P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
1
The Origins of Peacebuilding
As the Cold War was coming to a close in 1989, the United Nations launched
its ﬁrst major peacebuilding mission in Namibia, following the negotiation
of a peace settlement in that country’s decades-long civil war. At that time,
few observers predicted that postconﬂict peacebuilding would become an
international growth industry, but over the next decade, operations were
deployed to no fewer than thirteen other territories that were just emerging
from internal conﬂicts.
Ostensibly, these missions provided “technical assistance” to local actors
in war-torn countries – assistance aimed at preventing the recurrence of violence
and establishing a stable and lasting peace. In practice, however, these
operations were more than merely technical (or ideologically neutral) exercises
in conﬂict management. As we shall see, they all promoted a particular
model of political and economic organization: liberal market democracy.
Why did peacebuilders embrace democratization and marketization as strategies
for preventing renewed violence? And why did this brand of peacebuilding
proliferate so rapidly in the 1990s? Answers to both of these questions
can be found in the peculiar political and ideological conditions that
prevailed at the end of the Cold War, when peacebuilding came into being.
The Cold War’s End and the Rise of Peacebuilding
During the Cold War, the UN’s main security activity was “peacekeeping,”
which typically involved the deployment of a lightly armed military force
to monitor a cease-ﬁre or patrol neutral buffer zones between former com-
batants.1
The ﬁrst major peacekeeping operation was deployed to Egypt
in 1956, following the invasion of that country by Britain, France, and
Israel. With the agreement of all of the parties, including Egypt and the
1 See the Appendix of this chapter for a glossary of key terms, including “peacekeeping” and
“peacebuilding.”
13
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
14 Foundations
invading countries, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) oversaw
the departure of foreign forces from Egyptian territory, and then took up
positions along the Egypt-Israel border. UNEF was prohibited from using
force (except in self-defense) and from interfering in the domestic politics
of Egypt. The mission’s mandate clearly stated that UNEF should “refrain
from any activity of a political character in a Host State” and in no way
“inﬂuence the military balance in the present conﬂict and, thereby, the political
balance affecting efforts to settle the conﬂict.”2
An “after action” report
written two years later by then–UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskj¨old
reiterated the importance of these principles to the mission’s success: Any
future peacekeeping operations, he argued, “must be separate and distinct
from activities by national authorities,” and must limit their role
to addressing the “external [that is, international] aspects of the political
situation,” or else “United Nations units might run the risk of getting
involved in differences with local authorities or [the] public or in internal
conﬂicts which would be highly detrimental to the effectiveness of the
operation.”3
The principles that guided UNEF in Egypt provided a template for future
peacekeeping operations conducted during the Cold War, including missions
in Cyprus and Lebanon and on the India-Pakistan border. Most of these
operations involved lightly armed contingents deployed to monitor ceaseﬁres
and prohibited from intruding in the domestic affairs of the host states.
The mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), for instance,
stated bluntly that “UNIFIL, like any other United Nations peacekeeping
operation, cannot and must not take on responsibilities which fall under the
Government of the country in which it is operating.”4
Before 1989, only two UN operations deviated from these “traditional”
principles of peacekeeping. The ﬁrst was an ill-fated mission to the former
Belgian Congo in the early 1960s, which set out to provide the government
of the newly independent Republic of Congo with limited security assistance,
but got caught in a power struggle between the president and prime
minister, and ultimately took over many of the functions of the Congolese
government, including the task of forcibly suppressing a revolt in one of
the country’s provinces. The second was the United Nations Security Force
2 “Regulations for the United Nations Emergency Force” (February 20, 1957) and “Second
and Final Report of the Secretary-General on the Plan for an Emergency International United
Nations Force,” November 6, 1956 (UN doc. A/3302), reprinted in Siekmann 1989, pp. 40
and 4.
3 “Report of the Secretary General: Summary Study of the Experience Derived from the Establishment
and Operation of the Force,” October 9, 1958 (UN doc. A/3943), reprinted in
Siekmann 1989, p. 52.
4 “Report of the Secretary-General on the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 425,”
March 19, 1978 (UN doc. S/12611), reprinted in Siekmann 1989, p. 216.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 15
in western New Guinea, which governed the territory from October 1962
to April 1963, between the end of Dutch colonial rule and the territory’s
transfer to Indonesian sovereignty.5
Apart from these two exceptions, peacekeepers went to great lengths to
stay out of domestic politics, for several reasons. First, the United Nations
Charter – the legal basis for UN peacekeeping – expressly prohibited the organization
from intervening in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction
of any state.”6
Second, expanding the role of peacekeepers beyond the
relatively limited task of monitoring a cease-ﬁre would have required a more
intrusive role for international personnel than the parties to a conﬂict were
normally willing to accept. Third, the permanent members of the Security
Council – including the Cold War enemies, the United States and the Soviet
Union – were generally opposed to UN involvement in the domestic affairs
of their respective allies and client states. Both the Soviets and Americans
were concerned with maintaining the integrity of their own spheres of inﬂuence
and did so partly by insulating these spheres from outside meddling.
Achieving Security Council agreement for the deployment of a new
peacekeeping mission was therefore possible only when both veto-wielding
“superpowers” believed that their strategic interests were not threatened. In
cases where civil unrest endangered the stability of a client state, the superpowers
typically preferred to deal with these situations directly, rather than
through the United Nations, in order to maintain greater control over the
outcome.
Fourth and ﬁnally, even if the Soviets and Americans saw little threat to
their strategic interests, Cold War ideological differences made it impossible
for the United Nations to promote any particular model of domestic governance
within the borders of individual states. The United States and most
of its allies promoted liberal democracy and market-oriented economics,
whereas the Soviet bloc championed a different version of democracy –
communist “people’s democracy” – which emphasized public rather than
private ownership of the means of production and control of the state by a
vanguard communist party on behalf of the working class. Some developing
countries espoused their own brand of “guided” or “developmental” democracy,
which rejected both the competitiveness of liberal market democracy
and the class orientation of communist people’s democracy, and instead advocated
single-party rule as a means of carrying out the “general will” and
of promoting national unity and economic development. So while support
for democracy was nearly universally shared among UN members during
the Cold War, there was fundamental and heated disagreement over the
5 The administrative arm of the operation was known as the Temporary Executive Authority
(UNTEA).
6 Article 2(7) of the UN Charter.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
16 Foundations
meaning of democracy itself, which in practice prevented the organization
from promoting any particular model of democracy as the “proper” model
and reinforced the tendency of UN ofﬁcials to distance themselves from
questions of domestic politics.
“As a universal organization neutral in big Power struggles over ideology
and inﬂuence,” wrote Hammarskj¨old in 1960, the UN’s impartiality
on matters of ideology and domestic governance allows the organization to
“render service which can be received without suspicion.”7
In all of these
ways, the political and ideological conditions of the Cold War era helped
to restrict the functional scope of peacekeeping to narrowly deﬁned and
predominantly military tasks, such as cease-ﬁre observation, and worked to
limit the involvement of these operations in domestic affairs.
Many of these conditions changed suddenly when the Cold War ended in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. With the decline in East-West tensions, neither
the Soviet Union (later Russia) nor the United States was willing to maintain
Cold War levels of military and economic assistance to their respective allies,
particularly in parts of the world that were now perceived to be strategically
inconsequential, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This allowed international organizations,
including the UN, to become more directly involved in efforts
to bring an end to several long-standing conﬂicts. The erstwhile rival superpowers,
seeking to disengage themselves from costly foreign commitments,
were now quite happy to have international agencies assume responsibility
for these tasks.
