Niels Nagelhus Schia

‘Where the Rubber Meets the Road’: Friction Sites and Local-level Peacebuilding in Haiti, Liberia and South Sudan

Peacebuilding actors have been heavily criticized for being postcolonial, orientalist and mired in a Western rationality, causing a gap between needs on the ground and the means provided, and resulting in poor delivery. From recent fieldwork in Liberia, Haiti and South Sudan we argue that while there is merit to much of this critique, there is also a will to analyse and understand the local political economy and how international actors become a part of it, but that peacebuilding tends to fall victim to conflicting power structures within the UN and between international actors, as well as to the lack of application of acquired knowledge and cumbersome processes.

Reforms, Customs and Resilience

In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, a resolution which highlighted the role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction. It further stressed the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security. This resolution propelled the formation of other resolutions on women, peace and security that focus particularly on women’s security in conflict and post-conflict situations (S/RES/1820, S/RES/1888, S/RES/1889, S/RES/1960, S/RES/2106, S/RES/2122). Championing these initiatives as well as in their wake, there has been an increasing focus on the women-conflict nexus in research and policy work.1 However, this body of work has come partly at the expense of a focus on the effects of these resolutions ‘on the ground’ in ongoing peace-building processes. The current chapter is an attempt at remedying that.

The cyber frontier and digital pitfalls in the Global South

Abstract How does digitalisation lead to new kinds of global connections and disconnections in the Global South? And what are the pitfalls that accompany this development? Much of the policy literature on digitalisation and development has focused on the importance of connecting developing countries to digital networks. Good connection to digital networks may have a fundamental impact on societies, changing not only how individuals and businesses navigate, operate and seek opportunities, but also as regards relations between government and the citizenry. However, the rapid pace of this development implies that digital technologies are being put to use before good, functional regulatory mechanisms have been developed and installed. The resultant shortcomings – in state mechanisms, institutions, coordination mechanisms, private mechanisms, general awareness, public knowledge and skills – open the door to new kinds of vulnerabilities. Herein lie dangers, but also opportunities for donor/recipient country exchange. Instead of adding to the already substantial literature on the potential dividends, this article examines a less studied issue: the new societal vulnerabilities emerging from digitalisation in developing countries. While there is wide agreement about the need to bridge the gap between the connected and the disconnected, the pitfalls are many.

Understanding Peacebuilding Through Anthropological Perspectives on Organizations and Sovereignty

Why should we seek to understand peacebuilding through anthropological perspectives on organizations and sovereignty? My short answer to this is that peacebuilding is an organized activity. It is transnational in scope. It is a human construction which, in turn, shapes and influences people’s lives across borders, sometimes through state apparatuses and other times bypassing state apparatuses. It is performed through organizations, and it penetrates different forms of sovereign claims. In this way, peacebuilding is about how larger systems and processes influence upon local ways of life. How global and local processes impinge on one another has always been a concern where anthropological perspectives have been able to produce new perspectives and important knowledge. By applying these anthropological perspectives, it becomes possible to analyze peacebuilding without applying a state-centric form of exploration. It becomes possible to explore how peacebuilding is an organized activity geared toward creating and implementing taxonomies, it becomes possible to trace how and where these taxonomies are being produced, and it becomes possible to explore how they impact, regulate, and change local ways of life. The implication of this is that the two anthropological perspectives enable us to understand and trace how peacebuilding has effects beyond just the intended and formalized ones.

Implementing the Franchise

This chapter describes how bureaucratic intentions became transformed and eventually skewed into focusing primarily on responding to the donor side. This situation led to less autonomy at the implementation level, which in turn resulted in less exchange and negotiation between representatives of different systems. The many differing views, needs, and existing practices were not put on the table for discussion. Implementation of the intentions concerning, for instance, the security of women and children in Liberia, incorporated as a main activity of UN peacebuilding through UNSC Resolution 1325, was conducted in ways that neglected the local level. Projects like those referred to in this chapter are also part of global processes and require investigation from several perspectives if we are to gain a better understanding of what they are and how they are being performed. This chapter describes how intentions, as embodied in Security Council resolutions, are subject to international as well as national forces, agendas, and resolutions which have effects on the impact on the ground. The ways in which these issues were pursued by actors representing the international community produced certain kinds of actions. These actions connected mainly with actors in Liberia representing social processes and institutions, with an epistemology similar to that of the donors. This acted to marginalize the friction at the interface between the systems and disconnected customary systems which, as described in Chap. 4, are historically important social structures in Liberia. The practical effect of the disconnection, or the emergent property of this part of the peacebuilding process, was that questions of justice and impunity were often dealt with through informal processes and not the newly implemented formal system. This statebuilding aspect of the peacebuilding process was characterized by vertical loyalty, with limited space for bureaucratic autonomy in the field. Ultimately it did not result in an improved situation for women and children. Constructing new buildings in the county capitals helped in (re)producing state capacities, but, at the same time, the statebuilding project produced actions that served to undermine state apparatuses.

