Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’ rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.
Brexit og framtida til europeisk og norsk tryggleik
Steven Blockmans, Garvan Walshe og Øystein Bø skal sjå nærare på Brexit og moglege konsekvensar for Noreg, og korleis Storbritannias utmelding kan påverke EUs felles tryggleiks- og forsvarspolitikk (CSDP).
Rival priorities in the Sahel – finding the balance between security and development
The G5 Sahel initiative goes some way to make up for the lack of supranational coordination in the troubled Sahel region. If moulded in the interests of development, it could bring about positive change. But the initiative risks becoming yet another excuse to get more ‘boots on the ground’, if external stakeholders place too much emphasis on fighting terror and stopping migration.
Working Paper: Comparing the EU’s Output Effectiveness in the Cases of Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali
This part of the overall report (Deliverable 7.1) on the EU’s crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali compares the findings of three comprehensive cases-studies. The analytical focus is on the output dimension of EU policy-making that is the output of decision-making of the policy-making machinery in Brussels. Thus, the analysis is confined to the choices and decisions made regarding the EU’s problem definitions, policy goals, strategies and instruments – both on a strategic and operational level; thus policy implementation or impact will be analysed as next steps in following project reports (D 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4).
Implications of stabilisation mandates for the use of force in UN peace operations
When United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he will commission a review of UN peace operations during the June 2014 UN Security Council debate on ‘New trends in UN peacekeeping operations’, the main reasons he gave for why such a review was needed, was that UN peacekeeping is now routinely deployed in the midst of ongoing conflicts and, as a result has had to become more robust.[1] This trend has been exemplified by three recent UN peacekeeping mandates, namely the addition of the Forced Intervention Brigade (FIB) to the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), and the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). These three missions have been deployed amidst ongoing conflict and they have robust mandates that allow them to use force in order to achieve the missions’ mandate. What sets them apart from other UN peacekeeping missions, however, is that they have all been specifically designated as ‘stabilisation’ missions. Only one other UN peacekeeping mission has had ‘stabilisation’ in its name before, and that is the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). This use of the word ‘stabilisation’ in the mandates and names of these UN peacekeeping mandates seems to signal a clear departure from previous practice. What does ‘stabilisation’ mean in a UN peacekeeping context, i.e. what is the difference between a UN mission that has ‘stabilisation’ in its name and one that does not? And what are the implications for UN peacekeeping doctrine, and specifically its practices around the use of force, of this new trend towards UN stabilisation missions? In this chapter Cedric de Coning considers what stabilisation could mean in the UN peacekeeping context by analysing the mandates of MONUSCO, MINUSMA and MINUSCA, so as to identify what is different in these stabilisation mandates from other UN peacekeeping mandates. He then considers the implications of stabilisation mandates for UN peacekeeping doctrine, including especially the principles and practices around the use of force in UN peacekeeping.
Adaptive peacebuilding
International peacebuilding is experiencing a pragmatic turn. The era of liberal idealism is waning, and in its place new approaches to peacebuilding are emerging. This article identifies one such emerging approach, gives it a name—adaptive peacebuilding—and explores what it may be able to offer peacebuilding once it is more fully developed. It builds on the knowledge generated in the fields of complexity, resilience and local ownership, and may help inform the implementation of the emerging UN concept of sustaining peace. It is an alternative to the determined-design neo-liberal approach that has dominated peacebuilding over the past three decades. It represents an approach where peacebuilders, working closely together with the communities and people affected by conflict, actively engage in structured processes to sustain peace by using an inductive methodology of iterative learning and adaptation. The adaptive peacebuilding approach embraces uncertainty, focuses on processes rather than end-states, and invests in the resilience of local and national institutions to promote change.
Working paper on implementation of EU crisis response in Mali
This paper offers a critical review of the EUTM and EUCAP in Mali, arguing that this is another example of international interventions that may be well-intended, but that end up producing very mixed results on the ground. One reason for this is the gaps between intentions and implementation and between implementation and local reception/perceptions. Whereas the first gap points to mismatches between EU policy intentions and what effect the implementation of these policies actually have (see for example Hill 1993), the latter gap reveals the inability of an international actor to both understand how key concepts such as ‘security sector reform’ and ‘border management’ are understood on the ground as well as translating its own policies and Brussels’ developed mandate into policies that makes sense for people on the ground (Cissé, Bøås, Kvamme and Dakouo 2017).