Founding assumptions

Policies are often founded on assumptions that are not just unquestioned but apparently unquestionable. They express a worldview. When policies run into the sand, unless the worldview changes, those responsible for implementation are told to refuel, rev up and drive harder. Such founding assumptions are part of the anthropology of policy and politics and they need to be brought out into the light by looking at unwritten rules and silent norms – the way things are done – rather than just at policy positions, decisions and actions.

When the world changes, as it is changing in these years, therefore, it is well worth trying to bring those assumptions into the light. The idea of looking at the foundations of peacebuilding is not to reject the whole edifice – far from it – but to ensure it is resilient and relevant for current and future needs.

Three founding assumptions in the EU that underlie peacebuilding and also international development assistance alike recommend themselves for a fresh look in these times:

• It’s for others;
• It comes from benevolent power;
• It brings its beneficiaries into a development trajectory that, roughly speaking, is ours.

It’s for others

This is what my most  recent blog post was about. The EU has always thought of peacebuilding as something for ‘out there’ – a wealthy, stable and growing region offering others the benefits of its own success and simultaneously acting self-interestedly to protect that success from insecurity and instability in the wider global arena.

I don’t question that underlying motive. But I look around Europe and I ask myself if peacebuilding is really only relevant for ‘out there.’

No – us too

There are numerous signs of disaffection in our societies.  They are different in form, politics and social basis. They occur in a political and social landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. This background of exclusion, frustration and alienation leans  the disaffected towards something between a tolerance and an embrace for violence.

So – no, peacebuilding is not just for others. It can be brought home. The kind of approaches that offer some degree of hope of stability and forward movement out of repetitive cycles of violent conflict in other countries are worth looking at here as well.

Benevolent power

Closely related to the ‘out there’ assumption, the world the EU saw a decade ago when it adopted today’s commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding was one in which the OECD countries – developed capitalist economies and democratic polities – had the wealth and power and the rest of the world did not. It thus went without saying that what was willed would be done and what was done would be effective. It might take time to get it right, there could be errors along the way, it would be necessary to be self-critical, but when power went to work on weakness – well, the power would work.

Er, what happened to the power?

Except, of course, it’s not like that. That vision of the world doesn’t coincide with reality at ground level and in fact it didn’t ten years ago either. There have long plenty of actors around, powerful in their arenas, whom neither the EU nor the US could bend to their will, whether with aid, bribery or force. And some of those actors are powerful in very large arenas. The problem was visible a decade ago and has only grown in weight in the intervening years. This assumption was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The development pathway

With our economies stagnant, joblessness rising, growth next to invisible, politicians impotent and politics alienating, plenty of people are asking what’s so attractive about a development trajectory that leads to where we are. And that’s before we even begin to think about environmental sustainability, climate change and the pressures of demography.

Much of the discussion in Europe about international development aid has got itself tied up in two things – money and measurable targets. But as the debate warms up about what to do after the target date of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, it’s worth taking the analysis further. Current projections indicate that by 2015 not a single MDG will be met in any conflict-affected and unstable country. That is not something that better targets and more money will fix. It is something that should precipitate a rethink. And part of that rethink ought to be about the overall development trajectory.

The development aid discussion has trouble with setting out a desirable destination. With no clear sense of destination, there is no clear direction – there is only good works, which may or may not add up to development.

Here, peacebuilding is different, perhaps because it is newer. It is spending time with the questions, what kinds of countries are stable and why? Both the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 and the independent Global Peace Index reflect this process of inquiry and analysis. And here it turns out that, of course, there are recurrent features of relatively peaceful societies, including not only principles of equality (that are not always respected) but also the institutions that are the basis of how are societies run.

So, perhaps surprisingly, yes, warts and all, recessions and riots notwithstanding, there are things about western societies that make them attractive as development destinations. But in different countries, that destination can look very different. And getting there is not going to be achieved by recalibrating targets and spending more on them.

Power and results

Quickly exploring some of the assumptions underlying peacebuilding has implications for how programmes are understood, discussed and designed. For example, the results agenda that now predominates in many governments’ overseas aid policies is predicated on an untenable assumption about power and effectiveness and has side-stepped thinking properly about the development destination. It could go badly wrong by emphasising short-term results. But if it can be contextualised by greater realism about power and a clearer view of destination, it could be very helpful. It will mean a downwards adjustment in the importance of individual results, which may sound bad to a politician, with proportionately greater attention to cumulative impact.

Destinations and the outsider

Of course, this presupposes a better discussion of destination. That in turns a more honest and perhaps more courageous discussion that stops treating as technical issues that are well understood to be political, cultural and social.

And then there’s the perplexing issue of the outsider – the assumption that peacebuilding is for others out there. Extending the mandate of peacebuilding to include the problems within the EU would bring a new range of approaches to bear on familiar problems. It’s at least an option worth exploring and it would allow us all to get on even terms, sharing with partners in the still vital task of building a more peaceful and secure world.

The EU’s peacebuilding

Since 2001 the European Commission has spent €7.7 billion on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, more than any government or other international organisation and about 10 per cent of its total spending on external aid.

A recent evaluation concluded the money has been well spent overall, albeit with room for improvement – the sort of balanced conclusion you expect from a review like that. The report finds that the EC has undertaken and supported some pretty good work in places as different as the western Balkans, the DRC, Nepal and Central Asia. Not everything works, but nothing has been done that is actually harmful, much that is distinctly beneficial to the common good, and important lessons have been learned.

That was then

The Gothenburg decision was taken at a different time. The Euro and the big enlargement had been decided. Confidence, expansiveness and optimism were in the air. If confidence was shaken by 9/11, the beginning of “the war on terror” and the start of the build-up to invasion of Iraq, nonetheless it was an era of growth and of projecting the EU’s core mission of enlarging the zone of peace to far flung corners of the world.

But in 2007 came the sub-prime crisis in the US and the start of the international credit crunch. In September 2008 Lehman Brothers went down and the world started to be very, very different.

Tragedy and reflection

In fact, for my own organisation, International Alert, things had already started to change. In 2005, the day after London was awarded the Olympic Games of 2012, the city was visited by the worst terrorism it has experienced, far more lethal than anything inflicted in 25 years of war by the Provisional IRA – in four bomb attacks (one on a bus and three on underground trains), 52 people were killed (plus the four bombers) and over 700 severely injured. The city was quiet for the next few days and people worried about whether it was safe to use the bus and tube and go to work.  Two weeks later four more bombs were discovered before they detonated.

In that over-heated atmosphere, on the next day, a policeman shot and killed a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes. It has since been proven that he had no connection with terror groups of any kind. It has been proven that the police had no basis in fact for following him. They panicked and a young man lost his life. I reflected on this and its implications in a post on the day a permanent memorial was dedicated to his memory.