The end of the Cold War not only created new opportunities for mediation
in countries that had been proxy battlegrounds for the superpowers;
it also sparked new civil conﬂicts in several other countries. Some regimes,
such as those of Zaire and Somalia, had depended on foreign aid in order
to monopolize political power in their countries by doling out patronage
and ruling with an iron ﬁst. When the ﬂow of external aid diminished, their
ability to squelch internal dissent slipped away and long-suppressed resentments
came to the fore, sometimes violently. Perhaps the most vivid example
of this phenomenon was Somalia, where the government of Said Barre was
driven from ofﬁce by its political enemies, who ultimately fought among
themselves in what became an enduring and brutal civil conﬂict that blurred
the boundaries between warfare and criminal violence. Meanwhile, dormant
ethnic tensions reasserted themselves and sparked internecine violence across
a band of formerly communist states stretching from Yugoslavia through
the Caucasus to Central Asia. With Russia and the United States no longer
willing to devote the resources and energy that would be needed to rehabilitate
these “failed states,” such international organizations as the United
Nations were increasingly called upon to take action, particularly when
7 Quoted in Urquhart 1972, pp. 458–459.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 17
humanitarian crises in these states drew the attention of the international
media.8
For all of these reasons, the “demand” for new multilateral peace operations
swelled at the end of the Cold War. Simultaneously, the United Nations
and other international organizations were more willing and able to “supply”
these new missions, and a new collegiality in the UN Security Council
raised the possibility of reaching consensus (or at least avoiding vetoes) on
proposals to deploy new operations to countries that were experiencing, or
just recovering from, civil conﬂicts. The result of this combined growth in
demand and supply was a sharp rise in the number of multilateral missions
launched in the years immediately following the Cold War. In the decade
from 1989 to 1999, the United Nations deployed thirty-three peace operations,
more than double the ﬁfteen missions that the organization conducted
in the four preceding decades.
Some of the UN’s new operations undertook tasks that resembled the
traditional peacekeeping missions of the Cold War. In 1988, for example,
the organization deployed ﬁfty military observers to oversee the withdrawal
of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Although this was the ﬁrst time that a
UN operation had monitored Russian forces, the nature of the assignment
itself – verifying a cease-ﬁre and troop movements – was something that the
world body had done several times before.
Other operations, however, required the United Nations to perform more
complex and less familiar tasks. In 1989, for instance, the UN was called
upon to monitor the conduct of local police and to disarm former ﬁghters
in Namibia, while preparing the country for its ﬁrst democratic election
and assisting in the preparation of a new national constitution. These functions
went well beyond the constraints that had traditionally been imposed
on peacekeepers, including the prohibition on involvement in the domestic
affairs of host countries. In 1991, new missions were also launched in
Angola, El Salvador, Western Sahara, and Cambodia, which involved the organization
of elections, human rights training and monitoring, and even (in
Cambodia) temporarily taking over the administration of an entire country.
In 1992, the UN deployed personnel to Bosnia and Somalia in the midst of
ongoing civil conﬂicts, with the formal Security Council authorization to use
armed force for purposes other than simply self-defense – which contrasted
with the traditional practice of deploying peacekeepers only after the cessation
of hostilities. Also in 1992, a new mission was sent to Mozambique
with wide-ranging responsibilities that paralleled the operations in Angola,
El Salvador, and Cambodia, including the preparation and supervision of
democratic elections.
8 On “failed states,” see Helman and Ratner 1992/93. On the role of the international media
in the creation of new peace operations, see Jakobsen 1996.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
18 Foundations
The term “peace operations” emerged as a generic label for the wide variety
of missions that the UN began to conduct at this time, since many of these
interventions no longer seemed to ﬁt the traditional mold of peacekeeping.
In 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali issued a policy statement
entitled AnAgendaforPeace that offered a new taxonomy of peace operations
for the post–Cold War era.9
Among other things, Boutros-Ghali differentiated
between peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and postconﬂict peacebuilding.
Peacekeeping involved the deployment of UN military personnel to the
ﬁeld with mandates that largely complied with “the established principles
and practices” of traditional peacekeeping.10
Peace enforcement referred to
something relatively new: the deployment of missions that resembled peacekeeping
operations in many respects, but that were more heavily armed and
authorized to use armed force for purposes other than self-defense.11
The operations
in Bosnia and Somalia, both of which were authorized to use armed
force to accomplish their goals, represented early applications of the peaceenforcement
concept. The third category of peace operation – postconﬂict
peacebuilding – sought “to identify and support structures which will tend to
strengthen and solidify peace” in the aftermath of “civil strife.”12
BoutrosGhali
offered examples of particular tasks that peacebuilding might entail:
“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.”13
As it turned out, most of the UN’s peace operations after 1988 focused on
the task of postconﬂict peacebuilding. These missions differed from traditional
peacekeeping not only in their functional complexity but also in their
composition. The United Nations had virtually monopolized the practice of
peacekeeping in the preceding decades, in part because the relatively straightforward
tasks of traditional peacekeeping – such as cease-ﬁre monitoring –
could be performed by military personnel acting largely alone. But the more
expansive and diverse functions of postconﬂict peacebuilding lent themselves
to a new division of labor between the UN and other international agencies.
In some missions, for example, military tasks were delegated to the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while various specialized agencies
of the United Nations, including the UN Development Program (UNDP),
increasingly shared authority with regional organizations, such as the Organization
of American States (OAS), the European Union (EU), and the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In the realm
9 Boutros-Ghali 1992. 10 Ibid., p. 29.
11 I say “relatively” new because UN peacekeepers in the Congo operation during the Cold
War were given extraordinary enforcement powers as well. See Abi-Saab 1978.
12 Boutros-Ghali 1992, pp. 11 and 32. 13 Ibid., p. 32. See also United Nations 1996a.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 19
of economic reconstruction, important responsibilities were delegated to international
ﬁnancial institutions – the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
the World Bank, and regional development banks – along with the EU, national
development agencies, and a host of international nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).
The precise constellation of international actors varied from one mission
to the next. Some organizations were regular participants – in particular, the
United Nations and its specialized agencies – while other actors made rarer
appearances, so that a distinct alphabet soup of organizational acronyms
constituted each mission. The peacebuilding operations of the 1990s, in
other words, were not “run” by the United Nations – or by any other single
organization. Although “lead agencies” were designated for some missions
and for certain tasks, there was typically little central coordination of each
agency’s activities in the ﬁeld; there was always considerable room for individual
peacebuilders to deﬁne their own objectives and initiatives.
Given the multiplicity of peacebuilding agencies and the absence of a centralized
peacebuilding authority, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the
peacebuilding operations in the 1990s was that they all pursued the same
general strategy for promoting stable and lasting peace in war-shattered
states: democratization and marketization. The typical formula for peacebuilding
included promoting civil and political rights, such as the right
to free speech and a free press, as well as freedom of association and
movement; preparing and administering democratic elections; drafting national
constitutions that codiﬁed civil and political rights; training or retraining
police and justice ofﬁcials in the appropriate behavior for state
functionaries in a liberal democracy; promoting the development of independent
“civil society” organizations and the transformation of formerly
warring groups into democratic political parties; encouraging the development
of free-market economies by eliminating barriers to the free ﬂow of
capital and goods within and across a country’s borders; and stimulating the
growth of private enterprise while reducing the state’s role in the economy.
Another recurrent feature of these operations was their emphasis on rapid democratization
and marketization. Planning for elections began immediately
in every mission. Although in a few cases violence reignited before elections
could be held, in all the remaining cases, elections took place within three
years of the beginning of the operation. The same was true of economic
reform: Comprehensive marketization programs were usually initiated right
away.
