessment of responses to the conflict
by different departments of donor governments and analysis of. strategic----.....
opportunities:
. The. impacts -of development policy and programmes at the macro- and micro-..:.. levels should be mapped. The approach is to make connections with the conflict analysis and consider whether development interventions have affected sources of tensions identified in the structural analysis; or affected incentives, capacities and relationshipsrbetween warring groups identified in the actocanalysis; orwhether";";: they have affected factors likely to accelerate or slow conffictidentified in analysis  ' -of conflict dynamics. This draws on an analysis of the strategic context of the conflict and includes the preparation ofconflict scenarios and identification of - : possible triggers for violence. (OFID, 2002)
As Hoffman (2004) warns, humility is important with regard to claims made for the impact of peacebuilding measures. The evidence to assess such claims may not always be available and the complexity of processes in conflicts will always make attribution difficult. Nevertheless, developing: careful, well-evidenced evaluations of interventions by actors at different levels in conflict is a critical part of peacebuilding.
grounding for truly sustainable peace. Commenting on the many examples of local-level cross-community peacebuilding work in Eastern Croatia as a complement to the 1995 political-constitutional level settlement, for example, Judith Large concluded that, although it is easy for outside critics to be dismissive of these small-scale and