For me and for colleagues at Alert, this awful incident was very immediate: our office happens to be five minutes’ walk from the station where Menezes was shot. Like many others we reflected on these events and we wondered whether skills we have learned in trying to build peace in Africa, Eurasia and Asia since we started up in 1986 might be useful in Britain. We made contact with groups working on community conflict and cohesion and compared notes. Might what we do in Beirut, Monrovia or Kathmandu have some bearing, some relevance in Bradford, south London or Bristol?

The answer was yes (and we now have a programme of activities in the UK), not because we have a magic technique but because we start with a dispassionate analysis of the context of conflict and use a vision-based approach. We don’t only start with ‘what’s the problem and how do we handle it?’ – but with ‘where do we want to be in x years’ time?

This is now

In the summer of 2011, England had its riots. We look around Europe and we see different sorts of disaffection and action: the anger in the anti-austerity, anti-government riots in Greece, the thin patina that people tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland, the youth movements in Spain, the simmering anger in Italy. Even in a country self-proclaimed by an opinion survey to be among the 2two or three happiest in the world* – Denmark’s capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple of years. And at the psychotic and extreme end,  Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya in July 2011 and the discovery of a series of murders of immigrants by right-wing extremists in Germany;

I am not equating these events. This atmosphere of dissatisfaction and violence does not arise everywhere from the same source, the same social groups or the same politics.

But they are nonetheless connected, not by motive or participants, but by the political and social landscape in which they occur.

It is a landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. It is challenged by economics as job opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes. Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the young. Ordinary people feel they are paying the price for mistakes they did not make while those who had the biggest part in the errors in politics and finance are paying a much smaller price.

Some people direct their anger about the injustices at the political establishment, some at the finance world and some – in their confusion at this diminished sense of belonging – against immigrants. But even when the anger is mis-targeted and even when the accusations are false, the feelings that lie behind are real. And sometimes lethal.

Bringing peacebuilding home

How might a peacebuilding approach look? Standard procedure for working in fragile states – rule number one – is to start with context. Which means starting with questions and an open mind.

This makes it very difficult for politicians to bring a peacebuilding approach to their own home patch. At home, they are supposed to know the answers. That’s what we have politicians for – and then we get to choose which answers we like best. Or who answers best, which is not always the same thing.

A peacebuilding approach would not look necessarily at the numbers involved in each action, even the riots. It is a staple of peacebuilding to acknowledge that in countries with a population of tens of millions, it only takes a few hundred unemployed young men, some leaders ready to act, and access to weapons – and you have a war. The IRA’s active forces probably numbered well below 1,000 throughout three decades of war in and over Northern Ireland.

No, rather than the numbers, it’s the background that counts, the social, political and economic context in which this occurs. And the question is whether that background fosters peaceful relations or not.

Last year the UK government brought out its Building Stability Overseas Strategy to guide its approach to peacebuilding in developing countries. Here is some of its analysis, full of resonance for Europe’s current social and political challenges. I have already drawn on it for clues for its resonance for the English riots. But its clues about what questions to ask are so useful it’s worth repeating them (but hurdle over the bullet points if you remember them) (and also get a life – come on).

• ‘The stability we are seeking to support … is built on the consent of the population, is resilient and flexible in the face of shocks, and can evolve over time as the context changes…
• ‘Effective local politics and strong mechanisms which weave people into the fabric of decision-making – such as civil society, the media, the unions, and business associations – also have a crucial role to play.
• ‘All sections of the population need to feel they are part of the warp and weft of society, including women, young people and different ethnic and religious groups.
• ‘Jobs, economic opportunity and wealth creation are critical to stability. Lack of economic opportunity is cited by citizens as a cause of conflict, and is often the most significant reason why young people join gangs…
• ‘Without growth and employment, it is impossible to meet the basic needs of the population, and people’s aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children…
• ‘While an inclusive and legitimate political system is a requisite for stability, confidence in the future comes when people see that their needs and expectations are being met on the ground.’

On the basis of this kind of analysis, you would look at social inclusion/exclusion and marginalisation; at the degree of hope and confidence in the future – or their opposites; at our political institutions – both national and local; at the condition of the economy and whether economic policies are creating opportunities; and at the space for civil society and for bodies such as business associations and trades unions to represent people, articulate concerns and influence politics.

How peacebuilding at home would look

Peacebuilding looks different from one country to the next. But the golden thread that connects it all, expressed in abstract terms, is mobilising social energy for building peace. We work out what form this will take based on need, opportunity and ability in the country where we’re working: police reform, starting new institutions to promote transparency, cultural peace festivals, women’s forums, joint  micro-investment projects involving genocide victims and perpetrators in Rwanda, getting multinationals and community organisations round the table together, communications across the conflict lines, getting conflict-divided communities to cooperate on adaptation to climate change – and much more. Consistently, the theme is people coming together, their energy becoming synergy.

In our atomised societies, bringing people together, asking questions, listening carefully for answers, and shaping common actions: never in the past 60 years has there been such a shortage of this, never has it been more needed.

Growing youth unemployment is causing hurt and anger that a return to economic growth will not be enough to calm. Something else is needed too. It really does seem time to expand the mandate of peacebuilding to include the EU countries themselves.

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* Denmark was ranked top in 2010 in a Gallup poll reported by Forbes in 2010 but more recently may have been shaded out by Norway.

5 criteria for Busan

Just before the meeting, working with colleagues at International Alert, I proposed five criteria by which to judge the success or otherwise of the outcome. Here they are in summary form:

1. Change and uncertainty: A successful HLF4 would be one that recognised that much has changed in this field since the start of the century, causing a great deal of uncertainty – and would set out a way to meet that challenge.
2. Fake consensus: A successful HLF4 would resist the temptation of  shallow consensus and acknowledge that there are different interests, perspectives and approaches – it would, in short, agree to disagree in a grown-up way.
3. More effective collaboration: A successful HLF4 would promote deeper - which necessarily means more selective – collaboration between different actors.
4. Development, not development aid: Success at HLF4 would be reflected by focusing on development and not sliding unthinkingly from the extraordinarily difficult questions of what development means and how countries develop, into the usual concentration on technically better aid instruments.
5. Operationalisation: Finally, a successful HLF4 would encourage countries and organisations either individually or in small coalitions to pursue innovative activities.

So how well did they do at Busan? Does the Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation that was launched with the HLF’s final statement offer real benefits and gains for conflict-affected countries? I wasn’t at Busan nor was anybody from International Alert (and by the end of this article you’ll know whether I regret that), so the scores that follow are based only on the final statement. And note that I am only looking at its relevance for conflict-affected countries.

Change & uncertainty

Change, yes – it frames the opening discussion in the final statement. And by all accounts, the role of China at the meeting made one aspect of change vividly present. The document does reflect on the increase in co-operation between developing countries and the emergence of new aid providers. But that’s not developed as the statement proceeds. Taken as a whole, the flavour is just more of the same.