The fact that these agencies tended to promote liberalization as a remedy
for civil conﬂict reﬂected another major change that occurred in world
politics at the end of the Cold War: the perceived triumph of liberal market
democracy as the prevailing standard of enlightened governance across
much of the world, including places where it had been anathema only a
few years earlier. Few commentators had predicted the sudden collapse of
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
20 Foundations
liberalism’s principal ideological competitor, Soviet-style communism. As
recently as the mid-1970s, one prominent American political observer, the
late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had expressed pessimistic thoughts about
the long-term prospects of liberal democracy. “Liberal democracy on the
American model,” he wrote despondently, “increasingly tends to the condition
of monarchy in the nineteenth century: a holdover form of government,
one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may
even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no
relevance to the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.”14
Moynihan listed the symptoms of liberal democracy’s alleged decline, including
the seeming strength of communist ideology in many parts of the
world, and the failure of liberal democratic experiments in several developing
countries, such as India, the “largest and most important experiment
of all,” which temporarily abandoned democracy for dictatorship in 1975.
These developments, he argued, gave liberal democracy “a fateful air of a
transitional arrangement.”15
As it turned out, however, Moynihan’s pessimism about the future of market
democracy soon gave way to heady optimism as the Soviet bloc began to
disintegrate in the late 1980s and formerly communist countries instituted
elections. From 1990 to 1996, more than three dozen countries adopted liberal
democratic constitutions for the ﬁrst time, raising the total number of
liberal democracies in the world from 76 to 118.16
By the mid-1990s, 61 percent
of the world’s countries were holding competitive, multiparty elections
for major public ofﬁce, as compared with only 41 percent a decade ear-
lier.17
These developments prompted several commentators to declare that a
“democratic revolution in global politics” had taken place,18
or, in the even
loftier words of one pundit, “Democracy’s won!”19
In a much-discussed article,
U.S. State Department ofﬁcial Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end
point in mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the ﬁnal form of human governance.”20
Although
Fukuyama seemed to overstate both the ﬁnality and the extent of liberalism’s
new ascendancy,21
the Western liberal conception of democracy did
seem to have emerged as the “the only model of government with any broad
legitimacy and ideological appeal in the world.”22
14 Moynihan 1975, p. 6. 15 Ibid.
16 Diamond and Plattner 1996, p. ix; and Diamond 1997, p. xvi.
17 Diamond and Plattner 1996, p. ix.
18 Roberts 1990, p. ix; Gershman 1990; and Ledeen 1996.
19 Krauthammer 1989. 20 Fukuyama 1989, p. 4.
21 If history is any guide, new political and economic ideologies periodically sweep across human
societies, displacing contemporary orthodoxies. On this historical tendency, see Lasswell
1935.
22 Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1990, p. x. In the words of Manuel Pastor (1998, p. 154): “With
the Cold War’s end, the norm of free elections as the legitimate basis of governing has become
almost universal.”
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 21
To be sure, the principles of political liberalism were not observed universally
– there continued to be signiﬁcant pockets of resistance, both within the
Western liberal democracies (among certain groups of commentators, who
believed that “democracy” connoted not only elections and civil liberties
but also social and economic rights)23
and from the governments of a few
resolutely antidemocratic countries (such as in China, Iran, and Cuba). Furthermore,
some states that formally adopted democratic constitutions and
conducted elections continued to behave “illiberally” by refusing to grant
their citizens basic civil and political rights.24
But what was striking about
the post–Cold War period was the relative absence of disagreement in world
politics over the deﬁnition and desirability of “democracy” itself. Whereas
during the Cold War the meaning of democracy had itself been a lightning
rod for ideological conﬂict, there now seemed to be widespread agreement –
even in the former Soviet bloc and in much of the developing world – that the
liberal deﬁnition of democracy (emphasizing elections and political liberties)
was the “correct” deﬁnition.25
The global shift to liberal democracy took place along with an equally impressive
movement toward market-oriented economics. “By the mid-1990s,”
observed the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, “almost the entire world had
adopted the fundamental elements of a market economy, including private
ownership at the core of the economy, a currency convertible for international
trade, shared standards of commercial transactions . . . , and marketbased
transactions for the bulk of the productive sectors of the economy.”26
Even such putatively socialist countries as China and Vietnam moved away
from central planning and toward marketization in the aftermath of the
Cold War.
One indication of this economic revolution emerges from the Economic
Freedom of the World report for the year 2000.27
The report, sponsored by
ﬁfty-ﬁve economic research institutions, annually rates the economic openness
of most countries in the world on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the
most open. Every country (for which data was available) is assigned a score,
based on the composite index of economic openness, for each year from 1970
to 1997. According to these ﬁgures, economic openness declined by an average
of 9.9 percent in 1970–1975, increased at just over 2 percent in 1975–
1980 and 1980–1985, and rose by 4 percent in 1985–1990, reﬂecting the
trend toward market-oriented economic reform in many parts of the world
during this period. But in 1990–1995, the increase in economic openness
was striking, with average scores climbing by over 16 percent. In the words
of Claude Ake, market-oriented economics quickly became “something
23 For example, Hyland 1995; Robinson 1996; and Peeler 1998. See also Gould 1988.
24 On the phenomenon of “illiberal democracies,” see Zakaria 1997 and 2003.
25 Schmitter and Karl 1991, p. 75; Armijo, Biersteker, and Lowenthal 1994, p. 161; and Held
1998, p. 11.
26 Sachs 1999, p. 98. See also Gilpin 2000, p. 15. 27 Gwartney and Lawson 2000.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
22 Foundations
close to a global theology” in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.28
This was the political and ideological milieu in which the ﬁrst ﬂurry of peacebuilding
operations were launched at the very end of the Cold War – and it
was the context that shaped the design and conduct of these operations in
fundamental ways, as we shall see.
The Agents of Peacebuilding
When faced with the task of postconﬂict peacebuilding, the world’s leading
international organizations seemed almost predisposed to adopt strategies
promoting liberal market democracy as a remedy for conﬂict. Many of these
organizations had, in fact, become active and vocal proponents of liberal
democracy, market-oriented economics, or both, at the end of the Cold War.
This ideological reorientation took place not only in the United Nations but
also in other major organizations – including the UN’s specialized agencies,
the OSCE, the EU, NATO, the OAS, the IMF and World Bank, national
development agencies, and many international NGOs engaged in relief and
development tasks – in short, the principal practitioners of peacebuilding.
United Nations
The UN had been nominally committed to upholding the principles of representative
democracy since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, stating that “everyone has the
right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through
freely chosen representatives” and that the “will of the people . . . expressed
in periodic and genuine elections . . . shall be the basis of the authority of gov-
ernment.”29
In practice, however, Cold War disagreements effectively turned
the organization into a “battleground between two opposing ideologies and
power blocs,”30
which prevented the UN from emphasizing its commitment
to the principles of representative democracy and civil rights.31
But a remarkable
change took place within the organization at the end of the Cold
War. “Suddenly,” writes Carl Gershman, the provisions of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights relating to democracy were “dusted off and
presented to the international community as the foundation for a new world
order.”32
The turning point came in 1989, with the launching of a UN mission to
Namibia that set a number of precedents for the world body: For the ﬁrst
time, a UN ﬁeld operation not only observed a cease-ﬁre but also actively
assisted in the creation of democratic political institutions within a sovereign
28 Ake 1997, p. 287.
29 Article 21. A similar passage also appears in Article 25 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights.
30 Jakobson 1993, p. 23. 31 Forsythe 1996, p. 111. 32 Gershman 1993, p. 9.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 23
state. Shortly thereafter, the organization created a permanent Electoral Assistance
Division to provide countries making the transition to democracy
with technical advice and outside observers for the holding of elections.33
The General Assembly underscored the organization’s more active support
for representative democracy by passing a resolution in December 1991
declaring that “periodic and genuine elections” are a “crucial factor in the
effective enjoyment . . . of a wide range of other human rights.”34
The UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights also began to provide states with
advice on electoral laws and other election-related legislation, and helped to
train public ofﬁcials ﬁlling key roles in the administration of national elec-
tions.35
Further, in April 1999, the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights, which had been one of the principal ideological battlegrounds of
the Cold War, adopted a resolution afﬁrming that “democracy fosters the
full realization of all human rights” and deﬁning democracy in clearly
Western-liberal terms, emphasizing elections and civil liberties in particu-
lar.36
The resolution passed by a vote of 51–0 with two abstentions: China
and Cuba.
