Chapter 6. Supporting Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Development

SUMMARY

This chapter considers the efforts needed to sustain peace by preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict. Peacebuilding efforts need to focus on building resilient national institutions, a task which poses both governance and developmental challenges. Moreover, an actively engaged civil society is just as important as formal government institutions. While peacebuilding reforms cannot be enforced by national and regional leaders alone, they will need to be engaged in the effort.

It is important for a mission to consider mission exit and transition from the outset of a peace operation. Efforts to sustain peace must focus on addressing the issues of marginalization and unaddressed grievances, based on updated peace and conflict analyses. This requires a different approach to such analysis, one which allows for inclusive ownership and for identifying the drivers of peace and conflict that need to be jointly addressed by the state and society. It also means that the MLT must constantly undertake peace and conflict analyses to maintain awareness of the threats and risks to the mission and its ability to implement its mandate.

Peace operations are not often in the lead in many of these efforts. The MLT sets the tone for the rest of the mission to work collaboratively with other actors on the ground, allowing them to lead in areas where they have a mandate or a comparable advantage. The SRSG and DSRSG-RC/HC must exercise leadership and create political consensus in a broader sense, ensuring coordination among UN entities, mobilizing and maintaining donor funding, and marshalling support and engagement of key international players and regional financial institutions.

This chapter discusses a set of seven operational-level outputs, each with its own set of activities, risks and benchmarks, which together contribute to the overall outcome of sustaining peace and development.

• Secure and Effective Humanitarian Relief Efforts Supported. This output emphasizes the important linkages and similarities between the objectives of humanitarian relief and efforts to sustain peace and deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Accordingly, many peace operations missions have been mandated to contribute to a secure environment to enable the delivery of humanitarian relief. Nonetheless, the relationship between humanitarian actors and a peace operation is a fine balancing act, driven by humanitarian principles.
• Women’s Role in Peace and Security Promoted. This output speaks to the fact that women’s participation in conflict-prevention efforts, political processes and the security sector, as well as their perceptions of their own security, are essential contributors to a long-term and sustainable peace. This is particularly the case when a peace operation is preparing to drawdown and transition. Peace operations are expected to put in place mechanisms and reforms to ensure that women’s peace and security is promoted.
• Youth Participation Supported. This output reflects the fact that youth perspectives are underrepresented in formal political structures, including peace processes, and are excluded from discussions and decision-making. This can risk stoking grievances, making them an accessible demographic for armed groups, and creating enmity for the future, while ignoring the need to listen to, value and provide economic opportunities for the future electorate. Missions can foster these dialogues between the host authorities and civil society.
• Civil Society Engaged and Supported. This output highlights the essential role of civil society in building and sustaining peace, especially in times of transition. The mission needs to view efforts to engage with civil society as a long-term process. Peace operations can leverage civil society to improve the conditions for mandate implementation in order to prevent and mitigate local-level conflicts, provide early warning on human rights violations and abuses, devise protection strategies, facilitate local consultations and foster greater inclusiveness, particularly of women and youth.
• Return and Reintegration of Refugees and IDPs Supported. This output acknowledges that return and reintegration is a highly sensitive and potentially volatile process, from the identification and registration of affected persons to their eventual and voluntary return, in safety and in dignity, and their subsequent reintegration. Although the return of refugees and IDPs is managed and led by specialized UN agencies and their implementing humanitarian partners, the mission is central to establishing safe and secure conditions, and can play an important supporting role before, during and after the return.
• Transition from Emergency Relief to Recovery and Development Enabled. This output highlights that once the need for emergency assistance has subsided and early recovery is in progress, the focus should be on a smooth transition to longer-term development activities. This will entail gradual handover of responsibilities to national authorities. Ideally, planning for transition from emergency and early recovery to long-term rehabilitation and development should begin early in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding phase. The successful transition from recovery to development and the ability of national and other institutions to take responsibility in a number of areas will be defining factors in the exit strategy of a mission.
• Independent Media Supported. This output underlines the vital role of the free and responsible flow of information in supporting efforts to build and sustain peace. While peace operations do not have a lead role in establishing an independent media, they can enable the process through their political offices and capacity-building tasks, which provide an opportunity to foster legal institutions that can protect journalists in the long term and support the development of an independent media.

Each of the seven outputs listed above generates a set of considerations. Given the primacy of the host country, the UNCT and other development partners in the long-term process of sustaining peace, these considerations give rise to management issues for the MLT and the mission, such as:

• Balancing short-term political expediencies and gains with long-term UNCT attempts to address root causes for a sustainable peace through development.
• Balancing humanitarian imperatives and the political and force-protection requirements of peace operations. While peace operations are largely driven by political mandates, humanitarian action is driven by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence.
• Balancing humanitarian programmatic activity against safety and security of all UN personnel in the mission area for whom the DO as HoM is responsible.
• Over-reliance on gender advisers rather than treating Women, Peace and Security (WPS) as a whole-of-mission activity and responsibility.
• Engaging with a polarized civil society alongside prejudices and reluctance of government elites on whom political progress for peace depends.
• Balancing security and mission responsibilities to protect vulnerable civilians and IDPs against the government’s national ownership of the problem.
• Managing pressures for premature drawdown and early withdrawal alongside the dangers of overdependence on the peace operation and the erosion of national capacities.