Introduction: Why Examine Rising Powers and Peacebuilding?
Over the last decade several setbacks in places like Burundi, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen, to name a few, have significantly eroded the prominence that peacebuilding enjoyed in the international system. The failure of peacebuilding to deliver sustained peace has combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance, to produce a turn to the Global South as a source for more legitimate and effective responses to mass organized violence in the world. Onto this stage new actors like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and several other prominent regional powers in the Global South, like Indonesia and Turkey, have emerged as new ‘donors’ that advance their own political and technical approaches to peacebuilding. The entry of the rising powers into the peacebuilding field are likely to have significant implications for how the UN and other international and regional organisations, as well as both the traditional donors and the recipient countries view peacebuilding in the future. Their entry may fundamentally alter how we understand and undertake peacebuilding a decade or more from now. With this book, we seek to answer the following central question: What exactly is new and innovative about the peacebuilding approach of the rising powers from the Global South, and what are the implications of these new approaches for peacebuilding? In this introductory chapter, we explain why this question is important, and how we have gone about answering it in the book. The introduction thus give the reader an overview of the context, key research questions and the structure of the book.
Conclusion: Are Rising Powers Breaking the Peacebuilding Mold?
In the concluding chapter we analyze the peacebuilding concepts, policies and practices of the group of rising powers - Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey – that we have chosen to focus on in this book. We find that these countries share a number of approaches, but note that they also diverge in several areas. The rising powers have a broader concept of peacebuilding than most Western donor countries, but the extent to which they equate peacebuilding with development varies. They have a more holistic operational approach, they have a longer time horizon and a strong emphasis on national ownership, but the latter is often narrowed down to governmental consent. They share a heightened sensitivity to sovereignty, but negotiate this in a variety of different ways. We find that the rising powers have influenced the discourse and practices of peacebuilding, especially at the United Nations, but have not transformed them. Several recent setbacks raise doubts about whether rising powers will sustain their new influential role in peacebuilding. Our research show that rising powers have set forth a broadly coherent set of principles and rationales as the basis for their new approach to peacebuilding. These principles and practices, and especially their results, are likely to influence how Western donors, the UN, regional organizations and non-governmental organizations approach peacebuilding in important ways in the coming years.
Rising Powers and Peacebuilding: Breaking the Mold
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines the policies and practices of rising powers on peacebuilding. It analyzes how and why their approaches differ from those of traditional donors and multilateral institutions. The policies of the rising powers towards peacebuilding may significantly influence how the UN and others undertake peacebuilding in the future. This book is an invaluable resource for practitioners, policy makers, researchers and students who want to understand how peacebuilding is likely to evolve over the next decades.
UN-Friedenssicherung und Terrorismusbekämpfung: seltsame Bettgenossen?
Engelsk sammendrag: UN Peacekeeping and Counterterrorism: Uncomfortable Bedfellows? Based on the case of the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the article argues that UN peacekeeping neither is, nor will be ready operationally, doctrinally or politically to take on counterterrorism tasks. Such a development will jeopardize the legal protection of UN staff, and the ability of the UN to be an impartial arbiter of conflict, and for other parts of the UN family to carry out humanitarian work. The article thus argues that MINUSMA is an anomaly in the history of UN peacekeeping, and should be avoided as an example for future operations.
Contested Professionalization in a Weak Transnational Field
I analyse the contested emergence of so-called needs assessments and the push towards ‘evidence-based action’ within humanitarian organisations. The introduction of evidence-based action since the late 1990s inaugurated a systematic change within humanitarian organisations: it implied that practical experience from humanitarian crises - since long a hallmark of authority among humanitarian professionals - was no longer sufficient alone to establish authority and dominate humanitarian organisations. The push to use ‘objective’ methods to assess humanitarian needs came primarily from donors, who demanded that humanitarian organisations better demonstrate efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. While humanitarian professionals across different organisations can be said to share moral commitments and expertise, they were nonetheless not able to push back against the introduction of standardised needs assessments. The explanation for this is to be found in the fact that the humanitarian field lacks autonomy: Because humanitarian organisations rely extensively on outside actors (donors) for financial and political support, their internal organisation and outlook is heavily shaped by non-humanitarian actors. As a result, the ability of transnationally organised humanitarian professionals - operating in humanitarian crises - to shape humanitarian priorities and modes of work is undercut by their respective organisations´ relative dependence on outside actors. Present-day humanitarian organisations are thus marked by two different strands of professionalism: one with basis in practical experience from humanitarian crises, emphasising proximity to those in need and the role of bearing witness, and one with basis in more abstract models of knowledge of management, resource-mobilisation, and measuring needs through standardised methods.
Professional Networks in Transnational Governance
Who controls how transnational issues are defined and treated? In recent decades professional coordination on a range of issues has been elevated to the transnational level. International organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and firms all make efforts to control these issues. This volume shifts focus away from looking at organizations and zooms in on how professional networks exert control in transnational governance. It contributes to research on professions and expertise, policy entrepreneurship, normative emergence, and change. The book provides a framework for understanding how professionals and organizations interact, and uses it to investigate a range of transnational cases. The volume also deploys a strong emphasis on methodological strategies to reveal who controls transnational issues, including network, sequence, field, and ethnographic approaches. Bringing together scholars from economic sociology, international relations, and organization studies, the book integrates insights from across fields to reveal how professionals obtain and manage control over transnational issues.
Skatt og kapitalflukt: Vil Norge leve opp til ambisjonene?
Splid i politikerdebatt arrangert av SkattJakt-nettverket på Arendalsuka.
Kjetil Selvik
Kjetil Selvik er forsker 1 og leder for Forskningsgruppen for fred, konflikt og utvikling. Han har sin ph.d. i statsvitenskap fra Sciences Po i Pa...
Det illiberale Europa
Minda Holm skriver om en politisk utvikling preget av illiberal nasjonalisme.