By Sara Hellmüller, Senior Researcher and SNSF PRIMA Project Leader for the project "A child of its time: the impact of world politics on peacebuilding", with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, and Research Associate with the Global Governance Centre. 

Relative neglect of macro-level perspectives in the peacebuilding literature

In spite of the impact of multipolarity on UN peacebuilding, the peacebuilding literature remains dominated by micro-level perspectives characterized by a focus on the inner workings of international peacebuilding. This is not surprising, given that for at least two decades (~ 1990-2010), approaches to peacebuilding were congruent with the broader world political order. Indeed, UN peace missions – be it peacekeeping operations, special political missions, or special envoys – in the early post-Cold War years reflected the dominant liberal world order as they considered democracy and market-based economic reforms as a key driver of sustainable peace. In the mid-2000s, researchers coined the term ‘liberal peacebuilding’ to describe the liberal nature of these peacebuilding efforts.

In such a context, a macro-level perspective was not indispensable because world politics and UN peacebuilding interacted in a mutually reinforcing way. Peacebuilding scholars took the liberal macro-context in which peacebuilding was embedded mostly for granted and concentrated on criticizing peacebuilding itself. They accused liberal peacebuilding of falsely portraying the liberal model as universal, of upholding western dominance, and of further destabilizing, rather than pacifying, conflict contexts. Overall, they argued that international peacebuilding failed to integrate local actors, perspectives, and capacities. These critiques heralded the so-called ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding, with scholars calling for a greater focus on how international peacebuilding interacts with local processes.

Without a systematic analysis of the processes through which world politics influence UN peacebuilding, we risk leaving peacebuilding ‘out of sync’ with the context in which it takes place.

While this increased attention to the local dimensions of international peacebuilding was a much-needed remedy to former top-down and template approaches, the inward-looking perspective led to a relative neglect of the world political factors that influence peacebuilding. Yet, an awareness of the broader structural factors is particularly relevant in times of tectonic shifts in world politics, such as those we are currently experiencing with emerging multipolarity. Without a systematic analysis of the processes through which world politics influence UN peacebuilding, we risk leaving peacebuilding ‘out of sync’ with the context in which it takes place.

This is an excerpt. To read the full article, visit The Global.
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