What challenges are common to both statebuilding and peacebuilding? What are the tensions between them? This paper examines the implications for donors seeking to engage in ‘statebuilding for peace’. International actors have an important role, but it is accompanying and facilitating domestic processes, leveraging local capacities, and complementing domestic initiatives and actions. With humility, realism and greater political understanding, donors need to determine priorities according to the local context and commit for the long term.
The concepts of statebuilding and peacebuilding have become more closely related, but remain distinct. Peacebuilding has become more focused on state institutions, while continuing to emphasise non-state actors and bottom-up processes. The concept of statebuilding has also expanded, encompassing a focus on state-society relations in addition to formal institutions and state capacity. The core of statebuilding is now understood as an effective political process through which citizens and the state can negotiate mutual demands, obligations, and expectations.
There are challenges common to both statebuilding and peacebuilding. First, it is very difficult to ensure in practice the inclusiveness of peace processes and of the process to reconstitute the new polity. Changing embedded power structures is highly sensitive and political. Second, the types of state legitimacy emphasised by donors (performance-based and process-oriented legitimacy – the latter involving democratic representation and accountability, and justice and the rule of law) are very difficult to achieve in low-capacity fragile situations where co-existing forms of legitimacy may undermine one another. International actors have not adequately engaged with traditional forms of legitimacy – norms of trust and reciprocity rooted in social practices.
Tensions between statebuilding and peacebuilding also have implications for donors as they seek to bring the two approaches closer together in order to work more effectively in post-conflict fragile states. These tensions include the following:
- Statebuilding does not automatically lead to peace: The current devastation of many fragile states provides an opportunity for more inclusive and potentially more peaceful statebuilding processes than the violent and conflict-ridden processes of the past. Nevertheless, state-building remains deeply political, and could spark further conflict.
- Steps necessary to consolidate peace may undermine the creation of longer-term state capability: Where a peace settlement needs to be negotiated, the lack of clear winners and losers makes difficult compromises necessary. Power-sharing agreements can dilute authority so much that the political system becomes paralysed, and the need to appease ‘spoilers’ can entrench the political status quo. In addition, achieving peace and achieving justice cannot be easily reconciled – a careful and context-sensitive balance between these twin needs is essential.
- Peacebuilding undermines statebuilding when it bypasses state institutions, even though doing so may make sense in the short term: Donors need to invest in central government capacity-building while also maintaining and expanding the delivery of basic services. Work with non-state actors to provide services must be understood as part of the statebuilding project.
- Statebuilding efforts can remain too focused on formal, central state institutions: While an initial focus on building a relatively centralised state structure is needed in fragile states in order to allow an overall system to emerge, capacity and legitimacy should also be developed at the local level.
Fragile states cannot be made to work from the outside, and in the short term are unlikely to be able to deliver very much; donors should try to keep both their own and citizens’ expectations realistic. Donors also need to:
- Focus on both state capacity to perform core functions and on political processes: In their efforts to build state institutions, donors need to pay particular attention to openings for public participation and the capacity of civil society to express its voice, and to the creation of responsive and accountable central and local state structures. This involves: 1) better analysis of the political economy of statebuilding; 2) better incorporation of such analysis into donor operations; and 3) increased coordination and sharing of political economy analysis and ongoing monitoring among donors.
- Start with the domestic context in order to make informed policy decisions among competing priorities: Dilemmas should be addressed through inclusive dialogues at different levels of governance.
- Commit over the long term: Sustainable peacebuilding and statebuilding is likely to require a commitment of at least 15 years, and longer postings for field staff.