The UN Development Program, the world’s largest multilateral grantmaking
agency, also embraced the goal of democratization after the Cold
War. Although the UNDP’s mandate was to promote “sustainable human development,”
primarily through measures aimed at eradicating poverty,37
in
the early 1990s the agency began to argue that the promotion of “good governance”
in developing countries could help to achieve this goal. According
33 As of July 2002, the Unit had received formal requests from a total of 103 member states for
electoral support. (“Member States’ Requests for Electoral Assistance to the United Nations
System,” http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ead/assistance by country/ea assistance.htm,
accessed in May 2003.)
34 UN General Assembly Resolution 46/137 of December 17, 1991, “Enhancing the Effectiveness
of the Principle of Periodic and Genuine Elections,” reprinted in United Nations 1992,
pp. 588–589.
35 “Support by the United Nations System of the Efforts of Governments to Promote and
Consolidate New or Restored Democracies,” UN document A/53/554, October 29, 1998,
para. 37.
36 UN Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1999/57 (April 27, 1999). According to the
resolution, democratic rights include: “(a) The rights to freedom of opinion and expression,
of thought, conscience and religion, and of peaceful association and assembly; (b) The right
to freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media; (c) The
rule of law, including legal protection of citizens’ rights, interests and personal security, and
fairness in the administration of justice and independence of the judiciary; (d) The right
of universal and equal suffrage, as well as free voting procedures and periodic and free
elections; (e) The right of political participation, including equal opportunity for all citizens
to become candidates; (f) Transparent and accountable government institutions; (g) The right
of citizens to choose their governmental system through constitutional or other democratic
means; [and] (h) The right to equal access to public service in one’s own country.”
37 United Nations Development Program, “Mission Statement,” http://www.undp.org/info/
discover/mission.html, accessed in March 2002.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
24 Foundations
to the UNDP, good governance meant “the exercise of economic, political
and administrative authority” in ways that are “participatory, transparent
and accountable.”38
In practice, this deﬁnition included support for democratic
elections, which the agency views as “a major mechanism to promote
accountability.”39
The promotion of good governance could also include
efforts to help “establish and operate” national executive, legislative and
judicial institutions in developing countries, on the grounds that
[s]ound national and local legislatures and judiciaries are critical for creating and
maintaining enabling environments for eradicating poverty. Legislatures mediate differing
interests and debate and establish policies, laws and resources priorities that
directly affect people-centered development. Electoral bodies and processes ensure
independent and transparent elections for legislatures. Judiciaries uphold the rule of
law, bringing security and predictability to social, political and economic relations.40
For these reasons – and because the UNDP believes that “democracy,
human rights, and good governance are indivisible” – the agency came to
view the promotion of good governance as one of its central goals.41
In
the period 1997–2000, for example, the UNDP devoted 46 percent of its
regular budgetary resources to good-governance programs, such as training
election personnel in the Philippines and helping elected ofﬁcials in Gambia
to implement the administrative and legislative provisions of their country’s
new democratic constitution.42
If there were any doubts that the UN had, in fact, embraced a distinctly
Western-liberal conception of democracy, the organization’s post–Cold War
secretaries-general – Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Koﬁ Annan – dispelled these
doubts in their public statements. In 1996, Boutros-Ghali deﬁned a democracy
as a state that observed the following principles:
that the will of the people is the basis of governmental authority; that all individuals
have a right to take part in government; that there shall be periodic and
genuine elections; that power changes hands through popular suffrage rather than
intimidation or force; that political opponents and minorities have the right to express
their views; and that there can be loyal and legal opposition to the Government
in power.43
In 2000, Koﬁ Annan similarly described the “principle of democracy” as “the
right of all people to take part in the government of their country through
free and regular elections.”44
Such endorsements of liberal democracy by
the UN secretary-general would have been virtually unthinkable during the
38 UNDP 1997, pp. 2–3. 39 UNDP 2000c, chap. 5. 40 UNDP 1997, p. 14.
41 Cheema 1999.
42 UNDP 2000a. For an overview of the UNDP’s role in promoting democracy in peacebuilding
operations, see Santiso 2002.
43 Boutros-Ghali 1996, para. 21. See also Boutros-Ghali 1994. 44 Annan 2000.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 25
Cold War. Yet, as Annan characterized the UN’s new values and priorities:
“Support for democratization has become one of our major concerns.”45
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
A similar evolution took place in the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe. Prior to 1990, members of the OSCE (which was then
known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE)
operated on the principle of “respecting each other’s right freely to choose
and develop its political, social, economic and cultural systems as well as
its right to determine its laws and regulations.”46
This meant that all forms
of government – both democratic and nondemocratic – enjoyed equal legitimacy
within the organization. But after popular revolutions swept across
Eastern Europe in 1989, the organization passed a resolution in June 1990
declaring that “the development of societies based on pluralistic democracy
and the rule of law are prerequisites for progress in setting up the lasting order
of peace, security, justice, and cooperation that they seek to establish in
Europe.”47
To minimize ambiguity, the resolution included a list of speciﬁc
governmental structures and processes that the organization would promote,
including representative government in which the executive is accountable
to the voters, either directly or through the elected legislature; the duty of
government to act in compliance with the constitution and laws; a clear separation
between the state and political parties; a commitment to consider
and adopt legislation through regular public procedures; publication of regulations
as a condition of their validity; effective means of redress against
administrative decisions and the provision to the person affected of information
about the remedies available; an independent judiciary; and various
requirements in the area of criminal procedure.48
The OSCE’s democracy-promoting functions were concentrated in a new
Ofﬁce for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), based in
Warsaw, with a mandate to help OSCE-participating states “to ensure full
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, to abide by the rule
of law, to promote principles of democracy and . . . to build, strengthen and
protect democratic institutions as well as promote democracy throughout so-
ciety.”49
In its ﬁeld missions, ODIHR drafted rules and regulations for democratic
elections (primarily in the countries of the former Soviet bloc), trained
election observers and administrators, conducted voter education programs,
and encouraged grassroots political organization in states undergoing
45 Annan 1997.
46 This is one of the ten “guiding principles” set out in the Helsinki Final Act, which was signed
by members of the CSCE in August 1975. Cited in Kritz 1993, p. 19.
