Whose peace? Local ownership and UN peacebuilding

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on the participation of national actors in United Nations peace operations, reflecting what has become a near orthodox commitment to ‘local ownership.’ Advocates of local ownership assert that it: (1) increases the legitimacy of UN peacebuilding efforts; (2) increases the sustainability of peacebuilding activities after the departure of the UN; and (3) increases democratic governance in post-conflict states. While such thinking about local ownership has informed UN peacebuilding policy to a large extent, the UN has, to date, assumed these positive benefits without critically examining the causal mechanisms that allegedly produce them, specifying the conditions under which this correlation holds, or providing convincing evidence for these assertions. Moreover, exactly what local ownership is, what is being owned, and who local ‘owners’ are remain unclear. Indeed a closer examination of ownership’s relation with legitimacy, sustainability, and democratization reveal a plethora of contradictions that imply that local ownership may in fact decrease the UN’s ability to deliver peacekeeping results. Crucially, however, the UN persists in adopting a local ownership approach to peacebuilding, suggesting that it does so because it is normatively appropriate rather than operationally effective.

Local ownership and UN peacebuilding: discourse versus operationalization

The UN asserts that local ownership boosts the legitimacy and sustainabil- ity of peacebuilding by preserving the principles of self-determination and nonimposition in an activity that can contravene them. At the same time, it also perceives local ownership to imperil the achievement of its operational goals, thus bringing its normative and operational obligations into conflict. This article evaluates the UN’s discourse and operationalization of local ownership, showing that despite the UN’s invocation of ownership dis- course, it operationalizes ownership in restrictive ways that are intended to protect the achievement of operational goals but that consequently limit self-determination and increase imposition. Moreover, because of contra- dictions in the UN’s practices of ownership, it also undercuts its ability to re- alize the very operational goals that it is trying to protect. KEYWORDS: UN peacebuilding, local ownership, discourse vs. practice.

The Commonwealth, gender and peacekeeping

Reflecting on the strategic commitment outlined in the Plan of Action for Gender Equality (2005-2015) and the priority issues of the Commonwealth Women’s Forum, this article assesses the extent to which the Commonwealth as an institution is supporting troop and police-contributing member states in addressing the gender imbalance in peacekeeping operations. Drawing on desk-based research, interviews with international policymakers and a statistical analysis of the International Peace Institute Peacekeeping Database, the article first outlines the Commonwealth’s gender and security policy perspective before examining data sets to determine the success of Commonwealth member states in integrating women into uniformed peacekeeping contingencies between 2009 and 2015. The article observes that, in spite of a renewed optimism and drive to propel women into leadership positions in politics, the judiciary, public bodies and private companies, security sector reform and the implementation of pillar one of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, is notably absent from the Commonwealth’s gender agenda. It is argued that this policy gap suggests that national and international security architecture is regarded as an accepted domain of masculine privilege. A lack of political will among Commonwealth Heads of Government to mainstream gender equality and facilitate structural transformation of national security organs, and a chronically under resourced Commonwealth Secretariat limits the influence of the institution to that of arms-length promoter of international norms on women, peace and security.

Post-conflict peacebuilding: strategies and lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina, El Salvador and Sierra Leone

Includes bibliography

Peace beyond the State? NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina

By examining the work of several NGOs in the context of post-conflict reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay scrutinizes both the potential and limits of NGO contributions to peace-settlements and long-term stability. While their ability to specialize and reach the grassroots level is of great practical significance, the contribution of NGOs to the reconstruction of war-torn societies is often idealized. NGOs remain severely limited by ad hoc and project-specific funding sources, as well as by the overall policy environment in which they operate. Unless these underlying issues are addressed, NGOs will ultimately become little more than extensions of prevalent multilateral and state-based approaches to post-conflict reconstruction.