Why did international peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) fail? This book focuses on the three and a half years considered as the transitional period from war to peace in the DRC, from June 2003 to December 2006. It finds that the causes of ongoing conflict in the country were local as well as national and regional. As a result, they could only be successfully addressed by combining bottom-up and top-down peacebuilding. However, the dominant international peacebuilding culture – embedded in social routines, practices, discourses, technologies and institutions – precluded action on local violence.
Peacebuilding is defined as any action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace. Western and African diplomats, UN peacekeepers, and the staff of nongovernmental organisations involved in peacebuilding share a culture, with its own rituals, customs, beliefs, roles, rules and taboos.
In the DRC, this culture prevented action on local violence. UN staff and diplomats were trained to analyse conflicts from a top-down perspective. As a result, they identified national and regional tensions as the causes of continued violence during the transition period. They approached all of their tasks in a top-down fashion and focused on organising general elections:
- The main difference between the war and the transition period was the meaning given to continued violence by international peacebuilders. In the transition phase, the DRC was labelled a post-conflict environment. This meant that local violence was seen as private and criminal, and as the consequence of a lack of state authority. Extensive local violence was seen as a normal feature of life in DRC.
- International actors perceived themselves as working in the face of multiple and almost insurmountable constraints, which severely limited their peacebuilding options.
- Diplomats and UN staff members are trained to work on superstructures and socialised to focus on predefined tasks and performance guidelines. These fail to consider local violence.
The dominant international peacebuilding culture shapes the interveners’ understanding of peace, violence, and intervention in a way that overlooks the micro-foundations necessary for sustainable peace. The resulting inattention to local conflicts leads to unsustainable peacebuilding in the short-term and potential war-resumption in the long-term:
- Local violence in the DRC was motivated not only by top-down causes, but also by bottom-up tensions. During the transition period, many conflicts revolved around issues that were distinctively local.
- After a national and regional settlement was reached in the country, some local conflicts over land and political power became increasingly self-sustaining and autonomous.
- International interveners could have boosted local peacebuilding initiatives with the resources they had.
- However, the largest peacebuilding bureaucracies rejected attempts to adopt a bottom-up approach because these clashed with deeply entrenched cultural norms and jeopardised organisational interests.
NB: A partial preview of this introductory chapter is available at Google Books.
