Last week the United Nations Security Council extended MONUSCO’s peacekeeping mission for
another year in the Democratic Public of Congo (DRC), ushering the mission into
its 17th year. The Security Council is hoping that in this year
MONUSCO can address the ongoing humanitarian concerns and support upcoming
federal elections.
The DRC remains one of the poorest countries in the world – despite its wealth of resources. After two
decades of peacebuilding in the DRC, primarily in eastern Kivu regions,
if success is measured in Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, we can categorize this
intervention as a tremendous failure.
Though MONUSCO has tried revising
strategy several times, attempting to cater the mission to regional needs,
little progress is evident. Perhaps this is due to the fundamental flaws of the
UN approach itself. When the UN rolled out their modern peacekeeping missions
after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they employed then-UN Secretary General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s strategy, as outlined in his An Agenda For Peace. This is
based on top-down liberal internationalism – a framework Roland Paris critiqued as the crux of UN failures.
What is
Liberal International Peacebuilding?
The conceptual framework is: democracy, societal institutions, justice,
human rights and a free market are the foundation for a peaceful society.
Therefore, importing these components of western society to war torn regions of
the world, seems a reasonable way to build positive, lasting peace.
The strategy in the DRC has been
very responsive to the situation on the ground. However, it has not strayed
from the classic peacekeeping mission mandate of MONUSCO, and when it refocused
in the 2013 A Framework for Hope, the distilled emphasis is clearly based on
the Bourtos-Ghali framework:
•
To deepen
security sector reform
•
To
consolidate State Authority, particularly in eastern DRC
•
To make
progress in decentralization
•
To further
economic development
•
To further
structural reform of public institutions
•
To further
reconciliation
A workable
framework?
The problem with
liberal peacebuilding is not the concept of creating like societies. It is the
top-down, peace-first approach. UN engagement requires the national government
to work with the international community, in order to give national ownership
to the intervention. The issue with working directly with government is that
they are able to influence the mission for their own benefit. Based from Michael Barnett and Christoph Zürcher’s ‘peacebuilder’s contract’, Michael Lawrence outlines the heart of the
issue in his article Two Modes of
UN Peacebuilding:
State elites have their own
interests in maintaining power and survival but desire the resources and
legitimization provided by international peacebuilding programs. The ensuing
negotiation between the two produces ‘compromised peacebuilding’ in which national elites accede to
international peacebuilding in exchange for resources, but their commitment to
liberalization remains largely symbolic.
This issue occurs at top levels, and bleeds down through the
mission, regardless of how responsive the peacekeepers on the ground try to be.
And it really seems to be an identity crisis of the UN – as Paris has identified, they are required to have both a “heavy
footprint’ by which they can critically influence the
nation, and a ‘light footprint’ that allows local actors to participate in pursuit of their own
peacebuilding direction.
In the DRC, matters are further complicated by how
many rebel groups there are. The Congo Research Group reports there are currently over 70
rebel groups in the eastern region. While most are small, less than 200 people,
this often makes security the top priority over other society building
exercises. For these reasons, I propose the DRC needs to have a specifically
focused, community-based strategy. This strategy would build on the work of
Paris, Barnett and Zürcher, and
Lawrence. Lawrence has offered a peace-second, integrated peacebuilding
strategy, that elevates civil society to the level of
national government, and encourages communication between the three actors.
This can be made more robust through training opportunities at the community
level for the purpose of integrating community leaders into the domestic
governments of all levels and the UN writ large. In addition, the UN could
focus on micro-peace-building projects that are long term and united with
community leaders. The project direction and strategy would come from the local
community, who would determine what peace means to them.
By Jessica Baran
MA Candidate in International Affairs
Conflict Analysis and Resolution
Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University
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