Review: Peace Building: A Literature Review
Reviewed Work(s): Making Peace Work: The Role of the International Development
Community by Nicole Ball and Tammy Halevy: Play to Win: The Final Report of the Bi-
Partisan Commission on Post-Conflict Reconstruction by Center for Strategic Studies
(CSIS) and the Association of the United States Army (AUSA): Peacebuilding as Politics:
Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies by Elizabeth Cousins, Chetan Kumar and Karin
Wermester: Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm by
John Paul Lederach and Janice Moomaw Jenner: A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility by United Nations
Review by: Ana Cutter
Source: Development in Practice , Nov., 2005, Vol. 15, No. 6 (Nov., 2005), pp. 778-784
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Oxfam GB
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Development in Practice, Volume 15, Number 6, November 2005 lr Froup
Peace building: a literature review
Ana Cutter
Ball, Nicole and Tammy Halevy (1996) Making Peace Work: The Role of the International
Development Community, Policy Essay No. 18, Washington, DC: Overseas Development
Council.
Center for Strategic Studies (CSIS) and the Association of the United States Army (AUSA)
(2003) Play to Win: The Final Report of the Bi-partisan Commission on Post-Conflict Re
struction, Arlington, VA and Washington, DC: AUSA and CSIS.
Cousins, Elizabeth and Chetan Kumar with Karin Wermester (eds.) (2001) Peacebuilding
as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Lederach, John Paul and Janice Moomaw Jenner (eds.) (2002) Handbook of International
Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
United Nations (2004) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the Sec-
retary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, New York, NY:
United Nations Department of Information.
Building peace
In December 2004, a high-level panel of political leaders convened by UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan presented their report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, in which
they put forward a series of reforms that will be needed if the UN is to succeed in promoting
collective peace and security in the twenty-first century. While there is no scarcity of panels
of eminent people and reports on plans for reform of the UN, the High-level Panel on
Threats, Challenges and Change seems to have brought to a head the years of international dip-
lomatic grumbling about issues such as representation, operational capacity, and the use of
force. Annan issued a formal response to the report (www.un.org/largerfreedom/) and asked
member states to prepare for a summit meeting on UN reform. The scant coverage given by
the mainstream media to the publication of the report focused primarily on the reform of the
Security Council. Yet many of the other ideas proposed by the panel are of interest to those
in the fields of peace and security, particularly the placing of economic and social threats on
a par with more traditionally conceived threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and proposed guidelines for the use of force under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
778 ISSN 0961-4524 Print/ISSN 1364-9213 Online 060778-07 ?? 2005 Oxfam GB
DOI: 10.1080/09614520500296682 Routledge Publishing
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Literature review
Along with its new conceptions of security and its ideas for reform, the panel recommends
the formation of a new inter-governmental body, a 'Peacebuilding Commission', whose core
functions should be:
... to identify countries which are under stress and at risk of sliding towards State
collapse; to organize, in partnership with the national Government, proactive assistance
in preventing that process from developing further; to assist in the planning for transitions
between conflict and post-conflict peacebuilding; and in particular to marshal and sustain
the efforts of the international community in post-conflict peacebuilding over whatever
period may be necessary. (p. 69)
Why this emphasis on peace building? The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations
managed 17 peace operations in 2004. When the peacekeepers leave, as they will have done
in Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste by the end of 2005, these countries will remain heavily depen-
dent on international aid but their needs do not always fit within the traditional areas of focus for
development organisations. Disarming former combatants, monitoring the implementation of
peace agreements, and providing judicial assistance to the victims of human rights violations
are just some of the unique concerns of post-conflict societies. Responsibility for different
areas of peace building has been met by the different UN specialised agencies, bilateral devel-
opment agencies, and a multitude of international and national NGOs. Within the UN, the
UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery has developed some capacity to deal with
post-conflict issues such as mine removal, disarmament, and small arms- recovery, while
UNHCR works on protecting and resettling refugees and internally displaced persons during
and after conflict. But there is no clear transition from peacekeeping to other UN departments
or agencies.
