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CIAO DATE: 04/06
International Assistance to Countries Emerging from Conflict. A Review of Fifteen Years of Interventions and the Future of Peacebuilding
Alberto Cutillo
February 2006
Executive Summary
The end of the Cold War and the spirit of cooperation which prevailed in the early 1990s within the Security Council provided the international community with a historic opportunity to address the number of violent conflicts—and particularly internal conflicts—which had been steadily increasing since the end of World War II.
The United Nations (UN) found itself at the heart of an extremely challenging process of developing new tools to respond to crises. In the early 1990s, separate but related developments led to the establishment within the UN system of new structures and mechanisms in the area of conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict. At the same time, the concept of peacebuilding emerged as the combination of efforts by various actors to help wartorn societies avoid a relapse into conflict and to establish the conditions for sustainable peace. Peacebuilding has, therefore, been identified as the overall framework in which external assistance to post-conflict countries should be included, encompassing peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and development cooperation.
While statistical evidence suggests that the international community has achieved some progress in curbing the number of ongoing conflicts, it is generally recognized that peacebuilding, as the overall strategy to help countries with the transition from war to lasting peace, has fallen short.
Despite the considerable efforts and resources invested in fifteen years of practice, and during as many international peace operations coordinated by the UN, peacebuilding "has not yet developed the depth of experience, specialization and mission clarity that exists in the areas of peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance," or, to put it more bluntly, "the picture of international peacebuilding strategies pursued throughout the 1990s is one of ad hoc, piecemeal, and fragmented responses by a multitude of actors without an overall political framework or an institutional base ... .While humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts had institutional homes, peacebuilding was (and still remains) an institutional orphan ... [that] found temporary and tenuous shelter under the roof of development agencies."
A lively debate on ways and means to improve peacebuilding has been going on for several years within many different fora, including the UN Security Council, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Group of Eight (G8) nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the European Union (EU), as well as among academics and practitioners. The debate peaked with the presentation, in December 2004, of the report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Panel put forward several proposals on peacebuilding that formed the basis for decisions taken at the UN World Summit in September 2005. In the meantime, several donor governments have been reshaping their approach to post-conflict assistance in the last few years.
This paper reviews the debate and how it has translated into operational developments in the field, focusing on the main problems and gaps that have emerged so far. The final sections focus on the decisions endorsed by the World Summit and their likely impact on the ground.
