Charles T. Call

Building States to Build Peace? A Critical Analysis

Agencies throughout the development, humanitarian, political and defence fields have recently endorsed the centrality of state institutions in post-war peacebuilding. But how can external actors go about peacebuilding in a way that reinforces effective and legitimate states without doing harm? Drawing on an International Peace Institute project, this article calls into question the assumption that peacebuilding can be boiled down to building state institutions. The article argues that the process of building states can actually undermine peace, postulating five tensions between peacebuilding and statebuilding even as it asserts that strong state institutions remain crucial for consolidating peace. Identifying three crucial state functions for peacebuilding, the article emphasises the complex interrelationships among legitimacy, state capacity and security in post-conflict societies.

The Fallacy of the 'Failed State'

Abstract This article examines the origins and evolution of the concepts of ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states, arguing that the terms have come to be used in such widely divergent and problematic ways that they have lost any utility. The article details six serious problems with the term ‘state failure’ and related terms like ‘fragile’ or ‘troubled’ states, concluding that analysts should abandon these terms. It concludes with a modest attempt to develop alternative concepts and principles for thinking about diverse states that pose varied challenges for academic analysis and policy makers.

Beyond the 'failed state': Toward conceptual alternatives

The article advances conceptual alternatives to the ‘failed state.’ It provides reasons why the concept is deficient, showing especially how counterproductive it is to aggregate states as diverse as Colombia, Malawi, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, and Tajikistan. I argue for distinguishing among capacity gaps, security gaps, and legitimacy gaps that states experience. Importantly, I show that these gaps often do not coincide in a given country, and that the logical responses to each of the three gaps diverge in significant ways. I offer brief case examples of the logic of response to the gaps and of the tensions that must be managed among them. The article advances the debate over an important and under-theorized emergent concept in global politics.

Knowing Peace When You See It: Setting Standards for Peacebuilding Success

What constitutes a successful peacebuilding outcome? This paper identifies four common standards for peacebuilding success and explores them conceptually and operationally. War recurrence, the most salient marker of peacebuilding failure, is a necessary but insufficient indicator. Yet other standards are also problematic. This paper argues for a standard that includes (a) the recurrence of large-scale organised violence, plus (b) political and institutional elements that minimally indicate a state capacity for resolving social conflicts peaceably. Even as better cross-national indicators of institutionalising peace are needed, national and international decisionmakers should interpret any such standards with caution and in ways that are highly context-specific in developing policies.What constitutes a successful peacebuilding outcome? This paper identifies four common standards for peacebuilding success and explores them conceptually and operationally. War recurrence, the most salient marker of peacebuilding failure, is a necessary but insufficient indicator. Yet other standards are also problematic. This paper argues for a standard that includes (a) the recurrence of large-scale organised violence, plus (b) political and institutional elements that minimally indicate a state capacity for resolving social conflicts peaceably. Even as better cross-national indicators of institutionalising peace are needed, national and international decisionmakers should interpret any such standards with caution and in ways that are highly context-specific in developing policies.

Liberia's War Recurrence: Grievance over Greed

Scholars of peacebuilding are increasingly moving beyond questions of how to reach negotiated settlements to how an apparently stable postwar peace can be consolidated. Liberia offers a good case study, as its civil war of 1990–96 seemed to have concluded with an internationally supported election in 1997 and the withdrawal of international peacekeeping forces. Yet it experienced renewed warfare involving many of the same actors by 2000. What explains the failure of Liberias peace? Recent research on civil wars has emphasized the causal role of poverty, natural resource dependency, and weak state institutions. Although Liberia reflects many of these factors, I argue here that grievance and exclusionary behavior underlie Liberias civil war recurrence. These findings suggest that national actors and international peacebuilders should focus strategies on addressing postwar elected governments’ exclusionary conduct toward former enemies.

Conclusion: Are Rising Powers Breaking the Peacebuilding Mold?

