Suchergebnisse

Why do international peacebuilding organizations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, even within the same country? Bridging the gaps between the peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and global governance scholarship, this book argues that international peacebuilding organizations repeatedly fail because they are accountable to global actors, not to local institutions or people. International peacebuilding organizations can succeed only when country-based staff bypass existing accountability structures and empower local stakeholders to hold their global organizations accountable for achieving local-level peacebuilding outcomes. In other words, the innovative, if seemingly wayward, actions of individual country-office staff are necessary to improve peacebuilding performance. Using in-depth studies of organizations operating in Burundi over a fifteen-year period, combined with fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal, South Sudan, and Sudan, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, African studies, and peace and conflict studies as well as policymakers

AbstractUN peace operations have increasingly focused on the importance of "local ownership." The logic is simple. For peace operations to succeed in helping war-torn states to create accountable, democratic institutions grounded in the rule of law, peace operations need to internalize democratic principles by making UN missions accountable to different domestic constituencies—crossing ethnic, religious, racial, social, and gender lines—within the war-torn country. As part of a special issue on "The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward," this essay argues that while there is widespread consensus among UN member states and UN bureaucrats that local ownership is necessary, UN peace operations have faced significant obstacles to creating true local ownership. These obstacles include the UN's focus on host-government ownership; the challenge of creating trust with different domestic constituencies that represent diverse perspectives; the supply-driven nature of UN intervention; and the mismatch between the UN's ideal post-conflict state and the preferences of post-conflict societies. To make UN peace operations more responsive to post-conflict societies, UN staff often have to bend or break rules established only to hold them accountable to their member states.

Despite considerable attention given to professionalising methods and analysing best practices, peacebuilding organisations (i.e. any organisation aiming to impact the causes of peace) continue to have difficulty understanding and demonstrating their collective and individual impact. This article argues that this is in part due to the barriers they encounter in organisational learning. To impact the causes of peace, peacebuilding organisations have to learn what works in each conflict context. To improve their chances at learning, peacebuilding organisations have to measure and understand their successes and failures. As a result, this article argues, peacebuilding organisations' learning processes have an important role in determining their capacity to identify and influence the causes of peace in countries emerging from violent conflict.

Despite considerable attention given to professionalising methods and analysing best practices, peacebuilding organisations (i.e. any organisation aiming to impact the causes of peace) continue to have difficulty understanding and demonstrating their collective and individual impact. This article argues that this is in part due to the barriers they encounter in organisational learning. To impact the causes of peace, peacebuilding organisations have to learn what works in each conflict context. To improve their chances at learning, peacebuilding organisations have to measure and understand their successes and failures. As a result, this article argues, peacebuilding organisations' learning processes have an important role in determining their capacity to identify and influence the causes of peace in countries emerging from violent conflict. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractOne of the most consistent findings on UN peace operations (UNPOs) is that they contribute to peace. Existing scholarship argues this is because UNPOs' peacekeeping troops solve the security dilemma that inhibits combatant disarmament and prevents their political leaders from sharing power. We argue that existing scholarship's focus on peacekeeping troops overlooks UNPOs' role in enabling governments to implement redistributive power‐sharing reforms contained in peace agreements, along with their broader peace processes. While peacekeeping troops can help belligerents refrain from violence, military force alone cannot explain how political elites implement redistributive reforms that threaten their status. We argue that UNPOs that have predominant peacebuilding (as opposed to peacekeeping) mandates help sustain political elites' commitment to implementing peace agreement reforms and, thus, contribute to inclusive peace (increased political inclusion and reduced violence). We test our argument using a data set on UNPO mandates and original fieldwork on three sequential UNPOs in Burundi.