Of course, security progress in both Liberia and Timor-Leste has been limited and tentative, coming from low starting points. Citizens in both countries continue to face various forms of insecurity. Nonetheless, it is important not to underplay the significance of the security improvements that have been achieved, given the multitude of competing priorities post-conflict countries contend with, as well as the many threats to the peace they face. These progress stories are thus necessarily relative and modest, but nonetheless important in helping to deepen our understanding of how states emerging from conflict build peace.
Much of the existing literature and donor practice supports
(either explicitly or implicitly) a liberal peacebuilding approach, in
which democracy, economic liberalisation and rule of law are promoted as
the foundations for peace. Yet this overlooks the fact that elites may
reject change and be incentivised to retain the capabilities for
violence, and that historical processes of state formation have tended
to be violent. An examination of the drivers of security progress in our
case study countries reveals a more nuanced picture, in which factors
at the international, national and sub-national levels have contributed
to varying degrees to improved security. Of these, domestic political
factors emerge as the most important in creating an enabling environment
for peace. Key factors include the credibility and legitimacy of
leadership personalities, as well as their ability to use patrimonial
networks to buy elites and potential spoilers into the peace. At the
sub-national level, local security providers support conflict-resolution
that can prevent minor disputes from escalating, thus contributing to
stability. And finally at the international level, peacekeeping forces
can provide a window of stability, on which national leaders can
capitalise; and security sector reform (SSR) processes can facilitate
early improvements in security providers. However, despite these
important contributions to security progress, peacekeeping and SSR are
unlikely to exert a strong influence on peace in the longer term, with
national and local factors playing a much stronger role. These
international factors have thus played a more limited role in building
security in Liberia and Timor-Leste than is often assumed. Yet while
these drivers have enabled improved security in the short-term, they
have not fundamentally addressed the underlying causes of conflict and
there are concerns about whether they can lead to more inclusive, and
thus more sustainable, peace.
To address this, the report sets
out three approaches to help overcome the tension between how security
progress is achieved in practice in the short-term and the kinds of
equitable and inclusive security that are more sustainable in the longer
term. These include:
- Working with, but not for elite interests.
- Viewing support for security institutions as long-term processes of change.
- Incrementally increasing the inclusivity of development processes from the outset.
While
these do not resolve the impasse between the liberal peacebuilding and
elite-focused approaches, they provide some ideas as to how to bridge
them in a way that is realistic about the role of elites and yet
aspirational about what can be achieved for citizens in future.