Uncertainty is barely acknowledged. To be realistic, it’s not really permitted in official communiques of this kind. But that means that a lack of humility is still hardwired into international aid discourse and into its architecture.

And as for conflict-affected countries, in which 1.5 billion people live – they get a mention on page 1 and a paragraph to themselves later on. Not good, not enough and certainly not good enough.

Score: 3/10

Consensus

In paragraph 8 of the final statement, we read, “Our partnership is founded on a common set of principles that underpin all forms of development co-operation.” And that’s it, right there – that’s the fake consensus.

These shared principles are not bad but nor are they profound or inspirational:

• Ownership of development priorities by developing countries
• Focus on results
• Inclusive development partnerships
• Transparency and accountability to each other

The focus on results is new at this level but otherwise this is familiar terrain in which re-statement is easier than investigating why implementation is more complex than was initially anticipated. Rehearsing these unobjectionable and largely technical points masks a wide range of different interpretations about what they mean, which themselves reflect different strategies, goals and underlying principles.

Because there is a great deal of diversity of interest and opinion, it is surely better to agree to disagree – but to nobody’s surprise, the Busan forum reverted to type for such meetings and promoted agreement on technical rather than strategic goals. The final statement lists numerous examples of how actors can cooperate with each other but is silent about what they can and should aim to achieve.

Score: 2/10

Honest collaboration

In the same vein, a sign of success would be that recognition of the need for more effective co-operation (and not just quantitatively more moments of co-operation) would feed through into encouragement for a more selective approach. There could be diversity within this approach, with any government deciding to work most closely with these organisations and states on one issue and those organisations and states on another.

The one place where a push for honest collaboration comes through is in relation to the New Deal developed by the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. This is a valuable statement – drafted well before the Busan meeting – that is specifically directed at the development and peacebuilding needs of fragile and conflict-affected states, made by a group of governments of such countries plus donor government and international agencies. The Busan final statement welcomes the New Deal and continues, “Those of us who have endorsed the New Deal will pursue actions to implement it” – thus distinguishing between those who give the New Deal a passive welcome and those who want to make it work.

Had it not been for this willingness to forego trying for unanimity in action – which usually produces unanimous inaction – the New Deal would have been seen as an initiative that failed at Busan. Instead it comes out of Busan as a going concern with heightened international legitimacy.

Score: 7/10

Aid – or development

In the all too common elision between development and development aid, the latter tends to dominate discussion of the former. Yet in the end aid is merely a potentially important but relatively limited component of development – not the central element. So a successful HLF4 would have agreed that future forums  should be about promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid. HLF4 did not go so far but does include this statement:

“Aid is only part of the solution to development. It is now time to broaden our focus from aid effectiveness to the challenges of effective development. This calls for a framework within which:

“a) Development is driven by strong, sustainable growth.

“b) Governments’ own revenues play a greater part in financing their own development needs. In turn, governments are more accountable to their citizens for the development results they achieve.

“c) Effective state and non-state institutions design and implement their own reforms and hold each other to account.

“d) Developing countries increasingly integrate, both regionally and globally, creating economies of scale that will help them better compete in the world economy.

“To this effect, we will rethink what aid should be spent on and how, in ways that are consistent with agreed international rights, norms and standards, so that aid catalyses development.”

As far as verbal commitment goes, this is real progress. But there are also a lot of silences and recycled general commitments in the document. Nothing much new is said about international trade or crime and nothing at all about policies that reinforce repressive governments in fragile countries.

It remains to be seen whether the words will be matched by action. But the statement provides a useful marker for future intentions, to which governments can be held to account in the future.

Score: 5/10

Operationalisation

The high ambition of getting global agreement tends to lead to an unambitious convergence on the least demanding positions and commitments. By contrast, some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be based on global undertakings but on commitments made between a smaller number of actors. This will give them a chance to put into practice the new thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding.

The role of a global gathering should not be to control, limit or even initiate such innovative work – but rather to highlight and encourage it.

There are some good points in the final statement on this – the endorsement of the New Deal, an acceptance of the need to be less risk-averse, encouragement for development agencies to delegate greater responsibility to their in-country staff, a general welcome for diverse approaches and actors. But overall the final statement falls pretty flat.

Score 4/10

Overall score

To repeat the reservations entered at the outset, the final statement contains more than I have covered here and doesn’t have much about conflict and fragility. Moreover, not being in Busan means I don’t know some the detail that lies behind the statement.

But taking the Fourth High Level Forum at its word as reflected in its final statement, and having set out my stall beforehand to say how I and colleagues would be assessing it, the average of the scores given above is 42%. That’s not a pass mark. If a student got that, the professor would surely add, not good enough – more effort needed.

But others who were there and saw more may judge it differently and have good grounds for doing so.

money & achievement

The Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) was set an initial target to raise $250 million. In fact, $290 million rolled in over the first two years, from one of the broadest group of government donors of any UN fund. As a new set of institutions, the peacebuilding architecture got going slowly and one of the sharpest criticisms of the PBF in the first couple of years was that it wasn’t spending enough money quickly enough. That was mostly unfair, not only because the PBF was dependent on the speed and competence with which other parts of the system and would-be beneficiary governments moved, but also because any new institution has teething problems and goes slowly at first (and so it should or the teething will be all the more painful). One result of that initial impatience is that only $137 million more have been donated in the past three years. There has been a sense that some of the donor governments were waiting and seeing.

What they see now should be pretty reassuring. The PBF is a funding agency not an implementation body - it doesn’t do peacebuilding, it finances it – active in about 20 countries at a level that is pushing towards its business plan target of $100 million a year. It can respond to fully-fledged funding proposals in around three weeks and has been known to do it in a few days – unbelievable speed by UN standards. And there is starting to be a reasonable body of evaluation and assessment of the activities it has financed, which, with all the normal caveats in this kind of analysis, identifies broadly positive impact.

a looming, paradoxical shortfall

This positive record makes it all the more worrying and strange that donations to the PBF are picking up only slowly. This year, the downward trend stopped with just over $70 million donated or promised compared to about $37 million in 2010. And some governments are making multi-year commitments which brings the security of predictable funding levels. But at these levels, the PBF is still living on its initial income and is steadily spending it out. Without a significant increase in donations, it’ll have to cut spending to avoid a deficit in 2013.

Of course, a lot of this is down to the combined impact of waves of economic and financial difficulties hitting donor governments. But it would be staggeringly paradoxical if the PBF were to be left under-resourced today. Consider:

1. The experimental period of the PBF is over; the PBF has proven its worth.
2. As a contribution to the security of citizens, countries and regions, peacebuilding is far cheaper than peacekeeping or major humanitarian operations.
3. The need for peacebuilding is not declining.

