Why Peacebuilding Is Laborious, Often Flawed, but Increasingly Necessary

The need for peacebuilding in post-conflict societies grew out of the realization that signing agreements to bring fighting to an end is a necessary but insufficient step toward true and enduring peace. Peacebuilding is now conceived of as a multistage process that includes approaches ranging from governmental capacity-building and economic development to reforms of the legal and security sectors, with each initiative intended to be a step toward improving human security and fostering societal healing and reconciliation.

It is often a laborious and expensive process—and one that can easily be undone. Witness Brexit’s triggering of the long-dormant fault lines between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland. Moreover, as peacebuilding has evolved, there is still no consensus on who should lead these efforts. In the wake of Sept. 11, the United Nations introduced a Peacebuilding Commission, intended to push for the adoption of post-conflict interventions and then aid and track their implementation. The PBC lacks any actual enforcement capacity, though, and has struggled to establish itself. It also suffers from the same problem as the broader U.N. system: Key member states can block U.N. involvement, which may explain why Syria is still not on the PBC’s agenda despite the denouement of that nation’s conflict.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech at the opening session of the Paris Peace Forum at the Villette Conference Hall in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2018 (SIPA photo by Eliot Blondet via AP Images).

The question of who should fund reconstruction is also often an obstacle to peacebuilding. In some cases, consensus over the need for stability drives international funding mechanisms for pledging aid. In others, such as Syria, reconstruction funding simply becomes a new arena for contests over power and influence.

Regional bodies have also shown an interest in prioritizing post-conflict peacebuilding, particularly the African Union. Its track record has been mixed, though, in part due to capacity shortages, and it has been unable to prevent a return to conflict in places like the Central African Republic and Burundi. But even EU peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions to the Sahel have proven to be limited in their effectiveness at containing conflict and building peace. And U.S. efforts to transition from counterinsurgency to peacebuilding in Afghanistan have fared poorly as well.

WPR has covered post-conflict peacebuilding in detail and continues to examine key questions about future developments. Can Colombia get peace talks with its last major rebel group back on track? What lessons can countries draw from success stories, like Liberia, that appear to have successfully pivoted from conflict to peacebuilding? Will a global consensus emerge on who should lead post-conflict peacebuilding efforts and how to manage them? Below are some of the highlights of WPR’s coverage.