What do you understand by the term peacebuilding when applied to NGOs working in conflict areas? How can it be integrated into their development work? Discuss the challenges.

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ID: 591481                23.03.04

Module: Conflict, Humanitarian Aid and Social Reconstruction

Question: What do you understand by the term peacebuilding when applied to NGOs working in conflict areas? How can it be integrated into their development work? Discuss the challenges.

Due Date: 23.03.04

In the same year that Boutros-Boutros Ghali initiated the Agenda for Peace (1992) and its assuaged companion, the Agenda for Development, came a Zed books publication called The Development Dictionary (Sachs 1992). Needless to say, these perspectives were built on a number of observations in a then highly rupturing and shaky world. From the more orthodox perspectives though, these movements embodied a birth (or re-birth if you like), while for the latter school of thought they triumphantly articulated decay and death. This situation exhibited the wider realm of discourse in which NGOs as agents of ‘development’, specifically those NGOs working in conflict areas, were later to find particularly urbane; it is now in conflict areas that an evolving discourse is most visibly incorporating what appears to be a focus on security to validate its continued existence (Duffield 2001, Wilkin 2002). It is in this contemporary climate that Wilkin fears an international focus on long-term poverty reduction will be reduced and that needs, as a result, will be neglected in the search for a regime of aggregate global security. In the sense that perhaps a new incarnation of ‘development’ is very much alive and in the sense that this new incarnation may have negative consequences for those lacking the power to do with theirs what they will, a critical overview of an alleged and burgeoning ‘development-security terrain’ must be held throughout this paper (Duffield 2001:10). Indeed and to establish the not-forgotten question: how, if it exists, does this terrain inform and reform a concept NGOs have come to know as ‘peacebuilding’? Is it this understanding of peacebuilding that NGOs want to incorporate into their development work in the first place?

These wide conceptual questions are challenges in themselves before even assessing the practical confrontations one might find in the field and must therefore be dealt with first. As a consequence of this conceptual background being formed, a process of integration becomes possible to discuss and assess in both an empirical and normative light. In other words, having defined what peacebuilding means for NGOs and how this is played out on the ground, the ought factor can come into play because, as it stands, the question asks how this author’s understanding of peacebuilding ‘can’ be grafted with development work. The challenges that arise as the result of a discussion in case are then both real and hypothetical.

The primary case itself, Afghanistan, was chosen for three main reasons. Firstly, the country’s situation, in its even more than usual dynamism, presently has a high profile in the international arena which both elucidates contemporary thought processes on ideas of peacebuilding and configures a prolific amount of reading material in this context. Secondly, it must be said that it is unfair to dilute or brush over the local (Brohman 1995). Particular economic and socio-cultural contexts require lengthy exploration in  more ‘fine grained’ analyses (Goodhand 1999, 2002), especially in an environment of ‘new wars’ where there  appears to be an erosion of combatant-civilian (Duffield 2001) and beach/field – village/city (Hulme & Goodhand 1999) dualities; complexity is the order of the day. Finally, it is important to note that the experience of Afghanistan is in some respects encouraging a new framework in which to interpret peacebuilding. Surkhe et. al. (2002) read Licklider (1995) and note that there exists the idea that in spaces where a clear victor of a conflict has been identified, transactions negotiating a move towards peacebuilding at various levels are easier to accomplish. These authors realise that Afghanistan, although fitting the criteria, is far more volatile than Licklider’s conventions would allow. Also, and in relation, Goodhand (2002) sees Afghanistan as requiring a novel thesis of peacebuilding that differs from ‘Cambodian’ and ‘Somali’ models. A stray into the semantic minefields of aid and development discourse is however, as mentioned, a prerequisite to understanding the influences behind and reformations of peacebuilding in this context.

In its skeletal form, peacebuilding can be considered as a neologism born in the UN to address an interest in post-conflict reconstruction of infrastructure and institutions while more importantly addressing the ‘deepest causes of conflict’ (Ghali 1992: 4). Acting as a ‘counterpart to preventative diplomacy’ (ibid: 14), it works on the other side of peace-making and, if peace-keeping is seen to be prevention and/or containment (Harris 1999), then it find itself in a teleological setting as a final route in a flow towards a just and positive peace. In other words, towards a vision of an ideal-type society that has altered its previous asymmetrical structural inequalities into a format that allows balanced power-play by integrating the fields of conflict resolution and development (Miall et. al 2003). Ricigliano (2004) agrees only insofar as the concept does indeed collapse distinctions between ‘peace’ and ‘development and relief’ fields but the author differs in that he identifies further dimensions of ‘political’, ‘social’ and ‘structural’ peacebuilding. He notes on top of this however, that each of these dimensions involves an interplay of actors that can, in the case of Bosnia and Guatemala respectively, affect a situation for the worst or the best in the long term by acting in an uncoordinated fashion towards those dimensions. In the Bosnian case for instance, the structural aspect overtook and devalued the other two aspects in that a rush of funds aimed at physical reconstruction led to inappropriate and non-participatory allocations while the Guatemalan example had more positive outcomes in that synergies between the approaches emerged. So despite the fact that Galtung’s triangle can be used to explain that peacebuilding aims to transform structures (Miall et. al. 2003), it can nonetheless be argued that there is not at present a holistic and coherent framework that brings all factors influencing peacebuilding into account (Ibid.). This may consequently leave the concept open to ‘unprincipled’ political manipulation, that is, to actions not fully justifiable for violation of sovereignty.

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For Duffield (2001) this vulnerability had its beginnings in 1980s Sudan where the conjoining of relief and development began to be seen as a logical marriage to decrease the long-term affects of individuals dependent on assistance. Stable peace as security in world affairs, although on the surface apolitical, is considered by Duffield at this stage to have been implicitly political. Rather than working ‘around’ conflict, aid and development donors began to work ‘in’ conflict scenarios with what came to be known as a ‘minimalist’ attitude (Goodhand & Atkinson 2001). This ‘do no harm’ approach (Anderson 1999) recognises the political manipulations ...

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