This paradox is a symptom of a systemic hangover in the UN – the after-effects of early uncertainty about the concept of peacebuilding and the role of the PBF, alongside impatience because it seemed not to get its gears engaged quickly enough.

starting with uncertainty

The PBF was conceived along the other two pillars of the peacebuilding architecture – the PB Commission and Support Office – by the High Level panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, established by the UN S-G Kofi Annan, with its 2004 report, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, along with the follow-up response report in 2005 by Kofi Annan, In larger freedom.

The key insight from the High Level Panel was that, though peacebuilding should be seen as an expression of the UN’s core functions of security, human rights and development, it had, thus far, been a missing component from the machinery for securing the basic freedoms from want and from fear. So some new institutional machinery was established to fit in alongside the rest of the UN and focus on peacebuilding.

The term peacebuilding had entered the international vocabulary with Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 report, An agenda for peace. But it didn’t really stick. I realised this when I was commissioned in 2002 by the Norwegian foreign ministry in a project together with the overseas development ministries of Germany (BMZ) and the UK (DFID) and the Dutch foreign ministry to review and evaluate peacebuilding practice. The study set out with the notion that there was a decade’s worth of work to look at and soon tripped over the fact that as late as 2001 and 2002, the high-level adoption of the vocabulary of peacebuilding had had very little traction in on-the-ground practice. My overview report of that study, the so-called Utstein Report* was a small step in early 2004 towards clarifying the meaning of peacebuilding and embedding it in international practice. The significant progress was registered with A more secure world in 2004, In larger freedom in 2005 and later that same year the UN summit that set up the peacebuilding architecture.

So it is not really surprising that as recently as 4-5 years ago, as the UN peacebuilding trio started operating, there was a considerable degree of confusion and uncertainty among different parts of the UN, some donor governments and other multilateral organisations about what peacebuilding was and what the UN PBF was for. Some of this confusion, looking back, was almost certainly deliberate: a turf-based determination among UN agencies to push back the newcomer and, as much as possible, grab hold of the resources allocated to it.

clarifying peacebuilding

The grounds for this confusion and uncertainty have been steadily dispelled in the intervening years. Key developments have been the EU‘s partial adoption of the vocabulary of peacebuilding in about 2008; major policy statements by governments such as Norway (with a strategic paper in 2004 followed by a number of speeches and statements from ministers from 2006 onwards), Sweden and the UK; and developments in OECD-DAC, in the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, and the World Bank with its 2011 World Development Report.

The precise form peacebuilding takes varies from one country to the next because conditions and needs vary so widely. The core is the effort to assist a country that is in a perilous situation move to a situation of greater safety.

While the idea started in the 1992 report, An agenda for peace, as a way of defining the key long-term, post-conflict task, the chronology has since been widely qualified. Building peace after there has been massive violence is, in part, an effort to prevent a relapse – and in principle and also in terms of many of the detailed activities, that effort is qualitatively no different from what is required to help a country avoid tipping into large scale violence in the first place. If some 40-50 per cent of violent conflicts slide back into violence after agreement, how do you know at any one point whether you are in a pre-war or post-war situation?

Beyond this, the focus in the World Development Report 2011 on large scale violence of any kind, including crime as well as political instability and outright war, together with the experience of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 both suggest that peacebuilding has a much wider relevance than a recent war or its looming threat. In both kinds of countries, albeit in different ways, a core need is to develop reliable institutions for citizens’ access to social participation and a political voice, to justice and fairness, to security and prosperity. This is likewise the core set of tasks in peacebuilding. It is part of building a peaceful state and part of peaceful development – and they are a part of peacebuilding.

As the cogency of peacebuilding has become more widely accepted, its wide-ranging relevance understood, and its correspondingly large variety of means and modalities acknowledged, so also the practice has begun to advance and the body of evaluation literature is beginning to build up and reveal impact. With this, the earlier uncertainty and confusion around peacebuilding have dissipated significantly.

the role of the peacebuilding fund

At its broadest, peacebuilding is the process through which risks to human security are diminished and institutions are built so ordinary people can benefit from well-ordered government, the rule of law and relatively fair access to reasonable levels of prosperity. For unstable and conflict-affected societies, it’s a key pre-condition and an enduring component of equitable development.

It is, furthermore, not only a deep-reaching and wide-ranging process but also long-term. The World Development Report 2011 talks of a 15-30 year time frame.

It is not the role of the UN Peacebuilding Fund, aiming to spend about $100 million a year, to accompany a country the whole way along that road. It is its role, rather, to help start the journey and to come back in along the way to help clear some obstacles that may be encountered.

This means the PBF has to be catalytic. It has to know how to kick-start peacebuilding and unblock the process if and when that’s necessary. In turn that means it has to be quick. The three-week target for turning round applications for funds is both necessary and impressive. At the same time as speed, it needs to be relevant and precisely targeted. For example, it may not just be a question of police reform but of a specific component of police reform in a particular part of the country that is most needed. Knowing that – and knowing that it may be necessary to ask that question – is key.

All these qualities also mean the PBF often has to be innovative – or gently nudge UN in-country teams and would-be beneficiary governments into taking an innovative approach. And with that goes possibly the most difficult part of this array of qualities so the PBF can fulfil its niche role: it needs to be able to take risks. These risks are not the risks of doing direct damage but of not succeeding – of backing your judgement and getting it wrong.

We may think that the only people whose judgement never fails are those don’t use it much – and the same is true of institutions. But that is not much of a defence when a donor government asks about $10 million that has frankly speaking been wasted on poor programming. The PBF’s donors all support the idea that it should be less risk-averse than other parts of the UN system but not many can be relied on if the risk doesn’t pay off.

where things now stand

All that said, there is a pretty good feeling around the PBF at the moment and good reason for that. It is a quick acting, well managed, flexible financial instrument. It is building a decent track record. It has the support of some important donor governments and what it needs now is for some of those who are in the habit of giving it $1-2 million a year to promote themselves to the the 3-5 million range, while some of those at 5 or so push on for the 10 million mark.

It would be a good idea to start a fundraising push with the EU, which so far hasn’t given any money to UN peacebuilding but could, and then with countries whose economies are actually working and growing. China and India are both regular financial supporters of the UN Peacebuilding Fund: now would be a good time to join the ranks of the big donors and the main driving forces.

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* The group of four governments were known as the Utstein group because their first meeting as a foursome of development ministers was at Utstein abbey in western Norway.

(This post is co-authored with Phil Vernon, with input and comment from several colleagues at International Alert.)

The Fourth Forum

To the initiated it’s HLF4. The previous three were in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). The central output is the final statement – the Outcomes Document. For Busan HLF4 the wording is largely agreed and builds on the output from the previous three.

In one way it’s all a well-oiled piece of machinery. Yet economic and social development and international development assistance are anything but well-oiled. There’s a disconnect between what leads up to and out of Busan and the reality both of development and of development assistance.

A successful Busan HLF4 is one that finds some way to bridge that gap and address the realities.

New thinking on development and conflict

More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict. None of those countries has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDGs).