47 CSCE 1990, p. 1307. 48 This summary is drawn from Kritz 1993, pp. 19–20.
49 ODIHR website, http://www.osce.org/odihr/about.htm, accessed in August 2000.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
26 Foundations
the transition to democracy.50
In 1999 alone, ODIHR conducted more than
ﬁfty projects in twenty countries, and sent more than nineteen hundred observers
to monitor elections in eleven states.51
European Union
During the Cold War, the European Union’s efforts to promote democracy
beyond its borders were limited and haphazard,52
but since the early 1990s,
the organization has been actively engaged in fostering democracy in other
parts of Europe and overseas. First, in Europe, negotiations aimed at inducting
new states into the EU have included express requirements for candidate
countries in Eastern Europe to consolidate their transitions to democracy
and institutionalize civil liberties and the rule of law, among other things.53
Economic liberalism is also a condition of joining the EU, with candidate
states being required to have a “functioning market economy.”54
It appears,
in fact, that these conditions have strongly reinforced the consolidation of
transitional democracies in Eastern Europe that are seeking to demonstrate
their suitability for membership in the Union.55
Second, in the Balkans, the EU has been deeply engaged in the peacebuilding
operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Bosnia, one of the organization’s
primary goals has been “to establish functioning institutions and a viable
democracy, based on the rule of law and respect for human rights.”56
It has
pursued this goal by funding independent local media, helping to draft new
laws for Bosnia that are compatible with European Union standards, and
supporting a commission whose tasks include enforcing the human rights
provisions of the Bosnian constitution.57
In Kosovo, where the EU is by far
the largest external donor agency, the organization has focused on developing
a “modern market economy” in the territory, a task that it shares with
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.58
Third, in its relations with countries beyond Europe, the EU has not
only funded democracy-promotion programs but also imposed increasingly
50 Diamond 1995, p. 35; Franck 2000, p. 38; and the following ODIHR websites: http://
www.osce.org/odihr/democratization.htm, and http://www.osce.org/odihr/unit-eassistance.
htm, accessed in August 2000.
51 ODIHR website, http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections.htm, accessed in August 2000.
52 Youngs 2001b, p. 2.
53 These criteria were determined at the EU’s Copenhagen European Council in June 1993,
reproduced in the website of the European Parliament, http://www.europarl.eu.int/enlargement/ec/cop
en.htm, accessed in May 2003.
54 Ibid. 55 Kopstein and Reilly 2000. 56 European Union 2001.
57 European Union 2000a.
58 European Union 2000b. For more on the division of institutional responsibilities in the
Kosovo operation, see Chapter 10. Since 1999, the EU’s activities in the Balkans have been
guided in part by the provisions of the Stability Pact for South East Europe, which include
the goals of democratization and marketization in Bosnia and Kosovo (see Bartlett and
Samardˇzija 2000).
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 27
stringent conditions on states with which it negotiates commercial agreements.
Revisions in 1989 were made in the Lom´e Convention – an agreement
between the EU and developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean –
requiring these states to respect human rights as a condition of the agreement.
A further revision in 1995 provided for the suspension of agreements
with states that failed to “respect . . . democratic principles and fundamental
human rights.”59
Under these arrangements, the EU suspended trade and
aid relations with several countries in the 1990s, including Lesotho in 1994,
Niger and Sierra Leone in 1996, and Cameroon in 1997.60
Although some
commentators have accused the EU of failing to implement these provisions
fully and consistently across all states with which it has trade and aid rela-
tionships,61
the European Union nevertheless emerged as one of the world’s
most vigorous promoters of democracy in the 1990s.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949, formally committed NATO to
upholding “the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of
law.”62
During the Cold War, the organization’s pursuit of this goal was
limited to the defense of liberal democracies of Western Europe against the
threat of hostilities with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. NATO
did not, in other words, actively promote democracy in states outside the area
of the alliance itself. The demise of the Soviet Union, however, profoundly
altered the strategic landscape of Europe. The likelihood of a military attack
upon NATO suddenly seemed very remote, but at the same time a new problem
emerged: Long-suppressed tensions threatened to erupt into violence in
parts of the former communist bloc, including in nearby Yugoslavia, which
collapsed into civil war in 1991. In response to these shifting circumstances,
NATO began to reorient its activities. In June 1992, NATO foreign ministers
decided that the alliance could make available its resources and expertise in
support of the OSCE’s conﬂict-resolution efforts in the former communist
bloc.63
Since then, NATO has accepted primary responsibility for implementing
the military aspects of the Bosnian and Kosovo peace accords, missions
that aim, among other things, to establish functioning democratic institutions
in these war-shattered Balkan territories. Furthermore, when NATO
established the Partnership for Peace program in 1994 – a framework for
cooperation between NATO and the members of the former Warsaw Pact
organization, along with other states – the alliance imposed the condition
that any state joining the program had to commit itself “to the preservation
59 Quoted in Youngs 2001b, p. 35. 60 Youngs 2001a, p. 19.
61 For example, Olsen 2002; and Kubicek 2002. 62 North Atlantic Treaty, preamble.
63 Barrett 1996, p. 145. For an overview of changes in NATO’s mission since the end of the
Cold War, see Rader 1996; and Kaufman 2002.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
28 Foundations
of democratic societies.”64
Democracy is also a condition for gaining full
membership in the organization.65
In these various ways, NATO became
directly involved in the promotion of democracy in countries outside its
membership.
Organization of American States
Like the UN, the Organization of American States has always been constitutionally
committed to upholding representative democracy,66
but until the
1990s, the organization’s efforts to enforce this commitment were, in the
words of one commentator, “modest and episodic at best.”67
In June 1991,
however, the OAS membership passed a resolution calling for “the immediate
convocation of a meeting . . . in the event of any occurrences giving rise to
the sudden or irregular interruption of the democratic political institutional
process or the legitimate exercise of power by the democratically elected
government of any of the Organization’s member states.”68
The adoption of
this resolution signaled the start of a new period of activism in the promotion
and defense of democratic governance by the OAS.69
The organization has
since monitored elections in Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Paraguay, and
Surinam, and imposed sanctions following antidemocratic coups in Haiti
and Peru.70
At the same time, the OAS also established a new Unit for the Promotion
of Democracy to “provide guidance and support to the member states to
strengthen their democratic institutions and procedures.”71
The unit’s many
projects have included educational courses for national politicians and ofﬁcials
on the workings of democracy, the coordination of OAS electoral
assistance, and local-level projects to promote dialogues between ordinary
citizens and their elected leaders in OAS member states.72
In September 2001,
members of the organization signed the Inter-American Democratic Charter,
reafﬁrming their commitment to promote democracy in the Americas
and to suspend the membership of any state in which an “unconstitutional
interruption of the democratic order” has occurred.73
64 NATO 1994. 65 NATO 1999.
66 In the preamble to the OAS Charter, member states express their conviction that “representative
democracy is an indispensable condition for the stability, peace and development of
the region.” See also Articles 3(d) and 2(b).
67 Diamond 1995, p. 36. See also Acevedo and Grossman 1996, p. 137; and Boniface 2002,
p. 365.
68 Resolution AG/Res. 1080 (XXI-0/91), cited in Franck 1992, pp. 65–66.
69 For an overview, see Parish and Peceny 2002.
70 See Schnably 2000; and Boniface 2002, pp. 365–367.
71 Unit for the Promotion of Democracy website, http://www.upd.oas.org/Introduction/
aboutus.htm, accessed in March 2002.