In Making Peace Work, Nicole Ball and Tammy Halevy provide a framework for post-
conflict situations in which they identify two phases: cessation of conflict, including negotiation
and cessation of hostilities; and peace building, covering transition and consolidation. This
second phase has traditionally been split between humanitarian agencies that respond to the
immediate emergency needs of the civilian population in a post-war environment and develop-
ment agencies that focus on the longer term development goals such as building political insti-
tutions, economic and social revitalisation, and social reconciliation. The past decade has,
however, seen the recognition of a gap or break between the humanitarian and the development
responses. Thus we now see a number of specialised units focusing on this transitional stage and
increased communication and planning among humanitarian and development organisations
working in these situations.
A More Secure World identifies peace building as an institutional deficit in the UN system
and claims that the large number of states recovering from conflict places an obligation on
this inter-governmental body to tend to the unique needs of these countries. The Secretary-
General has welcomed the idea of developing a new capacity within the UN to support countries
in their efforts to make a successful transition from war to peace.
The term peace building first emerged to describe strategies designed to meet the needs of
societies recovering from deadly conflict but recent literature also focuses on the need for
peace building as a way to prevent further conflict: '... continuous preventive action, or
what the UN now refers to as post-conflict peacebuilding, seeks to prevent conflicts from recur-
ring where they have already taken place' (Rotberg 1996:32). The UN's treatment of peace
building in these reports seems to refer specifically to post-conflict activities; the proposed
Peacebuilding Commission will not have a preventive mandate. One Deputy Secretary-
General in the Department of Political Affairs recently remarked that while the UN can
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Ana Cutter
demonstrate success in having prevented conflict, the opportunities for UN intervention will be
mostly in post-conflict peace building.
This emphasis on the post-conflict stage also reduces the concerns about sovereignty that any
suggestion of UN intervention in domestic affairs provokes among its member states. While a
country dealing with an internal insurgency will usually repel any UN overtures (Nepal is a
recent example), the government of a country emerging from an armed conflict is usually
eager for international involvement and desperate for international aid. And given the rate of
recurrence (World Bank research states that 'on average, countries coming out of war face a
44 percent chance of relapsing in the first five years of peace'),1 it is less 'risky' for the UN
and the international community overall to invest in post-conflict situations than in cases
where states may be vulnerable to and demonstrate various indicators for potential conflict,
but have not yet experienced such an event.
While UN-trackers are focusing on this shift from the language of prevention to that of peace
building, and surmise that the shift is founded in both an effort to circumvent challenges by
member states to UN interventions as well, perhaps, as a more honest assessment of the
UN's limited ability to act preventively, there is no evidence that peace building is an easier
task. In a post-conflict setting, each group's perceptions of the other have become entrenched
as a result of the experience of violence. As Paul Collier (2000) has discussed in his research
on the economic dimensions of conflict, while greed may play a larger role than grievance in
provoking armed conflict, war changes the dynamics of the original conflict completely:
'Objective grievances do not generate violent conflict, violent conflict generates subjective
grievances.' (p. 23).
In terms of operations, the concept of peace building provokes a range of questions. What is
peace building? Who does peace building? And what have been the results of international
peace-building efforts in conflicts that have taken place since the end of the Cold War?
There is a significant and growing body of literature on peace building that attempts to
answer these questions, albeit with uneven results.
What is peace building?
Definitions of peace building tend to encompass such vast ranges of activities and actors that
the term becomes useless. For example the UN Department of Political Affairs offers this
description:
Effective peace-building also requires concurrent and integrated action on many differ
fronts: military, diplomatic, political, economic, social, humanitarian, and the many
imponderables that go to make up a coherent and stable social fabric. These efforts
range from demilitarization to building up national institutions, including police and judi-
cial systems; promoting human rights; monitoring elections; encouraging formal and
informal processes of political participation; providing sustainable sources of livelihood
to demobilized combatants and returning refugees and displaced persons, through training
programmes, the reactivation of the economy and the provision of social services; and sti-
mulating the normal process of economic and social development which will benefit the
population as a whole and provide the most secure basis for lasting peace.2
After getting though that paragraph of a sentence, the question one is left with is: what is not
peace building?