For all that the MDGs are, as I have argued in previous posts, flawed, generic and blunt instruments for measuring and guiding progress, they are what the international development assistance community has committed itself to – both to be guided by and to be assessed against.

And by that standard, for conflict-affected countries, it’s not working.

There has been a lot of reflection on this over the past few years:

• The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 outlined a new approach to development assistance in conflict settings. It emphasises jobs, inclusive public institutions and the confidence of ordinary citizens in their state and their future.
• There has been renewed focus on the need for concrete results from aid, to help citizens in recipient countries hold their governments to account. This chimes well with the growing emphasis on transparency among aid donors, recipients and intermediaries.
• There is an increased recognition that development is not just about the economy, health and education but also about how people are governed, their access to justice and whether they are safe from danger. And some development assistance is being used  on the lines of these insights.
• Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are providing increasing amounts of aid, bringing different approaches that are not part of the old aid orthodoxy.

Understanding complexity

Programming aid effectively is difficult, especially in conflict countries. It is not just a question of being more efficient, getting more coherence between donors without wasting time in endless committee meetings, and emphasising projects that produce quick and visible impact.

The very purpose of aid has changed in recent years to embrace the previously unfamiliar language of peacebuilding and statebuilding. It has thus become far more ambitious – and rightly so. Any number of successful development aid projects do not necessarily equate to promoting development, unless peace and the institutions of the state are being built at the same time.

Twenty years ago an aid programme might have built schools and trained teachers. Ten years ago it might have strengthened a government’s capacity to plan, provide and oversee education, including a grant for school building, operating costs and teacher training, while looking to a parallel programme to increase tax revenues to cover recurrent costs. Now some donors want to foster better relations between the state and the people, increasing responsiveness, responsibility and citizenship. This requires change in some of the institutions at the heart of governance and society.

New challenges – and persistent ones

Progress has been made, then – especially in the analysis – but many problems remain, especially in the practice:

• It’s widely agreed that building responsive and responsible citizen-state relations is key to peace and prosperity but not much is known about how to do it, especially at the speed and on the scale that meets people’s expectations. How to get the balance right between progress and stability?
• The lack of decent work for young people is widely acknowledged as a failure of development and a major threat to stability. The orthodoxy says the private sector should create jobs – but that won’t happen at the scale and speed, or with the dependability and stability, that are required in the aftermath of violent conflict or repression. Should we ignore the orthodoxy and go for externally funded 30-year public works programmes?
• Climate change brings new challenges – pressure on resources like land and water, the collision between growth and green priorities, the task of adaptation – together with huge new spending budgets. These are largely managed separately from other aid, raising the risk of increasing incoherence among donors and recipients.
• In conflict countries and fragile contexts, the practice of aid organisations has not kept pace with new understanding of the purposes of aid. Without urgent change, they risk being unfit for purpose.
• We have not yet got the right metrics for assessing progress towards stability. It cannot be done with the same metrics that suffice for health or education and it is increasingly tiresome that aid agencies seem to be pulled towards inappropriate indicators by the results agenda. Rigorous qualitative indicators and a time-frame appropriate to the task are key components.
• The behaviour of governments continues to hinder development. The foreign policy of some donors undermines their own aid goals while some recipients use aid primarily to hang onto power.

A new road after Busan

As so far drafted, the Busan Outcomes Document reflects a lot of new thinking on aid – statebuilding and peacebuilding, human security, transparency and results. But it fails to reflect the scale and complexity of the challenge of supporting development in conflict-affected countries in a changing world.

There is a fairly widely shared view that this is the time to end the High Level Forum process. Let Busan be seen as fourth and last. The world is changing and however the actors in international development want to come together in the future to discuss common issues and concerns, this format belongs to the world before the 2008 crash, before the collapse in confidence within the EU, before the recognition of how important the new big players are.

Changing format will – as any organiser of major events and processes will tell you – have a big impact on how participants will view their gathering. Changing format will permit them to break painlessly from old orthodoxies and assumptions that have served their purpose. It will let them get to grips more decisively and clearly with the challenges identified in the World Development Report 2011 among others.

Success at Busan

All that said, how will we know if the Busan High Level Forum is a success, justifying the presence of 2,000 busy people? Five critical factors in the speeches and statements at Busan will offer evidence of success:

1. Recognising change and uncertainty: The way development and aid need to be framed in policy discussions has fundamentally changed over the decade since the MDGs were agreed. They looked progressive then, unimaginative now. We need new tools and methods to achieve and to measure success. Good work has been done – more needed. Participants at a successful HLF4 will define this challenge and set out a process for meeting it.
2. Getting a balanced combination of agreement and disagreement: Beneath the technical language of aid, development is political and contentious. It speaks to different theories of progress and change. International forums about aid in the past have glossed over this, focussing instead on agreements about process issues. Not unimportant, but when consensus is achieved that way, it is a shallow and artificial agreement that often leaves aid practitioners trapped by official niceties into policies they know are flawed, targets they know are unreal and actions they know are ineffective. Alongside that, the emphasis on the technical masks the big power political, strategic and economic rivalries that are also part of the context. Participants at a successful HLF4 will recognise that their different interests and perspectives lead to quite different views about how development happens and how to aid it. This will allow the issue to be debated more openly as the international community starts to prepare for the world beyond the MDGs after 2015.
3. Improving the effectiveness of collaboration: Regardless of the difficulties of getting agreement beyond the technical and surface level, international agencies, governments and civil society do need to work together. But  – and this especially applies in conflict-affected countries and regions - they need to work together where and when they have a deeper level of agreement that covers more of the core problems. Thus, in line with getting recognition (and therefore respect) for differences of view and approach, participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to promote and mandate a more selective but deeper collaboration among the different actors.
4. Development – not aid: Aid is important and the way it is planned and used matters. But the time for meetings about aid effectiveness is over. Future meetings and processes should be about development strategies. They should debate what constitutes development and identify the policies and behaviours of citizens, governments, businesses, NGOs and IGOs that are most likely to promote progress, and figure out how to encourage them. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree that future international forums should be defined in terms of promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid.
5. Operationalisation: Getting global agreement on critical issues is hard and results in a convergence on least demanding positions and commitments. So it is worth recognising that some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be at the global level. Rather, it will be found at the level of specific countries, organisations, working relationships and programmes of activity. This implies a need to encourage individual countries and organisations to push ahead with operationalising some of the new development thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to prioritise the operationalisation of these new approaches to promoting development in conflict-affected countries.

I spoke at the launch meeting at the British Academy. The other panellists are all much more closely involved than I am in the process of counting and recording casualties – two are carrying out a project of this kind on the war in Kosovo in 1998-9 and one is engaged in doing it now in Syria. Some of their arguments, coming from right up close to armed violence and its costs, are in the video.

