This article reviews peacebuilding strategies in Asia, Europe, the Caucasus, Africa, Central America and the Middle East. It shows that country-based analysis can produce flawed conflict responses. Instead, policy based on conflict systems can shape more flexible and comprehensive responses. It can identify actors and dynamics that exist outside state borders, such as narcotic networks that support insurgent groups, and incorporate these into peacebuilding interventions. Thus, cross-border peacebuliding needs to ‘think outside the state’ – both beyond it, through regional engagement, and below it, through sub-state cross-border community or trade networks. To work effectively, supra- and sub-state initiatives need to be strategically linked.
Armed conflict does not respect political or territorial boundaries. It can spread over whole regions through dynamics that cross borders: refugee flows, ‘nomadic’ armed groups, narcotic or criminal networks, illicit trade or cross-border political, economic and social ties. Policy between states (diplomacy) and within them (governance) is well established to deal with conflict. However, since conflict response strategies still focus on the nation state, governance and diplomacy can struggle to reach borderlands and across borders.
Borderland communities can be politically marginalised and can associate more profoundly across borders than with state capitals. In weak or fragile states, state presence in borderlands can be limited to the police or military, with little evidence of social or welfare services.
International policy has become dominated by statebuilding as a response to conflict. But while statebuilding can be useful to help rebuild fragile societies, it can ignore or exacerbate cross-border conflict dynamics:
- Legitimacy comes from people and political legitimacy in borderlands is complex. State institutions do not necessarily confer either identity or legitimacy.
- Cross-border security is difficult to implement as agents of insecurity often have greater cross-border mobility than agents of security.
- Regional initiatives that focus on security only address the symptoms and not the causes of conflict, leaving in place many of the structural drivers that provoked it in the first place.
- Cross-border trade contributes to building trust and establishing interdependencies that provide incentives for cooperation and break down stereotypes.
- Traditions, social structures and kinship provide powerful tools to foster cohesion and cooperation. These allow civil actors to play peace-building roles across borders when governments and inter-governmental bodies cannot.
- Affected borderland communities have both the insight and the incentive to contribute essential analysis of cross-border conflict dynamics. They can identify local peace-building priorities and structures.
State efforts at peacebuilding need local inter-community and coordinated inter-state efforts to underpin their actions. In this way, regional peace and security can be made more effective. Policy and response architecture can then go beyond conflict management to tackle cross-border conflict dynamics at their roots:
- Cross-border conflict response strategies should draw on local perspectives and support local peacebuilding capability.
- Linking regional civil society and business networks with regional policy can help fill the policy gap across borders and in borderlands. It can enable a shift from regional security cooperation to conflict prevention and resolution.
- Peacebuilding needs to be mainstreamed in cross-border trade initiatives as a strategic objective.
- Regional integration can help to resolve problematic borders. Shared membership of regional organisations can soothe state sensitivity to sovereignty through collective purpose and goals.
- Regional bodies need internal political support from member states and may need external capacity support from donors.
- Regional organisations should lead and own capacity-building initiatives, independent of the state members.
