Peacebuilding: Imperialism's new disguise?

Schellhaas, Constanze; Seegers, Annette

Peacebuilding: Imperialism's new disguise?

Journal Article

2009

Journal Title

African Security Review

Link to Journal

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rasr20/current

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Political Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Since the early 1990s a growing emphasis on peacebuilding has marked the international community’s responses to conflicts. Supporters of peacebuilding have promoted it as a new international idea, usually tracing it back to then United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace in 1992 in which he proposes responsibilities and responses for the UN and the international community. Peacebuilding is expressed in different forms – a set of policies, a humanitarian agenda, or a way of conflict resolution – but all involve the idea of efforts made to prevent a relapse into conflict. We analyse debates about peacebuilding in order to clarify its character and history. We argue that despite appearing as something new, peacebuilding has the same assumptions as modernisation theory. Once considered dead, modernisation theory has been reborn, in radicalised form, as peacebuilding. The stages of modernisation, once understood to progress over many decades, have been shortened. Projects are ambitious, at times involving no less than a fundamental change of behaviour and values in target populations and these, too, in short order. Projects are claimed by powerful countries and coalitions of the willing prepared to interfere in domestic affairs, with outsiders’ direct influence on the domestic affairs of countries in the South increasing by leaps and bounds. Why was this revised form of modernisation needed? Bretton Woods hegemons needed a strategy for dealing with challenges to the status quo. We start by describing peacebuilding as presented by its promoters. In the second part we focus on various concepts of imperialism. Part 3 considers the discourses of peacebuilding and imperialism together, outlining the main arguments of critics. This is followed by our own critical assessment of these positions. Our type of discourse analysis is primarily a historical one, starting with the origins of a concept (of imperialism) and following it through the various phases. We are interested in academic and research communities, as well as practitioners and authors of the UN, international financial institutions and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs).

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