My own arguments from a bit further away for why the charter matters are as follows:

1. To know: Until now, there has been no agency with the responsibility for counting deaths in war. There are agencies whose job is to cause them and there are agencies with the responsibility to look after those who suffer but survive. But no agency whose task it is to count. Not knowing how many deaths occur in most cases of armed violence, which leaves the field open for estimates – sometimes with dubious methodologies - and for one-sided claims and pure invention. Knowing can get things in proportion – not necessarily less horrible than what estimates depict but reliable.

Those who lose family and friends in war also need to get things in proportion but in a radically different sense. Not knowing what happened to the missing often means people don’t really know what hapened to them. It’s out of that confusion that the inability to move even after two or three decades persists. I don’t exaggerate: in former Yugoslavia, the absence of knowledge about deaths during World War II left unhealed wounds that erupted more than a generation later, part of the background causes of the wars of the 1990s.

Knowledge won’t bring anybody back but it may help the survivors and the country move forward and live.

Nota bene: the charter is not just to count but to recognise every casualty – to acknowledge it, and acknowledge the reality of the life that has been taken.

2. To respect war: Regular readers of my blogging know that I can get quite impatient about the way in which the use of force is often discussed. To my mind, too often - for example when discussing the case for intervention in Libya - well-minded people ignore that the instrument they want to be used in order to do good is one that by definition does harm. War is about causing death. Let us recognise every casualty of war so that we respect the full facts of war.

3. Human respect: Recognising the reality of war and the humanity of every casualty will in turn, I hope, encourage mutual respect among participants and victims of war and armed violence – respect for each other’s humanity. This may make it harder to be a participant and that might make it less common to be a victim.

4. A civilising idea: It will not end war and it certainly won’t bring people back to life but, just like the founding of the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement, it will do something to help a potentially barbaric world be more civilised.

Indeed, I think there are many similarities between the original idea of the Red cross in the mind of its founder, Henri Dunant, based on his experience at Solferino in 1859.

• That too was a simple idea – that somebody should care impartially for soldiers injured in war.
• It filled a gap – there had been no such agency.
• Its weight comes only from moral clarity.
• It has not ended war but, not least through International Humanitarian law (previously known as the Laws of War) it has had a civilising influence in a barbaric context.

And like all good ideas, Every Casualty is – as the Red Cross was once articulated and as it remains - obvious. It’s the kind of idea that, as soon as it’s articulated, you’re likely to think you had the same thought years ago (which is the hallmark of the best ideas).

As I said at the top, to gain some traction, this campaign needs support. Apparently Every Casualty’s web-site is currently under construction; until it’s built and functioning, go to the web-site of its founding NGO, the Oxford Research Group, and sign up there.

The film is a kind of mini-metaphor about ending the fighting. But building a genuine and lasting alternative to violence is not just about that, or about helping refugees get back home, or building schools and roads.  At its heart, peacebuilding is about people and developing the ability – and the institutions – to manage conflicts peacefully.

The film is about the first steps that allow people to tackle the problems that took the country into conflict.

Peace is not built by people who come from outside the location of the conflict. What we can do is help – but the people who build peace are the ones who most need it, the oens who live there.

This is a good time to think about the people who build peace, among them:

• men and women operating community radio stations  in Liberia, who provide opportunities for local dialogue and thus help prevent a resurgence of violence;
• women’s organisations in Rwanda who bring victims and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide together to find a peaceful way forward;
• businessmen and women in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, who are figuring out their part in finding a solution to their country’s protracted conflicts;
• villagers in Nepal who sit down to discuss what kind of security they want – and who can and should provide it;
• leaders in Kyrgyzstan who meet together to talk open-mindedly about how their country can move forward – and away from the spectre of last year’s communal violence;
• and the men and women in LOndon who got together quite spontaneously the day after the riots in August to help clean up their streets.

For peace!

Building stability overseas

In July, the government brought out its Building Stability Overseas Strategy. Some of its basic premises have considerable resonance for our situation at home:

• ‘The stability we are seeking to support can be characterised in terms of political systems which are representative and legitimate, capable of managing conflict and change peacefully…’
• ‘This type of “structural stability”, which is built on the consent of the population, is resilient and flexible in the face of shocks, and can evolve over time as the context changes.’
• ‘The most peaceful political systems are accountable, giving everybody a voice, and trusted to manage and accommodate change.’
• ‘Effective local politics and strong mechanisms which weave people into the fabric of decision-making – such as civil society, the media, the unions, and business associations – also have a crucial role to play. All sections of the population need to feel they are part of the warp and weft of society, including women, young people and different ethnic and religious groups.’
• ‘In many fragile states the army or police can be the main face of the state for many citizens, and their behaviour can have a disproportionate impact on perceptions of legitimacy.’
• ‘Jobs, economic opportunity and wealth creation are critical to stability. Lack of economic opportunity is cited by citizens as a cause of conflict, and is often the most significant reason why young people join gangs…’
• ‘Only a healthy private sector and a well-functioning state can, in the long run, generate the growth and, particularly, the jobs needed for a sustainable exit from poverty, fragility and conflict.’
• ‘Without growth and employment, it is impossible to meet the basic needs of the population, and people’s aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children.’
• ‘While an inclusive and legitimate political system is a requisite for stability, confidence in the future comes when people see that their needs and expectations are being met on the ground.’

On the basis of this kind of analysis, I suggest, you would look at

• social inclusion/exclusion and marginalisation
• hope and confidence in the future – or their opposites
• political institutions – both national and local
• the condition of the economy and whether economic policies are creating opportunities
• the capacity, resourcing, training and behaviour of the police
• the space for civil society and for bodies such as business associations and trades unions to represent, articulate and influence

localised & intense violence

Partly because friends, colleagues and contacts in other countries have been asking whether the media reporting is hype or on the mark, it seems worth trying to summarise my own rough idea of what happened.

After localised violence in north/northeast London on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th August, violence erupted much more widely, afflicting at least 20 locations in the capital on the afternoon of Monday 8th and into the night. Next day it spread to other major cities in the Midlands and northwest, with three people killed. There have also been two deaths in London.

In all these instances the violence seems to have been very intense but also very localised. On Monday one centre of the violence was 3-4 minutes’ walk from where I live but I only knew about it because of television news, twitter and blogs, and the thwumping noise of the helicopter overhead. From what I can gather, that’s fairly typical. If you’re unlucky enough to be on a street that looters targeted, it was frightening; on the next block, you may have wondered what the fuss was about.

But the violence has affected everybody and not just because of living near it or knowing people who saw or suffered. It has had a particular quality that has got everybody thinking and wondering – about ourselves, about our communities, our values, politics and country.

There is not only a frightening edge to the violence but something horribly discomforting. It is not just a matter of people – sometimes whole families working together – taking stuff from stores. It’s not even just the nastiness of burning big stores or trashing local shops and pubs.

