Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | Peace in Our Time?, page 2

Shoring Up the Peace Process
“Stopping civil wars has never been more important,” says Michael Doyle. Since the end of the Cold War period, almost all new armed conflicts have occurred within the territories of sovereign states, he points out, yet research shows that their effects spread far beyond that state’s borders. Internal wars target civilians, displace populations and destabilize entire regions; they are difficult to stop and, once stopped, can easily start up again. “People do horrible things to each other in a civil war,” Doyle says. “What gets them to stop? The UN can do it, but we need to improve their percentage. Nearly half of all peace operations fail.” Doyle considers the current international approach uncoordinated and too short: NATO and the UN leave one crisis and head off for another too quickly, he contends. “To achieve a sustainable peace after civil war there has to be more coordination and longer engagement—not troops but international commitment. That’s what the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission must provide.”

A relatively new concept, the term peacebuilding was coined by former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his 1992 report, An Agenda for Peace. He defined it as “rebuilding the institutions and infrastructures of nations torn by civil war and strife; and building bonds of peaceful mutual benefit among nations formerly at war.” Since then, the meaning of peacebuilding has grown to encompass a range of approaches used at various points in the conflict cycle—from conflict prevention to post-conflict reconstruction. Peacekeeping, which involves imposition of outside troops between sides in a conflict, is a longstanding instrument of the UN. Peacebuilding goes beyond the UN’s established role in peacekeeping operations, enabling a country to move to a point where risks of relapse into conflict are reduced, violence is no longer used to promote political objectives and new engines are in place for economic growth.

Peacebuilding comes with a formidable to-do list: providing transitional security; maintaining public order; supporting the political process; saving lives with humanitarian assistance; creating a framework for economic recovery and rebuilding state institutions. Experience and research have made it clear that the scope of the process is more than any single organization can manage; it calls for a collective or integrated approach. A growing awareness of this fact on the part of UN officials resulted in a serious drive to improve international peacebuilding through the late 1990s, culminating in former Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 2003 formation of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Declaring that the UN had reached a fork in the road, he set the Panel to work “examining the major threats and challenges the world faces in the broad field of peace and security, including economic and social issues insofar as they relate to peace and security, and making recommendations for the elements of a collective response.”

In November 2003 Annan named Anand Panyarachun, former Prime Minister of Thailand, to chair the High-Level Panel on global security threats and reform of the international system, and he appointed fifteen Panel members:

Robert Badinter (France), Member of the French Senate and former Minister of Justice of France;

João Clemente Baena Soares (Brazil), former Secretary-General of the Organization of American States;

Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway), former Prime Minister of Norway and former Director-General of the World Health Organization;

Mary Chinery-Hesse (Ghana), Vice-Chairman, National Development Planning Commission of Ghana and former Deputy Director-General, International Labour Organization;

Gareth Evans (Australia), President of the International Crisis Group and former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia;

David Hannay (United King-dom), former Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations and United Kingdom Special Envoy to Cyprus;

Enrique Iglesias (Uruguay), President of the Inter-American Development Bank;

Amre Moussa (Egypt), Secretary-General of the League of Arab States;

Satish Nambiar (India), former Lt. General in the Indian Army and Force Commander of the United Nations Protective Force (UNPROFOR);

Sadako Ogata (Japan), former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees;

Yevgeny Primakov (Russia), former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation;

Qian Qichen (China), former Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China;

Nafis Sadik (Pakistan), former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund;

Salim Ahmed Salim (United Republic of Tanzania), former Secretary-General of the Organization of African Unity; and

Brent Scowcroft (United States), former Lt. General in the United States Air Force and United States National Security Adviser.

“The Panel was made up of former heads of state, foreign ministers, military and diplomatic officials,” Del Rosso says, “but behind the scenes a great deal of important work was done by staff.” Two key staff positions were held by Carnegie Corporation grantees on temporary assignment: Bruce Jones served first as deputy research director, then as deputy to the special advisor to the secretary-general, supporting the assistant-secretary-general for strategic planning on negotiations on security issues as well as acting secretary of the secretary-general’s policy committee. Stephen Stedman was the research director of the High-Level Panel and stayed on at the UN as a special advisor with the rank of assistant secretary-general to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel’s recommendations. During the High Level Panel process, scores of outside experts were brought in to consult and provide analysis, which the UN was unable to do on its own, in order to come up with actionable recommendations, says Del Rosso. As a result, two scholars represented the most direct link between the Corporation’s International Peace and Security Program and the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission, while the work of a number of other individual grantees and organizations influenced the Panel as well.

“The High-Level Panel was where the first proposal for a Peacebuilding Commission emerged,” Stephen Stedman recalls, “but getting there required an enormous number of policy decisions.” One of the UN’s major shortcomings is that it was designed for the world of 1945,” he explains, “and the member states have a hard time agreeing on what its present-day role should be.” Stedman is troubled by the UN’s traditional lack of commitment to sustained conflict resolution and he points to some pressing needs—first of all for paying attention. “Once a conflict falls off the docket of the Security Council no one pays attention after the peacekeepers leave, even when there are serious signs of danger,” he says. “There’s also a dearth of good strategies, which is why the statistics are so grim….What struck us was how difficult it is to get anyone to say what their long-term strategy is, which explains why so many peace agreements fail to take hold. There are a lot of tasks, but no sense of what anyone’s doing about sustaining peace over time.”

Next page: The High-Level Panel spent a year reviewing virtually every aspect of international security and, in December 2004, officially announced 100-plus recommendations for change, urging the adoption of new, far-reaching ground rules to help the world face evolving security threats and to shore up the United Nations.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5