The concluding chapter analyzes the peacebuilding concepts, policies, and practices of five key rising powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey. It finds that these countries’ approaches share some key features but diverge in others. Rising powers have a broader concept of peacebuilding than most Western donor countries, but the extent to which they equate peacebuilding with development varies. They have a more holistic operational approach, a longer time horizon, and a strong emphasis on national ownership, but the latter is often narrowed down to governmental consent. They share a heightened sensitivity to sovereignty, but negotiate this in a variety of ways. It finds that the rising powers have influenced the discourse and practices of peacebuilding, especially at the United Nations (UN), but not transformed them. Several recent setbacks raise doubts about whether rising powers will sustain their new influential role in peacebuilding. This volume shows that rising powers have set forth a broadly coherent set of principles and rationales as the basis for their new approach to peacebuilding. These principles and practices are likely to influence how Western donors, the UN, regional organizations, and non-governmental organizations approach peacebuilding in important ways in the coming years.

A “Brazilian Way”? Brazil’s Approach to Peacebuilding

Since the early 2000s, Brazil has been a high-profile advocate of non-Western approaches to development cooperation, peace operations, and other initiatives related to peacebuilding. Brazil became more active in a variety of initiatives that can be considered to fall under the concept of peacebuilding. In UN debates, Brazil promoted peacebuilding as a complement and sometimes as an alternative to militarized approaches to peacekeeping, arguing that investing in political processes and socioeconomic development was essential to the promotion of peace. This chapter describes the scope of, and trends in, Brazil’s peacebuilding activities since the early 2000s. It analyzes the broader context, key principles, and main mechanisms of Brazilian peacebuilding; identifies major patterns and trends; and notes some of the most important challenges and contradictions. In particular, it examines whether there is a “Brazilian” approach to peacebuilding and what its elements might be, as well as how that approach differs from dominant or Western principles and practices. It finds that despite recent cutbacks and a lower profile on the global stage, Brazilian efforts abroad constitute a loose but emergent approach to promoting stability and development in partner countries.

Introduction: Why Examine Rising Powers’ Role in Peacebuilding?

Over the last decade, setbacks in places like Burundi, Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen have undercut the credibility that peacebuilding enjoyed in the international system. These failures have combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance to produce a turn to the Global South for more legitimate and effective responses to mass organized violence in the world. Onto this stage new actors like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and other regional powers in the Global South, like Indonesia and Turkey, have emerged as new “donors” that advance their own political and technical approaches to peacebuilding. These rising powers seek to influence how the United Nations, other multilateral organizations, traditional donors, and recipient countries view and do peacebuilding. Their entry may fundamentally alter peacebuilding a decade from now. This book seeks to answer the following central questions: What exactly is new and innovative about the peacebuilding approaches of rising powers from the Global South, and what are the implications of these new approaches? The introductory chapter explains why this study is important, identifies several key research questions, and outlines the method and structure of the volume.

The Lingering Problem of Fragile States

During his campaign, Donald Trump pledged a “very swift and decisive end” to nation-building if elected. His statement—identical to the pledge made by then-candidate George W. Bush—marks a reversal of a strong emphasis on failed and fragile states initiated by none other than President George W. Bush. In the wake of 9/11, President Bush declared that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” He subsequently made “failed states” a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. He reoriented military and civilian capabilities toward these states, a practice continued by the Obama administration even as Obama sought to draw those two wars to a close. A policy paradigm of “failed states” emerged as U.S. allies, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations (UN) built new institutions to address these priority countries under the rubric of “state-building,” “reconstruction and stabilization,” “conflict mitigation” and “peacebuilding.” As Trump’s campaign rhetoric indicates, the failed states paradigm has receded. Traditional security challenges posed by Russia and China as well as nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran are higher priorities, and the U.S. military is pulling back from its decade-old emphasis on large-scale stabilization operations. Last year, the Defense Department expressed skepticism about a “fragile states strategy” proposed by the White House, and the Congress has no enthusiasm for ambitious new state-building operations. Michael Mazarr, political scientist at the RAND Corporation, argued: “the decline of the state-building narrative reflects a more profound underlying truth: the obsession with weak states was always more of a mania than a sound strategic doctrine.” Indeed, the failed-