Some of the violence has been so personal, so mean – the deliberate running down of three men trying to guard their community, killing them, or the attack on a man who tried to extinguish a fire in a garbage bin, killing him too, or the theft from a young man who was already injured.

The fear people feel and express is not only physical. It is a moral, even a spiritual fear. There is a visible callousness among some rioters about anything and everything that most people ordinarily value. Everywhere you can hear and read puzzled people asking (or experts trying to answer), Just what is going on, what has gone wrong?

In my view it is the nature of the events rather than their scale that fully justifies the introspection that has begun. The question is, in what direction will it go?

the debate

A vibrant debate has started. Not surprisingly, numerous loud voices want a hard line, urging the government to use, inter alia,

• Curfews (including a suggestion for a voluntary curfew, a concept whose effective content evades me),
• Water cannon (Cameron says it’s available, senior police officers say it’s not useful in the circumstances they face),
• Plastic and/or rubber bullets
• And the army.

The government is also talking about removing benefit payments (e.g., for unemployment) from anybody convicted over the riots. In what seems like a purely spiteful variant, Wandsworth Council in London has announced, with Prime Ministerial support, that it intends to evict from social housing the father of a convicted rioter.

Meanwhile, the commentariat is out in force to analyse, explain and recommend. This is the necessary battle of ideas that we must have if we are to find a way out. It is important that it doesn’t just turn into a blame game, and especially not into a bout of political point scoring. At present, surfing around and picking up articles recommended by tweets and bloggers, it seems there is a lot of good analysis and insight around (including these five articles and this one).

Encouragingly, it is not only the liberal commentators who are urging politicians and citizens to look beyond criminality to the context of violent disorder. One of the best pieces of analysis and one of the bitterest dissections of the amorality of the upper class were both published in the conservative Telegraph.

There is one (and only one) aspect of the response to these sad events that is more heartening than the immediate recourse to reasoned debate, and that is the self-mobilisation of ordinary citizens in turning out to clean up their communities: #riotcleanup was the top London trend on Twitter during Tuesday 9th.

But as the opinion polls, the comment threads on lots of these articles, Twitter traffic and a combination of common sense and historical parallel all suggest, communities’ reactions can take more than one form. With that vicious and fearful shadow looming, it is not surprising that many people of impeccable social conscience look at the news footage and ponder imaginative modes of retribution.

Not surprising – not productive either.

politics

The politicians returned from their holidays that the international financial crisis couldn’t tear them away from and started saying things.

• The Prime Minister David Cameron started by saying it’s all just ‘criminality, pure and simple’,
• and then shone his spotlight on a society that is not just ‘broken’, as he put it last year, but sick.
• He has also criticised the police’s performance – reflecting a lot of public opinion on this.
• And the police and politicians – especially including the PM – have started to dispute the degree to which the police response contributed to the riots escalating.
• Home Secretary Theresa May would probably like to forget her comments last September, specifically addressing and dismissing the risk of public disorder if the police are subjected to spending cuts.
• Meanwhile Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg may have mixed thoughts about his embarrassingly prescient reflection in last year’s election campaign  that a narrow Conservative win plus cuts would equal a wave of riots.

The ‘deeper problems’

Cameron’s starting point is that it’s ‘criminality, pure and simple’. You can understand the political need to say this, but taken at face value it’s a pretty gormless statement, taking one facet of a complex problem and saying that’s the whole thing.  It’s absolutely no guide at all as to what policies the government should adopt – and more than that, it’s no guide as to what policies it will adopt. Because, like everybody else, Cameron, as reflected in his House of Commons statement on Thursday 11th, knows there are ‘deeper problems.’

This is the fulcrum of the debate that has now started: what are those deeper problems? And then, of course, how to address them?

Cameron focuses on

• “A major problem in our society with children growing up not knowing the difference between right and wrong.”

So it is the parents’ fault for failing in the upbringing of the children and it is not to do with economic or social opportunity, exclusion or well-being:

• “This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.”

The fact is, however, that culture also sits in a context. And it is that context to which David Cameron’s attention could be fruitfully directed by the government’s own strategy for building stability.

Another couple of quick contributions to his and the government’s thinking  - and the opposition’s – could come from the work done on how to help fragile states become more peaceful and prosperous.

start with questions

In the OECD/DAC guidance for working in fragile states, rule number one is to start with context. To the inevitable question about how to do that, the answer is to start with questions.

Questions need to be asked in a spirit of inquiry; that seems cloddishly obvious but when issues and debate heat up one casualty is the honest, open and straightforward question – too many questions get not asked but laid, like landmines. And answers need to be listened to very carefully, yet treated as provisional and incomplete.

The best of the opinion pieces that have been written often comment on the difficulty of getting the balance right in trying to understand what has been going on – the balance between all the different factors. A resilient and balanced understanding of it all will not come out of one head, one article, one brilliant writer: components will come but to find the proper balance they must be in dialogue with each other.

Thus, Beware the tendency to label. The power of generalisation sweeps all before it and gets in the way of good analysis and effective policy. Whatever one-dimensional that is attached to these events, it’s wrong.

some lines of inquiry

I will return in another post to some of the components of an open-minded dialogue of inquiry about the events in England last week (and by the way, one question to ask is, why only England – why not Wales or Scotland as well?).

Among the things that are pre-occupying me now are:

1. The economic context, not only in terms of narrowed opportunity but also two other links:

a) Pessimism about the future that was deliberately projected by the government last year to justify the cuts;

b) The power of bad example: “What links the City banker and the looter is the lack of restraint, the absence of boundaries to bad behaviour.” (Larry Elliott)

2. The longer-term social context in which significant numbers of people seem to have lost all sense of identity with community along with much sense of opportunity and agency.

3. The social psychology that could explain the astonishing lack of empathy shown by many rioters and looters.

4. The condition of local political institutions, after they have been hollowed out by successive governments over at least 30 years.

5. What actually happened and how numbers of people were mobilised – along with what it is that they thought they were being mobilised for.

More later…

Blown cover story

The initial cover story that the intervention would simply be imposing a no-fly zone with the aim of preventing civilian deaths at the hands of Qaddafi’s murderous forces has long since been blown.

OK – perhaps that’s unfair. For many advocates it was a real motive and I will willingly concede that they believed in the limited operation they were arguing for. My point – and the bitterness that lies behind it is because the same point has been valid, valid and valid again over the past two decades – is that that limited form and aim of intervention was not realistic.

IT WOULD NOT WORK. I have looked into some of the frustrating and seemingly irreducible components of this non-workability in an article for Public Policy Research, out now. Mine is the middle of the three in a cluster - just like my position is pretty much in the uncertain middle.

And the people who were taking the decisions and tasked with implementing them KNEW ALL ALONG IT WOULD NOT WORK. For them – for Cameron, Sarkozy, Obama and their military chiefs – the aim from the beginning has been regime change. That they had to mask it was to do with the constraints imposed both by a sceptical public opinion at home and a wary Arab league in the region.

