How are statebuilding and peacebuilding processes linked, and what are some of the most significant complementarities and tensions between them? How can donors navigate the challenges of ‘statebuilding for peace’ in fragile states? This Briefing Paper outlines an arena full of contradictions, arguing that these need to be recognised if they are to be managed. Effective donor engagement requires humility, better political understanding, greater sensitivity to context, and sustained, long-term commitment.
In fragile, conflict-afflicted settings, the international community faces the dual task of promoting peace while helping to build more effective, inclusive and responsive states. This has led to a growing realisation among donors that their peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions should be brought closer together – ‘statebuilding for peace’, as the UN Development Programme has put it.
There are, however, both complementarities and tensions between statebuilding and peacebuilding:
- The statebuilding approach contributes to peacebuilding: It has brought to peacebuilding a corrective focus on state institutions and a more realistic, longer-term timeframe for working in fragile states.
- Both approaches seek to build more inclusive polities and societies: This involves working with domestic actors to foster institutions that are more representative and responsive in practice, not just on paper.
- Both approaches seek to foster legitimacy: This involves ensuring that the process to constitute the new polity enjoys broad-based legitimacy and support so that it proves sustainable over time.
- Statebuilding may not automatically lead to peace: As a political process that may create both winners and losers, statebuilding could spark further conflict.
- Steps necessary to consolidate peace may undermine the creation of longer-term state capability: Power-sharing agreements can dilute authority too much and the need to appease ‘spoilers’ can inhibit changes in power relations.
- Peacebuilding undermines statebuilding when it bypasses state institutions: The temptation to bypass a low-capacity state in order to produce quick ‘peace dividends’ (such as by using NGOs to provide basic services) can have negative consequences on longer-term statebuilding priorities.
- Statebuilding efforts can remain too focused on formal, central state institutions: Important non-state actors, including traditional leaders and mechanisms and informal institutions, may be overlooked.
Donors need to recognise more fully that ‘statebuilding for peace’ is not a linear sequence of cumulative or mutually reinforcing steps. The fundamental complementarities between the peacebuilding and statebuilding agendas may outweigh some of the tensions between them, but some tensions may not be resolved. If they are better understood, however, they can be better managed. Donors therefore need to:
- Start with the domestic context in order to make informed policy decisions among competing priorities: This involves facilitating existing domestic processes and leveraging local capacities (without romanticising local structures and institutions). Dilemmas should be addressed through inclusive dialogues at different levels of governance.
- Be more humble in their approach to fragile states and more realistic about what international actors can achieve: This includes avoiding the creation of unrealistic expectations among citizens about what the state can deliver.
- Sharpen their political understanding: Better, more sophisticated political economy analysis is needed. Key areas for analysis include the evolution of the political settlement, different sources of legitimacy and sub-national institutions, and state and non-state actors with whom donors can engage.
- Find more effective ways to incorporate political economy analysis into operational work: This requires the assessment of donor instruments’ compatibility with a political economy approach and their flexibility in responding to varied fragile situations.
