“In fact, peacebuilding has seldom resulted in a complete transformation from an authoritarian system to an open democratic one,” write ADAM DAY, SARAH VON BILLERBECK OISIN TANSEY and MAYHAM AL MALEH.
“Instead, most systems retain some form of authoritarianism via a continuation of a particular ruler, ruling party, or consolidation of power in a small elite.”
More worryingly, many post-conflict settings experience a further concentration of power and even greater repression as regimes take advantage of new forms of economic development and international support, according to the report titled ‘Peacebuilding and Authoritarianism: The Unintended Consequences of UN Engagement in Post-Conflict Settings’.
In some cases, there is evidence that peacebuilding support may have contributed to increasing levels of authoritarianism, even while advancing other important goals.
The report explores the ways in which peacebuilding may unintentionally enable authoritarian tendencies, despite its stated goal of more inclusive forms of governance. The authors build on scholarship that has analyzed the impacts of democratization efforts in post-conflict settings, and the substantial literature describing how authoritarian systems may prove resilient to external efforts to transform them, including by instrumentalizing democratic institutions, controlling resources, and emplacing political structures that tend to centralize authority in a small elite. While helpful in understanding the politics of authoritarian rule, this literature seldom offers an analysis of the causal relationships between peacebuilding and authoritarianism, leaving policymakers and practitioners without a clear framework to understand the impact of their interventions.
The fact that peacebuilding is one amongst many factors influencing authoritarianism means that its possible contribution to tendencies of centralization and political repression often go unnoticed.
The principal argument of the report is that peacebuilding support may enable authoritarian forms of governance in two ways: (1) by providing material and other resources to the central State, thereby allowing it to consolidate control over key institutions and levers of power, and (2) by signaling in ways that lower the perceived costs of autocratic, non-democratic forms of rule and may help to shield leaders from accountability for their actions.
“Together, these operate as a causal mechanism through which international peacebuilders may bolster authoritarian tendencies within political systems even while ostensibly promoting democratic forms of rule.”
In contrast, where peacebuilding support diversifies its resources to a broader range of stakeholders and sends signals that the political costs of non-democratic forms of governance may be high, it should contribute to reductions in authoritarian tendencies.
While these impacts may be difficult to isolate – especially given that the UN is often a small player in the broader peacebuilding landscape – an examination of international peacebuilding support more generally across a range of settings will facilitate a better understanding of these dynamics at play.
This approach would also help us understand the dilemmas facing peacebuilders who must often choose between supporting State institutions as key actors in conflict prevention, while also recognizing that authoritarian governments may instrumentalize the same institutions to consolidate power. Moreover, it offers an evidence base for policymakers and major donors hoping to understand how to translate elite bargains into more sustainable forms of peace.
The report not only explores the relationship between peacebuilding and authoritarianism, but also aims to provide a usable framework and set of recommendations for policymakers and practitioners to avoid some of the common pitfalls and ensure that peacebuilding support is not distorted or co-opted.
To that end, this paper is organized as follows: Part One reviews the literature on post-conflict peacebuilding and authoritarian governance, noting that the bulk of scholarship on peacebuilding provides few causal explanations for the prevalence and resilience of highly centralized forms of governance. It then lays out the research design and the use of the two-part causal mechanism described above.
Part Two illustrates how these dynamics play out in a range of country settings where the UN has invested significantly in peacebuilding support. The analysis compares across in-depth country case studies on DRC, Haiti, and Cambodia, and draws on an assessment of peacebuilding funding flows in eight other countries.
Part Three builds on the country comparison and provides a framework for policymakers and practitioners involved in peacebuilding, offering key considerations and suggested approaches to planning future interventions.
It should be noted at the outset that this paper is primarily focused on UN-led peacebuilding efforts, the authors state, though it analyses a broad range of international peacebuilding support and provides recommendations that can be applied to bilateral donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) as well as the UN.
Taken together, this framework proposes a reexamination of the elite bargain at the heart of much of the UN’s conflict prevention and peacebuilding paradigm. It suggests that the tendency of the UN to identify solutions based on a core group of powerful elites may appear necessary to mitigate the immediate risks of escalation, but that it also carries significant risks of longer-term drift into the kind of deeply unequal, highly centralized rule that the Sustaining Peace resolutions and the UN/World Bank Pathways report have identified as the major drivers of instability globally.
“Implementation of this framework will not necessarily mean jettisoning the elite bargain, but it will require that peacebuilders strike a balance between the exigencies of day-to-day conflict prevention and the ways in which international interventions might unintentionally bolster authoritarianism in the longer term.”
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