To do them credit, they never acted as if a drive-by intervention would suffice. But they did – and rightly for diverse political, military, financial and moral considerations - want to limit their military involvement. So it’s been air power, very limited teams on the ground, some intelligence, supplies – but not a full-blooded and bloody Iraq-style or Afghanistan-style intervention.

Nor, in point of fact, has it been like the bombing of Serbia in 1999. Despite predictably hitting the wrong targets several times, western air power has been used with as much precision as possible and a fair amount of restraint.

Aims & means

Take three key factors in the Libyan war – the limited but growing military capacity of the Interim Transitional National Council’s forces, the unlimited aims of both the insurgents and the western interventionist governments, and the limited means those same western powers are prepared to employ. Add them up and the result must be that the claimed urgency of the intervention in March and April morphs into the slog towards Tripoli in June and July.

Media commentators worry about stalemate and partition. I don’t think we are there yet. Seeming stalemate is likely a staging post on the way to a win for one side or the other and partition is much less likely – because the country is much less partition-able – than most commentators seem to think.

Different kinds of costs

“A win for one side or the other” – there’s the rub, isn’t it? A win for whom? The issue can be put this bluntly: if the western interventionists – the UK, USA and France – have, first, the will-power and, of second importance, the resources to sustain the action against Qaddafi, then the dictator will be defeated. If not, he will triumph and his vengeance will be appalling.

The human costs of this will be overwhelming and that is the argument that many advocates of intervention will use to support seeing it through to the end. But I have been round the block too many times to believe the human costs will be the decisive factor in whether outside intervention continues.

It is the political costs for Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy that matter most. These would be so great – for them personally, for the governments they lead, for the influence of their states in the coming decade – and they must be so clear about those costs, that I find it inconceivable they will back down.

Summer of decision

This month or next will demonstrate whether that assumption is right or wrong. It is possible that the approach to Tripoli of the ground forces of the Interim Transitional National Council will trigger a second wave of popular uprising in the capital and Qaddafi’s regime will implode. If not, if a decisive result is not on the immediate horizon, the west will either get out before the end of August or stay in as long as it takes.

Political calendars make it impossible for the British or French forces to be pulled back from about September onwards. In the UK’s case it’s to do with the party conference season in September/October and the return of Parliament from summer break. In France, it’s to do with the slow burn of the Presidential elections. Obama, I think, pretty much has to go with whichever option his European allies choose.

So my assumption is that if they are still bombing in September, they will carry on even if takes into 2012 – and at some point there will be more Special Forces boots on the ground in Libya.

And after

What comes after is unclear. In my Public Policy Article, referenced above, I raise the issue of what it will mean for Libyan democratic politics after Qaddafi, if the people have sovereignty because of external military action.

Politics does not move in a straight line. The military instrument is hard to use with precision. These issues are complicated. I wish everybody on all sides of the arguments would recognise those simple truths.

The fundamental issue in relations between people is how to manage conflict. That’s true for relations between individuals, between states, and at every level in between.

Whether people can manage their disputes productively and caringly will decide whether or their relationship – whether as friends, partners, colleagues, whatever – will continue.

And what distinguishes countries and societies that are moving forward and improving the conditions and autonomy of ordinary people from those countries and societies that are marking time or regressing is their capacity for handling conflict. This basically comes down to the state of their social and governmental institutions for handling conflict. Countries such as, say, Sweden or the Netherlands are very different in many ways from, for example, Colombia or Burundi. But the differences that define their prospects of peace and prosperity can, without too much simplification, be mostly described in terms of their institutions for handling conflict.

Conflict is not always bad. In a relationship, sometimes you just have to clear the air; better to get the issue out into the open in the form of a conflict than let it fester quietly away.

And for countries, conflict is often necessary. There is no social and political progress without it: no votes for women without a struggle, few human rights without standing up and demanding them, we would still be stuck in feudalism or slavery with unimaginably worse social inequalities than persist today. We will not get a better society without conflict.

But the question is whether and how we can manage it so that it is productive rather than destructive, leads to progress. Worldwide, 1.5 billion people – around one fifth of the world’s population – live under the threat of large scale political and/or criminal violence. And much of the conflict that generates that violence is stuck in stagnant, malignant, repetitive cycles.

Though conflict can be good, even when it is not violent it can mean getting  bogged down, with the engine revolving and roaring madly but not producing anything except the pain of excess noise. And of course it can produce violence.

It might be said that one way of handling conflict is through negotiation and the search for agreement on a new synthesis between initially incompatible positions. And another way of handling it is with violence.

But when violence starts, it all too often gets out of control. And the idea of managing conflcist by using something that is largely unmanageable just won’t work. That is true for just about ay level of violence. Between people, it is hard to sustain a good relationship after physical force has been used, whatever the provocation and however uncharacteristic it was of the person who did it. And at a completely different level, using armed force in Libya to protect civilians from the brutality of Qaddafi’s dictatorship is an understandable impulse – but the use of violence even for good purposes has already done harm and risks doing a great deal more. As an instrument of policy, violence is hard to use with control and, therefore, with very much certainty about the outcome.

Which makes it all the more unfortunate that so many political leaders of different political stripes are attracted so often to trying to do good through violence.

Conflict is not a homogenous entity. It is one name for many different things. Political, personal, industrial and corporate conflicts – they are all very different, they have very different kinds of causes and they unfold in different ways. Even so, there are some generalisations you can make.

Number one: conflict is very rarely about what it’s about. Heated arguments are rarely settled by figuring out who has the best argument – because that’s not what they’re about. And most wars have other causes than the noble ones the protagonists try to claim for themselves.

Because of that, addressing conflict often feels like peeling away the layers of an onion. Think of virtually any dispute within a family. And then think about the Israel-Palestine conflict. If it is ever going to be resolved, they are going to have to go several layers down to find a reasonable settlement. If current leaders on either side and the international political figures who are trying to broker agreement do not seem the kind of people who instinctively look several layers down – that might say something about the prospects of achieving a sustainable peace.

One of the difficulties with trying to resolve conflicts is that they change. The conflict isn’t about what it’s about but after a while, what it’s about changes at both the level where it’s articulated and at the deeper levels. Violent conflict reproduces itself. Such hateful things get done that mutual hatred becomes the main hindrance to achieving a peace agreement.

All this makes peace an unstable, chancy process. Peace may be pretty much universally desired but that doesn’t make it easy to achieve. As many peace agreements get broken as not. Ceasefire agreements are often not much more than a chance to reload.

An American wit, Ambrose Bierce, defined peace as a period of cheating that falls between two periods of fighting.

But peace could also be called the period when people increasingly learn how to pursue their conflicts without damage – whether to individuals, to communities or whole societies – so they manage to build a better future. It’s not as witty but in every other way it’s better – more accurate, more honest and more generous. And because it is ambitious, also more realistic.