72 OAS 2000.
73 Article 21 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, signed at Lima on September 11,
2001.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 29
Bretton Woods Institutions
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are known collectively
as the Bretton Woods institutions, with the World Bank itself comprised
of two main constituent units: the International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development and the International Development Association.74
Before
the 1980s, the Bretton Woods institutions had clearly different roles: The
IMF provided short-term “stabilization” loans aimed at helping countries
overcome temporary balance-of-payments problems, while the World Bank
concentrated on lending for large-scale development projects. During this
period, the International Monetary Fund frequently attached strings to its
loans; the World Bank generally did not. In particular, the IMF typically required
recipient states to implement ﬁscal and monetary austerity measures –
such as reductions in public spending, limits on the provision of credit, and
devaluation of the local currency – in order to lower the rate of inﬂation and
restore macroeconomic balance.75
In the 1980s, however, the distinction between the respective roles of the
IMF and World Bank gradually eroded as IMF lending packages became
longer term, and as the World Bank began to impose policy conditionalities
on its loans that were similar to those advocated by the IMF.76
There
was also a partial convergence in their conception of what was required in
order to promote economic growth in the developing world – sometimes
described as the “Washington consensus” – which held that international
donors should encourage recipient states to implement economic liberalization
policies, on the grounds that deregulation and privatization of these
states’ economies would create the most propitious conditions for sustained
growth.77
Speciﬁcally, both organizations began promoting “structural adjustment”
programs in developing states, which included provisions for ﬁscal
austerity and deﬂationary policies, privatization of state-owned enterprises,
trade liberalization, currency devaluation, and deregulation of ﬁnancial and
labor markets.78
John Walton and David Seddon explain the reasoning behind
these policies:
Currency devaluations make Third World exports more competitive in international
trade; reduced public spending curbs inﬂation and saves money for debt repayment;
privatization of state-owned corporations generates more productive investment and
reduces public payrolls; elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign
investment lures more efﬁcient export ﬁrms; cuts in public subsidies for food and
basic necessities help to “get the prices right,” beneﬁting domestic producers; wage
74 The other major units of the World Bank are the International Finance Corporation (IFC),
the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Centre for
Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
75 Taylor 1993, pp. 41–42. 76 Feinberg 1988; Polak 1997, pp. 473–493; and Krueger 1998.
77 Williamson 1989. See also Taylor 1997.
78 Rapley 1996. See Weaver 1995 for a general description of structural adjustment, including
an overview of the main elements of the “typical” structural adjustment program.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
30 Foundations
restraints and higher interest rates reduce inﬂation and enhance competitiveness; and
import restrictions conserve foreign exchange for debt servicing.79
Since the end of the Cold War, structural adjustment programs sponsored
by the Bretton Woods institutions have routinely demanded that developing
states undertake not only economic liberalization but political liberalization
as well – a policy shift that has been more evident in the World Bank than in
the IMF.80
In theory, the Bank is prohibited by its own Articles of Agreement
from interfering in “the political affairs of any member” state, and Bank ofﬁcials
are required to make lending decisions only on the basis of “economic
considerations.”81
From 1990 onward, however, the World Bank has effectively
linked its lending to a requirement for “good governance” in recipient
states, which includes “holding those in positions of authority responsible
for their actions through the rule of law and due process rather than by
administrative ﬁat” and “giving citizens a voice in governmental decisions
and activities – not only through voting and representation but also through
direct involvement in shaping and implementing programs that affect their
lives and well-being.”82
Although the Bank claims that it does not seek to impose any particular
form of government on developing states, its conception of “good governance”
(like that of the UN Development Program) nevertheless implies
support for the principles of limited government and popular accountability
through elections, which are central elements in the Western notion of
liberal democracy.83
In the words of Wolfgang Reinicke: “It is difﬁcult to
imagine how an independent judiciary, freedom of organization, speech, the
media, and even elections, all of which are preconditions for good governance
but also elements of democracy, could be operated only with reference
to economic efﬁciency and effectiveness criteria.”84
Nevertheless, they
are. For better or worse, the good-governance agenda pursued by the Bank
(and to a lesser extent by the IMF)85
has sought to remedy “two undesirable
characteristics that had been prevalent earlier, the unrepresentative character
of governments and the inefﬁciency of non-market systems.”86
Thus, the
79 Walton and Seddon 1994, p. 41.
80 Williams and Young 1994, pp. 85–86; and Shaw 1996, p. 41.
81 Article IV, Section 10 of the World Bank’s Articles of Agreement, cited in Skogly 1993,
p. 760.
82 World Bank 1995, pp. 5–6. See also World Bank 1992 and 1994.
83 Jeffries 1993, p. 26; Islam and Morrison 1996, p. 11; and Gillies 1996. For an overview of
the various ways in which “good governance” has been deﬁned, see Moore and Robinson
1995.
84 Reinicke 1996, p. 293.
85 The IMF’s global governance efforts focus primarily on “the rule of law, improving the
efﬁciency and accountability of the public sector, and tackling corruption.” See IMF 1997.
For analysis of IMF “good governance” activities, see James 1998; and Phillips 1999.
86 Weiss 2000. See also Abrahamsen 1997, pp. 145–146.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 31
lending practices of the Bretton Woods institutions in the 1990s seemed to
presuppose that Western models of economic and political organization were
optimal, and that market-oriented economies and political democracies were
mutually reinforcing.87
National Development Agencies
The national development agencies of the wealthy industrialized democracies,
which are among the most prominent players in the world of international
aid, have also shifted toward democracy promotion since the end of
the Cold War, reﬂecting the broader trend toward “political conditionality”
in development lending.88
The United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), for example, the world’s largest aid donor, historically
focused on social and economic development in poor countries, especially
in the areas of health, population, and the environment, and until recently
placed relatively little emphasis on democracy and human rights.89
This focus
began to change under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when
USAID initiated several programs to assist in the administration of justice
and the conduct of democratic elections, particularly in Latin America.90
In
1990, the agency identiﬁed the promotion of democracy as one of its central
goals, announcing that “allocations of USAID funds to individual countries
will take into account their progress toward democratization,” with the objective
of placing “democracy on a comparable footing with progress in
economic reforms and the establishment of a market-oriented economy, key
factors which are already used as criteria for allocating funds.”91
USAID
subsequently launched a series of new programs aimed at assisting developing
states in the areas of free and fair elections, constitution drafting,
legislatures, judicial systems, local government, anticorruption efforts, regulatory
reform, civic education, and independent organizations and media in
civil society (including human rights, legal aid, and women’s, professional,
and church groups).92
Comparable changes have also taken place in the national aid agencies
of other industrialized states, as virtually all major donor governments have
placed more emphasis on democracy and human rights in their allocations of
development aid since the end of the Cold War, including Canada, the Nordic
countries, Holland, Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the
European Union.93
Further, the Development Assistance Committee of the
87 Harbeson 1994, p. 7. See also Hibou 2002. 88 Stokke 1995.
89 Diamond 1995, p. 13. 90 Ibid. See, in particular, n. 13 on p. 71.
91 Cited in Nelson and Eglinton 1992, p. 16. See also Nelson and Eglinton 1996, pp. 170–
172.
92 Diamond 1995, p. 13.
93 See Uvin 1993; Robinson 1993; Leftwich 1993; Baylies 1995; Islam and Morrison 1996;
Forsythe 1996; Selbervik 1997; Commins 1997; and Blair 1997.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
32 Foundations
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which
coordinates policy among the world’s preeminent aid donors, has endorsed
the objective of using development assistance to promote “democratic and
accountable governance.”94
Even Japan, which has traditionally been reluctant
to link aid to the policies of recipient governments, announced in 1992
that it would include progress toward democracy among the principles that
would guide the future apportionment of aid.95
International Nongovernmental Organizations
The number and variety of international nongovernmental organizations has
increased rapidly in recent decades, making it difﬁcult to generalize about
the activities or ideological orientation of the international NGO sector as
a whole.96
In the ﬁnal years of the twentieth century, however, a new class
of international nongovernmental actors gained prominence – the so-called
democracy NGOs – based primarily in the United States and in other Western
democracies. Ronald Reagan’s decision to emphasize democracy promotion
in the early 1980s led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), modeled on Germany’s Stiftungen, which had subsidized democratic
groups in the developing world since the 1950s.97
The NED, a publicly
funded but privately run grant-making agency, has transferred funds
directly to foreign organizations and democracy movements and has also
channeled grants through four other U.S.-based international NGOs: the
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International
Republican Institute, the Free Trade Union Institute, and the Center for International
Private Enterprise.98
The British government founded the independent Westminster Foundation
for Democracy, fashioned after the NED, in 1992; and the Canadian
government established the International Centre for Human Rights and
Democratic Development in 1989, with a mandate to “encourage and support
the universal values of human rights and the promotion of democratic
institutions and practices around the world.”99
Several private NGOs,
such as the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the Institute for
Democracy in Eastern Europe, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute,