Arguing that in many post-conflict environments 'the chaos on the ground is paralleled only
by the chaos in the international response', the US Bi-partisan Commission on Post-conflict
Reconstruction in its report Play to Win: The Final Report of the Bi-partisan Commission on
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Literature review
Post-conflict Reconstruction focuses on the problems not just of post-conflict societies but also
the threat of failed states, because failed states provide 'safe haven for transnational threats,
including terrorist networks .... (p. 5). A bill based on the report entitled 'The Winning the
Peace Act of 2003' was proposed to the US Senate to establish a permanent mechanism and
a formal process within the US government for post-conflict reconstruction efforts.3 As a
means of improving what is considered a haphazard and undisciplined approach to reconstruc-
tion over the last ten years, the act would authorise the president to designate a director of recon-
struction for each country or region where the US military has engaged in armed conflict or
where the US government has committed to rebuilding. The report neither narrows the defi-
nition of peace building nor reduces the number of actions associated with it, but it does
provide a framework and delineate specific tasks for peace building around four recognised
pillars for post-conflict reconstruction: security; justice and reconciliation; economic and
social well-being; and governance and participation. The report prioritises security as the one
constant in post-conflict societies, stating that 'security is the sine qua non of post-conflict
reconstruction' (p. 7).
The report emphasises the role of local and national actors, yet there is an assumption
throughout that international actors are directing the show. There is no real idea of how to
make people self-sufficient in terms of developing their own capacity to deal with reconstruc-
tion and to rebuild their societies. It is a truly US report (and, it is only fair to say, aimed at an
US audience) in the sense that it conveys a sense of American efficiency and hubris. 'Here is the
solution!', the report seems to proclaim, 'Just follow this 30-step program and you will have a
peace-building success.' Can it really be so easy? And who is supposed to do all this work?
Each of the four pillars contains over 50 tasks-each of which is a huge job in itself, such as
the enjoinder to '[e]stablish and enforce weapons control regimes'. The framework develops
the categories of issues that may need to be addressed in a peace-building response and a
general roadmap of how to proceed. As such, it is certainly a useful tool for international
actors developing strategies for intervening in post-conflict situations. But the definition and
the conception of the role of outsiders are still enormous while the criteria for measuring the
success of such interventions are ambiguous.
In Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, a publication of the
International Peace Academy, editors Elizabeth Cousins and Chetan Kumar provide a narrower
definition of peace building that focuses attention on creating stable political processes. 'The
most effective path for preventing renewed hostilities, then, is for international efforts to
help a given society build its political capacity to manage conflict without violence' (p. 12).
The authors claim that the revitalisation of political institutions is one of the few areas where
external actors can play a legitimate role, and that other areas of post-war recovery-such as
the cultural or spiritual spheres-are internal processes where outsiders can have only
limited impact and credibility.
Peace building as a political process is an important concept, rooted in the recognition that
development aid can be a negative or positive factor in conflict dynamics. Peace building,
like any attempt at social change, does not happen in a void. Rather, it is a political process
embedded in the history of a place, and necessarily involves political leaders. Approaching
peace building as politics forces external actors to understand themselves as political agents
that have multiple impacts on the situations in which they choose to intervene. Yet their
capacity to affect social change or 'transform intergroup relations into viable political pro-
cesses' (p. 187) is dependent on their ability to support a course by which national actors
reach agreement on how to create or re-create their own political institutions. It is this work
that gets to the root causes of conflict. Why do these wars occur? They happen because
people are arguing about how the country is to be governed. The strengthening of political
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Ana Cutter
institutions-facilitating the creation of indigenous capacities to resolve and prevent conflict-
is the essential building block of post-conflict peace.
