The emergence of post-conflict peace-building in the 1990s created a new arena for humanitarian action and formed part of broader efforts to assist war-torn societies and help them in a more peaceful direction. Peace-building was introduced to United Nations (UN) doctrine in the 1992 An Agenda for Peace, where it was defined as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict” (Boutros-Ghali 1992: §15). The notion came to encompass a wide range of activities: from physical reconstruction, disarmament, and elections to refugee management, security sector reform, political and legal reform, reconciliation, and transitional justice.
Resources for peace-building in civil war settings boosted the budgets of international humanitarian organizations (Fearon 2008). The protection, return, and resettlement of refugees were central tasks for humanitarian actors, but they also took on broader responsibilities for assistance to war-affected populations in anticipation of more permanent state institutions that could fill their needs. With the limited success of international state-building efforts, this role often turned into semi-permanent structures of welfare provision (Lie 2017).
The integration of humanitarian aid within a broader peace-building agenda has been criticized for undermining the neutrality and independence of humanitarian actors. In particular, contested peace-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced the reputation of humanitarian organizations as part of a Western political agenda. At present, humanitarian organizations face the opposite dilemma in postwar Syria: to stay on as part of a peace-building process to the benefit of the current government’s regime, or to withdraw in the name of human rights.
It is possible to maintain a strictly humanitarian role in the context of peace-building, and there is a long tradition in humanitarian action for operating pragmatically in controversial political environments without taking a political stance. The question, therefore, is not so much whether to engage in post-conflict situations but to what extent humanitarian priorities should be dictated by an overarching agenda of peace and development. Indeed, such integration was recently prescribed as a central objective in the Agenda for Humanity adopted at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 in order to address the root causes of humanitarian needs (Ki-Moon 2016).
Peace-building evolved in an international political climate where political liberalism was the predominant ideology. In effect, political and economic liberalization was the framework for all major international peace operations in the 1990s and 2000s, usually even without thematizing this political orientation (Paris 2004). Eventually, this resulted in scholarly and political criticism of “liberal peace-building” for being a Western hegemonic project poorly adapted to local conditions in “non-liberal” countries. More recently, scholarly debates have emphasized the non-liberal rationales behind the international engagement in peace-building as well as the multiple roles and potentials of local political actors in both generating and resisting foreign interference (Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam 2011).
After two decades of lofty ambitions of radical social and political transformation, hopes for peace-building as a miracle cure have waned (Chandler 2017). Moreover, the combination of a shift in American attention towards the “Global War on Terror” and the increased opposition to political liberalism by Russia and China in the UN Security Council has contributed to the replacement of the objective of peace-building with “stabilization,” “resilience,” and the “protection of civilians.” These are currently more dominant policy frameworks of humanitarian action in war-torn countries than peace-building.
Although the idea of promoting peace through political and economic liberalization has been downplayed as a strategy for peace operations, it nonetheless still lives on in UN policies of conflict prevention, development assistance, prevention of extremism, and in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” ( UN 2015; UN 2018). It is in this wider sense of peace-building that it remains central to debates on humanitarian action as part of the nexus between humanitarianism, development, and peace.
References
Boutros-Ghali, B. (1992) An Agenda for Peace. United Nations Department of Information.
Campbell, S. , Chandler, D. , Sabaratnam, M. eds. (2011) A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding. Zed Books.
Chandler, D. (2017) Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017. Springer.
Fearon, J.D. (2008) The Rise of Emergency Relief Aid. In: Barnett, M.N. , Weiss, T.G. eds. Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics. Cornell University Press.
Ki-Moon, B. (2016) Agenda for Humanity: Annex to the Report of the Secretary-General for the World Humanitarian Summit. (A/70/709) United Nations.
Lie, J.H.S. (2017) From Humanitarian Action to Development Aid in Northern Uganda and the Formation of a Humanitarian-development Nexus. Development in Practice, 27: 196–207.
Paris, R. (2004) At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict. Cambridge University Press.
UN (United Nations) (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/RES/70/1.UN General Assembly.
UN (United Nations) (2018) Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace. Report of the Secretary General. A/72/707–S/2018/43. United Nations.