were also created around this time in order to support democratic transitions
and elections in developing countries and the states of the former
Soviet bloc.100
94 OECD 1996; and Kondo 1999. 95 Nelson and Eglinton 1996, p. 175.
96 Rosenau 1995. 97 Carothers 1999, pp. 30–31. 98 Diamond 1995, p. 16.
99 International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development 2000, p. 1.
100 The proliferation of these international democracy-promoting organizations was, in part,
the result of the shifting priorities of the industrialized democracies, which began to “contract
out” the delivery of development assistance in the 1980s to NGOs. See de Wall 1997;
and Barkan 1997.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 33
To be sure, a number of NGOs were critical of the new prominence of political
and economic liberalization as development goals. Some organizations
in the human rights ﬁeld – such as Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee
for Human Rights, and the International League for Human Rights –
contended that too much emphasis was being placed on elections and too
little on civil liberties. As the former director of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh
Neier, wrote in 1993: “By and large the human rights movement would prefer
not to be associated with the global crusade to promote democracy.”101
Others claimed that aid donors should do more to foster popular “grassroots”
forms of political participation, instead of focusing so narrowly on
elections.102
Still others criticized the allegedly disruptive and damaging effects
of market-oriented adjustment policies on developing countries.103
Yet these criticisms were less fundamental than they appear at ﬁrst glance.
Few international NGOs ever went so far as to endorse antiliberal political
or economic policies – say, dictatorships or command economies. When
international human rights organizations argued, for instance, that more
attention should be paid to civil and political rights, they were still advocating
principles that derived from liberal democratic ideology.104
As David
Williams and Tom Young note, most development NGOs share a “common
vision of what development means which is rooted in Western notions
of the state, ‘civil society’ and the self. The most radical part of the NGO
discourse . . . is their emphasis on ‘grass roots’ participation. . . . But this terminology
is always to be understood entirely within Western preconcep-
tions.”105
This is not to say that these organizations’ criticisms were insignificant
but, rather, that they tend to remain committed to promoting liberal
political or economic goals, albeit by different means. Put differently, most
international NGOs (in the ﬁelds of human rights, development, and emergency
relief) seemed to accept the view that free and fair elections, respect
for civil liberties, and market-oriented economics are desirable objectives for
developing states.106
For many of these governmental and nongovernmental organizations, liberalization
was an uncontroversial solution for reconstituting war-torn societies.
No great ideological debates were required to reach this consensus;
it emerged almost automatically and without much questioning or comment,
reﬂecting the newfound enthusiasm for liberal democracy and marketoriented
economics in the world’s leading international organizations, which
in turn mirrored the ascendancy of liberal political and economic ideas in
world politics at the end of the Cold War. “It is clear,” wrote David Chandler
in 1999, “that we have witnessed a major transformation in the language
101 Neier 1993, p. 47. 102 For example, VeneKlasen 1996.
103 For example, Oxfam 1995. 104 Carothers 1994, p. 112.
105 Williams and Young 1994, p. 98. 106 Fernando and Heston 1997, p. 14.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
34 Foundations
and themes of international relations. The international policy agenda today
is dominated by issues such as the consolidation of democracy and the protection
of rights.”107
This observation applies directly to the international
organizations described here, which exhibited a newfound and “unprecedented
commitment . . . to the promotion of liberal pluralist arrangements”
after the Cold War.108
As three commentators put it in 1994, “the primary
debate now taking place within governments and many international organizations
centers not around whether democracy and market-oriented reforms
are desirable, but rather around how they can be supported most
effectively by external actors, and how best to secure and target the necessary
resources.”109
Given all of the changes that occurred at the end of the
Cold War – the increased demand for postconﬂict peacebuilding, the ability
of the United Nations and other international agencies to respond to this
demand, and the turn toward liberalism both in world politics and in the
commitments of the world’s leading international organizations – it comes
as little surprise that peacebuilding operations would emerge as a growth
industry in the post–Cold War era, and that these operations would tend to
promote political and economic liberalization.
Indeed, it appears that it was a combination of changes in the power
structure of international affairs at the end of the Cold War and a concurrent
and related shift in the “cultural” environment of world politics that
led the agents of peacebuilding to adopt the strategy of promoting liberalization
as a means of consolidating peace in war-shattered states. One could
argue that both the Soviet Union and the United States had been conducting
their own versions of peacebuilding during the Cold War, within their
respective spheres of inﬂuence. For the United States, that meant managing
internal conﬂicts by propping up friendly regimes that were often touted as
democratic (even if the real character of the regimes was different). For the
Soviet Union, dealing with civil conﬂict within its client states meant building
up socialist regimes on the Soviet model. When the Cold War ended,
the power structure of world politics changed, and the American version of
peacebuilding “won” and was largely adopted by international agencies for
the peacebuilding operations of the 1990s. This model was, in a manner of
speaking, internationalized.
But changes in the power conditions of world politics tell only part of
the story, because there was a related shift in what might be called the international
norms of legitimate statehood. The “world polity” school of
sociology offers one set of analytical tools for examining this normative
change.110
Like other sociologists, members of this school study the norms,
107 Chandler 1999a, p. 18. 108 Taylor 1999, p. 555.
109 Armijo, Biersteker, and Lowenthal 1994, p. 161.
110 Examples of this school’s work include Meyer and Hannan 1979; Meyer 1980 and 1999;
Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, and Boli 1987; Boli and Thomas 1997 and 1999; and Meyer,
Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 35
customs, and widely held beliefs – or the “culture” – of human societies, but
rather than focusing on the culture of a particular national or religious group,
they examine the formal and informal rules of the international system, or
what they call the “global culture.” Among other things, global culture deﬁnes
who the principal actors in world politics should be, how these actors
should organize themselves internally, and how they should behave. From
this perspective, the modern state is itself a cultural form that is continuously
reproduced because it is widely viewed as the most appropriate model for
organizing human societies. At a given moment in history, some states may
be considered as more legitimate than others; and it appears that the end of
the Cold War gave rise to a historic shift in global culture in which liberal
democracy came to be generally perceived as the most legitimate form of the
state. This cultural revolution cannot be separated from the power changes
that occurred at the end of the Cold War, as noted, but the global culture perspective
does help to explain why international organizations seem to have
willingly embraced liberalization as the “natural” solution to civil conﬂict
and strategy for peacebuilding.111
Liberalization as an All-Purpose Elixir
Decades from now, historians may look back on the immediate post–Cold
War years as a period of remarkable faith in the powers of liberalization to
remedy a broad range of social ills, from internal and international violence
to poverty, famine, corruption, and even environmental destruction. In the
statements of government policymakers and the writings of academics, especially
in the ﬁrst half of the 1990s, market democracy took on the qualities
of a universal antidote to misery and conﬂict, “almost mystically endowed
with an array of characteristics that are supposed to assure both domestic
and international peace and prosperity.”112
Writing in 1995, for example,
Stanford University’s Larry Diamond, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy,
offered this paean to liberal democracy as a panacea for so many of the
world’s problems:
The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves
in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do
not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders.
Democratic governments do not ethnically “cleanse” their own populations, and they
are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism
against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to
threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring
trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for
investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer
to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments.