In critiquing current peace-building programmes, the Cousins and Kumar claim that most
peace-building strategies stress the "'what" and the "who" of peace building over the "how,"
"why," or "to what end"' (p. 7). Focusing international efforts on establishing the conditions
for viable political processes demands that in approaching a post-conflict situation, international
or external actors start with the problem rather than with their own institutional capacity to
provide a solution. In contrast to Play to Win, this approach treats each conflict as unique
and eschews the idea of a single framework or approach that can be applied to any situation.
The book is organised around case studies, the problem with which is that events quickly
overtake the authors' situational analysis. Haiti, for instance, is declared a peace-building
success, yet three years later a new UN peacekeeping force entered the country after continued
instability, violence, and a politico-economic crisis gave rise to anti-government forces taking
the capital in February 2004 and the flight of President Aristide. The judgements on the other
case studies-Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Somalia-fare the passage of time rather
better, but none is an unqualified success in peace building. Somalia still has no central govern-
ment and suffers frequent violent clashes between clans. Regarding Bosnia, the report of the
International Commission on the Balkans states that '[d]ue to its interethnic conflicts, weak
institutions and geographical position SE Europe is at risk of becoming a centre of organised
crime, and a fertile ground for religiously motivated extremists and terrorists in Europe' (Inter-
national Commission on the Balkans 2005). Organised crime and violent gangs have a looming
presence in Cambodia and El Salvador. The lack of long-term success in these peace-building
operations illustrates that there is still much to be learned about international interventions in
post-conflict societies.
Again the gap in this literature seems to be a lack of guidance regarding the criteria for evalu-
ation and success, but Peacebuilding as Politics succeeds in what seems to be its main objec-
tive-narrowing the definition of peace building to focus on the political, and determining the
appropriate area of intervention for external actors as 'reinforcing and providing support for
those factors that will allow resilient and authoritative political processes to emerge in conflic-
tive societies' (p. 188).
Who does peace building?
Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm is the latest offering by
John Paul Lederach, a professor of international peace building at the Joan B. Kroc Institute
for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a Distinguished Schola
at Eastern Mennonite University's Conflict Transformation Program. A practitioner, who
works as a peace-building practitioner, trainer, and consultant throughout Latin America,
Africa, and the USA, Lederach has written over ten books on peace building ranging from per-
sonal reflections to his well-known Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided
Societies (Lederach 1998).
This volume, edited with Janice Moomaw Jenner, director of the Institute for Justice an
Peacebuilding at the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University, is
pitched at international NGO staff and independent consultants based in the global North
West (i.e. the 'developed' countries) who work on conflict and crises in the global South
(i.e. 'developing' countries). The cover blurb description of the book as a 'resource for resol-
ving international crises' is misleading. This is not a book about how to resolve conflict.
Rather, its aim is to provide external actors or experts with a set of basic guidelines, almost
a code of conduct, for how to approach a conflict that is not their own.
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Literature review
Like all of Lederach's work, the book is informative and written in a simple, direct style free
of academic jargon and UN-ese. The chapters, elaborated by well-known-mostly US-
practitioners of conflict resolution and peace building overseas, are ordered around questions:
how much do I need to know? Is it safe? Who pays? Can my good intentions make things
worse? Some chapters are more useful than others, and the authors do not seem to have a
shared sense of the intended audience. One chapter offers a list of sources of information for
country situations including 'in-print books' and 'on-line newspapers', which leads to the
conclusion that this is written for high-school students considering work abroad, while the
discussions about accountability and orientation within the existing 'system' are more
sophisticated.
What does work about this book is the section entitled 'So You are Coming to Help Us:
Advice from the Ground', comprising chapters written by local conflict-resolution and
peace-building practitioners. Perspectives from Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle
East, and West Africa, leave the reader with the impression that external interventions are
often 'foreign impositions that seem to have lost touch with the people' (p. 168). Each
section offers sage advice often in the form of lists of 'dos' and 'don'ts' for international prac-
titioners-'Do Not Assume that the Contestants are Irrational' (p. 139)-but the overall
message is that local is better. So where, one wonders, does that leave all these eager consultant
and practitioners?
