Peace Operations Tracker is one of the main deliverables of a research project called MILITARYPEACE: From Liberal to Military Peace? An Analysis of the Contemporary Changes in Peacebuilding.
This is a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID-2020-116068GA-100) from September 2021 to June 2025.
The project is concerned with the fact that International peacebuilding is changing in profound and important ways.
Peacebuilding is defined by the collective actions undertaken by different actors towards consolidating peace after conflict, addressing the root causes of conflict and avoiding relapse into it (UN 2010, 3).
It is the product of the multiple changes after the Cold War, whereby peace operations expanded and developed a set of criteria and tools for action, going from a strict focus on observation and deterrence to encompassing a whole set of actors, synergising military, humanitarian, political and development goals.
Up until then, peacekeeping was the solution to deploy military personnel to help maintain or restore international peace and security in conflicts under strict adherence to the principle of impartiality and use of force only in self-defence. Peacebuilding transformed conflict management practices and understandings, mainly around the goal to reform states under the premises of good governance, democratisation and economic liberalisation.
This approach was dubbed ‘liberal peace’ (Duffield 2001).
And though liberal peace has been contested both in theory and practice, and has experienced multiple transformations, it has managed to capture the analysis and operationalisation of conflict management and resolution since the early 1990s.
Over the last decade, this liberal peace paradigm seems to have come to an end. Previous work has demonstrated how peacebuilding has been increasingly focused on military peace-enforcement and on building the military capacity of its targeted states (Iñiguez de Heredia 2019, 2020).
While there is a general trend since 2015 towards downsizing peace operations, this has affected mostly the civilian side (Coleman 2020). With the dawn of stabilisation missions in 2004, peacebuilding has been infused with counter-insurgency and immediate military goals (Iñiguez de Heredia 2019; Karlsrud 2017, 2019; Kenkel 2021; Tull 2018).
The broad spectrum of political, economic and military goals associated with the liberal peace agenda is narrowing down to states’ defence from and preparation for war (Belloni and Moro 2019).
The project observes these changes in the two most important peacebuilding actors, the UN and the EU. Both the EU and the UN have introduced changes to make peacebuilding more efficient – though with contradictory results (Iñiguez de Heredia 2019, 2020; Karlsrud 2015; Kenkel and Foley 2021; Tull 2018).
Their peacebuilding strategy displays a preference for delegating enforcement to regional organisations and third states (de Coning 2017), for boosting military training and equipment (Iñiguez de Heredia 2020) and for deploying humanitarian and development programmes with the goal of resilience and appeasing populations (Abrahamsen 2019; Chandler 2017; Joseph and Juncos 2020). In the UN, peace-enforcement has become the norm rather than the exception (de Coning, Aoi, and Karlsrud 2017; Sloan 2011), while EU military operations have gone up 11% since 2010 and those with a military-training focus have doubled (Iñiguez de Heredia 2020, 9).
Both the UN and the EU have retained the liberal language in long-term goals, though these are being relegated in practice. The UN peacekeeping principles of impartiality, neutrality and use of force only in self-defence are now being questioned (Aoi, de Coning, and Karlsrud 2017; Rhoads 2016), claiming that peacekeeping needs to take a proactive approach ‘to neutralise and eliminate threats’ and ‘project strength’ (Dos Santos 2017, 11-17). The EU’s Global Security Strategy’s principled pragmatism is prioritising the strengthening of the EU’s and partner’s security and defence (EU Commission 2016), contradicting the liberal values it proclaims to promote (Juncos 2017, 2).
The puzzle that emerges is one that points to a new era of peacebuilding.
Only looking at the increased use of enforcement, the withdrawal from overhauling reform programmes and the continuous but changed role of humanitarian and development actors suggest that we are neither in the liberal peace nor in the traditional peacekeeping paradigm. Yet, while the rise in the aggressive use of military force and military capacity-building appear as important transformations, these have never been extraneous to liberal peacebuilding.
In addition, while these military practices point to an increased commitment to intervene in conflicts, these interventions are increasingly delegated and personnel is being curtailed. Overall, even if it is possible to state, as Coleman and Williams (2021) do, that peace operations will continue, we still do not know in what form.
This is the puzzle MILITARYPEACE addresses, aiming to provide a full understanding of how and why peacebuilding has changed and the consequences of that change.
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Abrahamsen, Rita. 2019. ‘Defensive Development, Combative Contradictions: Towards an International Political Sociology of Global Militarism in Africa’.Conflict, Security & Development 19(6): 543-62.
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