They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations
111 For an elaboration of this argument, see Paris 2003c. 112 Slaughter 1998, p. 129.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
36 Foundations
and because their openness makes it much more difﬁcult to breach agreements in
secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil
liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation
on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be
built.113
At the same time that Diamond was writing these words, UN SecretaryGeneral
Boutros Boutros-Ghali was drafting a major policy statement that
later became known as the Agenda for Democratization.114
In the report,
Boutros-Ghali expressed a similar missionary-like faith in the many beneﬁts
of liberal democracy. Given the importance of the UN as a peacebuilding
agency and symbol of the international community, and the fact that the
organization had been so riven by ideological disputes during the Cold War,
the Agenda for Democratization is worth quoting at length. According to
the secretary-general, “the practice of democracy is increasingly regarded as
essential to progress on a wide range of human concerns and to the protection
of human rights.” These “human concerns,” he went on to explain, include
interstate and intrastate peace, economic development, cultural enrichment,
control of crime and corruption, and protection of the environment:
Because democratic Governments are freely chosen by their citizens and held accountable
through periodic and genuine elections and other mechanisms, they are
more likely to promote and respect the rule of law, respect individual and minority
rights, cope effectively with social conﬂict, absorb migrant populations and respond
to the needs of marginalized groups. . . . Democracy within States thus fosters the evolution
of the social contract upon which lasting peace can be built. . . . Democratic
institutions and processes within States may likewise be conducive to peace among
States. . . . The legitimacy conferred on democratically elected Governments commands
the respect of the peoples of other democratic States and fosters expectations
of negotiation, compromise and the rule of law in international relations. When States
sharing a culture of democracy are involved in a dispute, the transparency of their
regimes may help to prevent accidents, avoid reactions based on emotion or fear and
reduce the likelihood of surprise attack. . . .
In today’s world, freedom of thought, the impetus to creativity and the will to
involvement are all critical to economic, social and cultural progress, and they are
best fostered and protected within democratic systems. In this sense, the economic
act of privatization can be as well a political act, enabling greater human creativity
and participation. The best way to cultivate a citizen’s readiness to participate in the
development of his or her country, to arouse that person’s energy, imagination and
commitment, is by recognizing and respecting human dignity and human rights. The
material means of progress can be acquired, but human resources – skilled, spirited
and inventive workers – are indispensable, as is the enrichment found through mutual
dialogue and the free interchange of ideas. In this way, a culture of democracy, marked
by communication, dialogue and openness to the ideas and activities of the world,
helps to foster a culture of development. . . .
113 Diamond 1995, pp. 6–7. 114 Boutros-Ghali 1996.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 37
By providing legitimacy for government and encouraging people’s participation
in decision-making on the issues that affect their lives, democratic processes contribute
to the effectiveness of state policies and development strategies. Democratic
institutions and practices foster the governmental accountability and transparency
necessary to deter national and transnational crime and corruption and encourage
increased responsiveness to popular concerns. In development, they increase the likelihood
that state goals reﬂect broad societal concerns and that government is sensitive
to the societal and environmental costs of its development policies.115
Boutros-Ghali concluded that the promotion of democracy was essential
because “peace, development and democracy are inextricably linked.”116
Given all these claims, it would have been surprising if the UN had
not embraced liberalization as the grand strategy for postconﬂict peacebuilding,
particularly since one of the core arguments in favor of liberalization
is that it promotes peace. In fact, as we shall see in the next
chapter, the proposition that liberalization fosters peace – sometimes called
the “liberal peace thesis” – is a very old idea, dating back to the writings
of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. Scholars “rediscovered”
this idea in the 1980s. It became a major area of social scientiﬁc
research in the early 1990s, providing timely ammunition to policymakers
in national governments and international organizations who were already
inclined to believe that democratization and marketization represents
the surest route to lasting peace in countries that are just emerging from
civil wars.
But to what extent was the peace-through-liberalization proposition based
on demonstrated fact? Did democratization and marketization actually create
conditions for stable and lasting peace in the countries that hosted peacebuilding
operations after the Cold War? These are questions that the remainder
of this book will address, after we take a closer look at the liberal peace
thesis itself.
115 Ibid., paras. 17, 18, 22, 24. 116 Ibid., para. 118.
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
38 Foundations
Appendix to Chapter 1
The Terminology of Peace Operations
The terminology of peace operations is notoriously slippery. Some commentators
use “peacekeeping” as a label for all types of military operations that
do not involve outright war ﬁghting, whereas others assign speciﬁc labels to
different kinds of missions. Following is a short glossary of terms used in
this book, including a deﬁnition of peacebuilding itself:
r Preventive diplomacy is action to prevent conﬂicts from starting in the ﬁrst
place or spreading to neighboring territories.
r Peacekeeping is the deployment of a lightly armed, multinational contingent
of military personnel for nonenforcement purposes, such as the
observation of a cease-ﬁre.
r Peacemaking is the attempt to resolve an ongoing conﬂict, either by peaceful
means such as mediation and negotiation, or, if necessary, by the authorizion
of an international military force to impose a settlement to the
conﬂict.
r Peace enforcement is the threat or use of nondefensive military force to
impose, maintain, or restore a cease-ﬁre.
r Peacebuilding is action undertaken at the end of a civil conﬂict to consolidate
peace and prevent a recurrence of ﬁghting. A peacebuilding mission
involves the deployment of military and civilian personnel from several international
agencies, with a mandate to conduct peacebuilding in a country
that is just emerging from a civil war.
r Finally, the generic phrases peace operations and peace missions refer to
any international peacemaking, peacekeeping, peace-enforcement, peacebuilding,
or preventive diplomacy operations that include a multinational
military force aimed at restoring or preserving peace.
These terms are not mutually exclusive. Peacebuilding, for instance, can
involve the deployment of lightly armed, multinational contingents for
nonenforcement purposes, and can therefore incorporate elements of peacekeeping.
Alternatively, peacebuilding missions may include troops with enforcement
rather than peacekeeping duties and powers. Confusion sometimes
arises from the fact that peacebuilding operations seek to prevent a
recurrence of violence, which is, in effect, a type of preventive diplomacy.
Furthermore, peacebuilders can become involved in peacemaking if ﬁghting
reignites during a mission.
While it is easy to become entangled in these deﬁnitions, two distinguishing
features of peacebuilding are worth highlighting. First, peacekeeping
and peacebuilding are not synonymous. Peacekeeping is a primarily military
activity that typically concentrates on cease-ﬁre monitoring, whereas peacebuilding
involves a wide variety of both military and nonmilitary functions,
P1: KAE/lcr P2: Kcz
0521834120Agg.xml CY338/Paris 0521834120 March 5, 2004 8:37
The Origins of Peacebuilding 39
including the administration of elections; the retraining of judges, lawyers,
and police ofﬁcers; the nurturing of indigenous political parties and nongovernmental
organizations; the design and implementation of economic
reforms; the reorganization of governmental institutions; the promotion of
free media; and the delivery of emergency humanitarian and ﬁnancial assistance.
The military component of a peacebuilding operation therefore
represents only one element in a larger effort to establish the conditions for
stable and lasting peace. Second, peacebuilding begins when the ﬁghting has
stopped. It is, by deﬁnition, a postconﬂict enterprise. Some commentators
use the term more broadly to encompass other types of interventions, including
those aimed at preventing violence from erupting in the ﬁrst place,
or what I have labeled preventive diplomacy. However, I have adopted the
more common usage: Peacebuilding operations are deployed to consolidate
peace in countries that have recently experienced civil conﬂict, and where
hostilities have already ended.117
117 For example, the U.S. Army ﬁeld manual on peace operations (United States Army 1994)
has deﬁned peacebuilding as “postconﬂict actions . . . that strengthen and rebuild civil infrastructures
and institutions in order to avoid a return to conﬂict.”