Lessons identified, but not learned
With the exception of Play to Win, the books reviewed convey the need for modesty on the part
of external actors in their approach to post-conflict situations, based on the understanding that
their impact on any internal situation is limited and often unconstructive or even harmful. The
key elements that make peace work in post-conflict situations are commitment and political will
on the part of the warring parties actually to make peace. Peace cannot be built where there is no
peace to start with. Compare Bosnia and El Salvador: in Bosnia there was a forced peace with
different degrees of commitment from the parties to the conflicts. Ten years later the country is
still heavily dependent on the international community and there is a constant threat of further
fragmentation of the state. In the case of El Salvador, the parties had fought for 12 years. The
withdrawal of US aid to the armed forces after 1998 led both sides to realise that there was not
going to be a military solution, and that compromises were necessary. A strong peace agreement
was negotiated which dealt directly with some of the country's underlying political imbalances
and problems. The challenge for El Salvador since 1992 has been to implement that agreement
in full-a situation in which international actors have a foundation for successful, albeit modest,
interventions.
Even in situations where there has been a commitment to peace, the books reviewed here
convey that while there is considerable knowledge about what makes for successful peace
building, these lessons have not been entirely learned or institutionalised in terms of strategic
planning for post-conflict operations and how programmes are implemented. A lesson common
to all the literature is the need for sustained attention. Peace processes are not one- to two-year
events. It takes ten years or more for the objectives of the peace agreement to be ingrained in
society. But has this really been learned?
And how do we judge success in peace building? More than a decade after the Clinton admin-
istration restored President Aristide to power in Haiti and a UN peacekeeping mission was
established to help the newly restored democracy sustain a stable environment, Haiti is in a
shambles and the UN has once again embarked on a peacekeeping mission. Six years after
the NATO bombing made way for international peacekeepers, there is renewed violence in
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Ana Cutter
Kosovo and no real progress on a final status. Afghanistan and East Timor are fragile situations
that are experiencing frequent violence and are highly dependent on the international commu-
nity. If preventing the recurrence of violence is the criterion by which analysts and evaluators
judge the success of post-conflict peace-building efforts, then the international organisations
and agencies involved in this work have largely failed.
These failures force us again to acknowledge the marginal and often damaging role that the
international community plays in post-conflict situations, the need to focus on supporting
national capacities to resolve and prevent conflict through viable political processes, the critical
importance of long-term commitments to peace-building programmes, and the need to develop
honest evaluations of progress and criteria of success. While there has undoubtedly been a huge
amount of learning about post-conflict peace building in the last ten years, there remain major
challenges to planning and implementing peace-building strategies. Let us hope that the pro-
posed UN Peacebuilding Commission takes into account this learning and remains modest in
its ambitions.
Notes
1. See http://lnwebl8.worldbank.org/ESSD/sdvext.nsf/67ByDocName/ConflictPreventionandRecon-
struction (retrieved 30 April 2004).
2. See http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/prev-dip/fst_prev-dip.htm (retrieved 23 May 2005).
3. The bill HR2616 IH was referred to the House Committee on International Relations and there it sits.
References
Collier, Paul (2000) 'Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy', World B
Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank, available at http://www.worldbank.org/research/conflict/pape
civilconflict.htm
International Commission on the Balkans (2005) The Balkans in Europe's Future, Sofia: ICB.
Lederach, John Paul (1998) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washin
ton, DC: USIP.
Rotberg, Robert I. (ed.) (1996) Vigilance and Vengeance: NGOs Preventing Ethnic Conflict in Di
Societies, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
The author
Ana Cutter is Adjunct Professor and Fellow at the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia
University. Contact details: Columbia University, 2690 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6902, USA.
<agc [email protected]>
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