How is link between security and development influencing peacebuilding activities in post-conflict countries? This article reviews case studies from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Angola and finds that international actors are already adapting their post-conflict strategies to integrate issues of human security and welfare. It contends that further efforts should be made to embrace the link between security and development, including the implementation of ‘developmental peacekeeping’.
The link between conflict and development is a complex, but indisputable one. Most of the world’s 20 poorest states have experienced violent conflict in the past decades. Africa, in particular, has become known as a continent steeped in armed conflict and instability, the sources of which are both diverse and endemic. For some years, therefore, there has been a growing consensus on the necessity of linking security and development to achieve meaningful peace.
Lying at the nexus of development and security, peacebuilding requires a readiness to make a difference on the ground in preventing conflicts or establishing the conditions for a return to sustainable peace. In recent years, peacekeeping operations have increasingly been given the task of enforcing peace and of assuming de facto sovereignty over a territory. By consequence, these missions assume responsibility for managing large-scale socio-economic and political change. Reviewing case studies from Sierra Leone, Angola, and Kosovo, there are three sectors in which international actors have started to develop new programmes to respond to peacebuilding challenges:
- Governance programming: aimed at shaping a society’s capacity to reconcile conflicting interests and to manage change peacefully
- Security sector programming: aimed at security sector reform, the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of former combatants, and the protection of vulnerable and war-affected populations, as well as restructuring security institutions and instituting civilian oversight to advance democratic control and accountability
- Rule of law programming: aimed at the promotion of human rights, constitution making, traditional justice mechanisms, and legal and penal reform.
A new strategy for peacebuilding has emerged, known as ‘developmental peacekeeping’. This concept, developed in South Africa, aims to achieve sustainable levels of human security through activities aimed at accelerating capacity building and socioeconomic development, to dismantle war economies and conflict systems, and replace them with globally competitive ‘peace economies’.
- An important feature of developmental peacekeeping is that it does not distinguish between peacekeeping and peacebuilding on a process level, as if they were separate phases or elements in a linear process.
- The concept is premised on the ‘problem statement’ that current peacekeeping interventions are unable to resolve resource-based conflicts or conflicts sustained by war economies, and that they involve long time lapses before developmental and peacebuilding interventions are implemented in war zones.
- While developmental peacekeeping has not received an official policy endorsement at governmental level, it underscores a firm belief among Africans that specific instruments and programmes of human security and ‘conflict sensitive development’ need to be implemented to address armed conflicts constructively.
Donors and other actors can continue to press for change by ensuring that:
- Peacebuilding is an essential part of any multinational peacekeeping undertaking
- Policy instruments outside the toolbox of traditional security policy are mobilised to address conflict
- Development and security continue to be seen as mutually reinforcing – especially as many security threats arise from lack of development.
