Governance and Development

Christian:

People regularly wonder why peacekeeping has been abandoned in favour of more “robust” “stabilization” missions, also known as peacebuilding and peace enforcement.   For one thing, there are still plenty of traditional peacekeeping missions across the globe – they just don’t make headlines.   The recent deployment to southern Sudan is just one example.   The problem is that the nature of the beast has changed.   No longer are Western troops keeping two warring factions apart who have agreed to a ceasefire beforehand.   Rather, peacebuilding operations tend to occur where the West has picked a side that it backs.   Since the “bad guys” have not signed on to the deal, no wonder that they will make every effort to stir up a hornets nest.   For often the West’s presence is there precisely to call the power of the “bad guys” into question.    Note that these missions are usually missions which have explicit UN backing (such as Afghanistan) but where the UN has unequivocally said that it has neither the assets nor the expertise to perform anything but a limited role as a political partner.   But how do we decide where peacebuilding should take place?   If we look at this map of failed or failing states, it is evident that the West could be in a lot more places than it is:

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The trouble is that places that get to “benefit” from peacebuilding tend to be those in which the West has geostrategic or other interests.   So, far from deciding on humanitarian groups, realist politics prevails.   In that regard, of course, peacebuilding is no different from peacekeeping.   The problem is that peacebuilding missions are often sold as humanitarian missions when, in fact, the humanitarian aspect of the mission is but a means to an end.   The problem, however, is that without a clear rationale and principle based on which to choose where to intervene, the West’s efforts often look more like cherry-picking than a genuine effort at global peacebuilding.   A principled approach, by contrast, such as the “Responsibility to Protect” would require Western intervention in any number of places, many of them with conflicts far more intractable than Afghanistan.   In either case, then, peacebuilding is impossible to justify based on principled grounds.   Yet, in a Westphalian world where the concept of state sovereignty prevails, only a principled approach to intervention is defensible.   Which raises the question whether peacebuilding holds out promises which it just simply cannot keep – and which is thus bound to disappoint both Western voters and the local populations who we are supposedly there to help alike.

Meghan:

This then begs a larger question of the role of the military in foreign affairs. What is a “principled” action? Who decides when, and where to act? What biases are inherent in such decisions? Should Western nations provide any sort of military aid at all?  Do we have a moral obligation to “help” our foreign neighbours? Are we capable of “helping” without first weighing the benefits to our own nation? Is military intervention just a thinly disguised version of 18 ^th and 19 ^th century colonialism?