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.
The evolving landscape of African insurgencies
Amid an array of shifting national, regional, and global forces, how have African insurgents managed to adapt and survive? And what differences and similarities can be found, both among the continent's diverse rebellions and guerrilla movements and between them and movements elsewhere in the world? Addressing these issues, the authors of Africa's Insurgents explore how new groups are emerging and existing ones changing in response to an evolving landscape
Mali: Islam, arms and money
Amid an array of shifting national, regional, and global forces, how have African insurgents managed to adapt and survive? And what differences and similarities can be found, both among the continent's diverse rebellions and guerrilla movements and between them and movements elsewhere in the world? Addressing these issues, the authors of Africa's Insurgents explore how new groups are emerging and existing ones changing in response to an evolving landscape.
Africa's insurgents in comparative perspective
Amid an array of shifting national, regional, and global forces, how have African insurgents managed to adapt and survive? And what differences and similarities can be found, both among the continent's diverse rebellions and guerrilla movements and between them and movements elsewhere in the world? Addressing these issues, the authors of Africa's Insurgents explore how new groups are emerging and existing ones changing in response to an evolving landscape.
Pathways to reconciliation in divided societies: Islamist groups in Lebanon and Mali
Why do some population groups choose to turn away from the state and opt for violence, while other groups that may be equally frustrated with the state remain engaged with the existing polity? This question has become particularly salient and complex in the last five years following the Arab revolutions and counter-revolutions. In a number of states, Salafi groups had to choose between standing outside the domestic political game or participating in formal and informal ways in national and local politics. We approach Sunni and Shi’I Islamism not as monolithic blocks, but as ideological arenas of dispute between competing and evolving social movements, operating in specific local contexts. Thus, focusing on cases from Tripoli, Lebanon and Bamako, Mali we show that religious actors are positioned in multiple fields at the same time. No position or pattern of allegiance should therefore be seen as permanent, but rather possible flexible and shifting. We analyse how such actors navigate such situational fields, what factors that determine their strategies’ potential for contributing to peaceful reconciliation, the sustainability of such reconciliation, and what lessons learned from the divided societies of Lebanon and Mali that are relevant for the case of Syria.