Liberia and the History of a Franchised State

This chapter chronicles the war in Liberia, describes the historical trajectory of the Liberian state, and notes some distinct features, like shadow structures, as well as the Liberian state or executive branch of government as both client and patron at the same time. These aspects are central for understanding how and why the Liberian state—as represented by elites—is honed to be a client of international organizations and donor states. More specifically the chapter analyzes the formation of the state and the bureaucracy in Liberia as a process where state mechanisms and apparatuses had been honed and adjusted vis-a-vis external actors during almost the entire nineteenth century as well as throughout the twentieth century. The UN’s engagement could be seen as a continuation of this pattern. It became possible to analyze this dynamic as a reproduction of older patrimonial patterns shaped through the particular historical trajectory of Liberia. Thus, the chapter provides the background for understanding the how and the why also today. This will also be further explored in the following empirical chapters.

Franchised States and Beyond

This book empirically scrutinizes paradoxes of peacebuilding by showing how the Liberian state was being rebuilt as a global phenomenon through peacebuilding. With regard to the anthropological perspectives on organization and sovereignty, it was possible to see Liberia as a franchised state and thereby argue that even if the ideology behind peacebuilding is built on Western values and ideas, it is not necessarily Western goggles that determine how peacebuilding, and the organizations through which it is implemented, is sub-situated. That is determined by how institutions are built and filled with purpose and content through human practices.

Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship: Liberian Ministries, International Consultants, and Making Connections

The United Nations Security Council adopts broad mandates and resolutions concerning countries hosting a peacebuilding mission. Because these mandates and resolutions are results of compromises, consensus focus, and big politics, they have to be negotiated, interpreted, and adapted to the situations in the field or the implementation level. This creates a gap between the implementation level and the executive decision-making level and a need for the bureaucrats or the officials on the ground, to create ownership and interpret situations in the field in relation to Security Council mandates. Studying peacebuilding in Liberia through a focus on how formal schemes and informal processes impinge on one another illuminated parts of the peacebuilding process that involved statebuilding-like activities within Liberian ministries. In order for the Liberian government to be able to absorb the complexity of the international operation and presence in the country, these ministries needed assistance. This situation had opened the way for international consultants. The role of the international consultants in the Liberian ministries revealed the snowball effect on peacebuilding processes with regard to how other non-UN actors take on the responsibility for other tasks and projects pertaining to peacebuilding. This chapter explores the function of these consultants in the interface between the international and the national. The paper concentrates in particular on the consultant’s role in the making of new connections, disconnections, new formal stipulations, and thus in the making of new bureaucracy. This, in turn, also opens up for a discussion of the state and notions of sovereignty.

Being a UN Bureaucrat: Policy-Making in the UN Secretariat

Much of the attention of UN officials, or bureaucrats, working at headquarters was dominated by a catching-up tendency. The formal stipulations in the broad peacebuilding mandates and resolutions, as adopted by the Security Council, result in a multitude of activities and actors on the ground, all seeking to realize the formalized intentions in the resolutions in the peacebuilding context in the post-conflict country. The degree of autonomy on the ground affects the institutional output and the linkages of the peacebuilding process, between the peacebuilding recipients and the donors. The protagonists in this chapter, the UN bureaucrats, were working at UN DPKO headquarters in New York and were geared towards a catching-up modus, trying to put language on activities emerging on the ground or in the field as a result of broad Security Council mandates. Based on the empirical findings through qualitative fieldwork and participant observation, as described in Chap. 3, this chapter focuses on performers and producers of UN peace operation strategies, the actors working at UN DPKO headquarters. These actors represent an interface between the political decision-making level and the implementation level on the ground in the peacekeeping missions. They also represented an interface between the external and the internal, the global, and the local, where political, cultural, and knowledge processes are continuously challenged and (re)built.

Producing State Effects: Everyday Practices and Diplomacy in the UN Security Council

Most resolutions adopted by the Security Council are concerned with the peace operations of the UN. Council decisions generally contain intentions that have been expressed at the topmost executive level of the organization. Through UNSC resolutions, these intentions influence, guide, and impact on peacebuilding activities around the world. Consequently, in order to understand the origin of the intentions behind the resolutions adopted by the Council, it is necessary to explore what the Council does and how it actually works.