Peacebuilding Strategy: Lessons from Some Misconceived Interventions

This chapter tries to bridge the gap between peace and conflict theory, on the one hand, and the practice of professional Peacebuilders in post-conflicts settings, on the other hand. It first highlights some of the main insights brought about by the theorists, linking the latter to standard bargaining theory, institutional economics, as well as to the theory of voting. This brief overview shows that the key issue in peace theory is how credible commitments can be made by the negotiators. This is not the way the main peacebuilding institutions understand their mission, and international bureaucracies tend to implement fairly different protocols. The chapter then discusses two prominent themes in the standard peacebuilding strategy that call for second thoughts, namely disarmament and the jump to democracy, as embedded in elections organized as soon as possible. Three fairly successful post-conflict cases are then presented, showing that their successes were based on innovative solutions aimed at enabling the new governments to make credible commitments about their policies, sidestepping the standard protocols.