BUILDING PEACE IN THE ERA OF THREE WAVES

Ashok Swain, Ramses Amer and Joakim Öjendal

Introduction

During the last few decades, the nature of peace and development in the international system has shifted considerably so has the measures applied in support of those values. Whereas 'war' has structurally shifted from being interstate concern to becoming intrastate in nature, 'development' has moved from one of typically defining national development strategies to one of tapping into a neo-liberal global order in the most efficient way possible. As such, the values and processes of, and measures to support, peace and development have, to a large extent, conflated. Moreover, internal war is typically founded in a particular political economy further feeding — or even being the origin of — conflicts; adaptation to the neo-liberal globalization has, on the other hand, turned 'development' into a conflict prone process, marginalizing large number of people. Globalization which — for good and bad — is driving the processes described above will not fade within the foreseeable future, but rather it is likely that the trend will increase in the decades to come. While undeniably, this shift in 'order' has brought some positive values, globally the problems may be even more severe, including the creation of social and internal conflicts, ethnic strife, political instability (often related to democratization), pauperization, forced migration and rampant natural resource extraction with severe livelihood losses for millions, just to mention a few of the far too prevalent problems.

One of the major policy responses from the international community has been the invention of a battery of 'repairing', 'reconstructing' and 'reconciliatory' policy approaches. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these attempts has been branded 'peacebuilding' that dates back to the tenure of General Secretary Boutros-Boutros Ghali. Its origin in the UN system was an early attempt to respond to the first cycle post-cold war conflicts and its ambition was to adapt to a post-cold war world. At bottom, it contains an ambition to deal with the problems described above comprehensively including both peace and development aspects. However, hitherto few successes have been recorded in these efforts. The international responses have been largely separated into conflict resolution as carried out from the UN offices, or traditional development activities carried out by different actors and agencies, missing the obvious connection between these two values. Self-critically, it could also be observed that research has to a large extent followed that path too.

This volume aims to present a broad inventory of the study of the contemporary peace, conflict and development research in light of the above-mentioned problematic. The chapters, in various degrees, take as their point of departure the ongoing globalization and reflect upon the viability of various peacebuilding efforts. Below follows a brief review of the themes we have chosen in order to illuminate the issue at hand. Neither the themes, nor the coverage of them, are comprehensive, but rather a dip into a wide sea of possible themes and approaches whose full treatment goes beyond the scope of this volume.

Globalization and Conflicts

The world has gone through a major transformation in the last two decades. The end of the cold war in Europe has directly led to massive increase in the private capital flow and indirectly to an information and telecommunication revolution. In this new interdependent and interconnected world, the international trade and investment has overtaken the importance of national economies. Globalization has created new opportunities as well as many risks and challenges. The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization in its report in February 2004 praises globalization for promoting open societies, open economies and better exchange of goods and ideas. At the same time, the Commission finds the current working of global economy 'ethically unacceptable and politically unsustainable'.

Globalization is generating new wealth and encouraging technological innovations, but at the same, it has failed to support and promote sustainable human development (Swain, 2006). So far, it has had largely negative impact on the poor and underprivileged sections of the society. In 1990s, the global growth in gross domestic product has been sluggish compare to previous decades. The debt burden of developing countries has multiplied, which impedes their development. The gap between the ratio of per capita income in the developed and the developing countries has widened further, from 50 to 1 in the 1960s to more than 120 to 1 in 2006.

The number of poor and unemployed people is at its highest level ever. There is no doubt that the globalization's benefit has failed to reach the majority of the poor.

While the key to the sustainable growth lies in the countries' own efforts to pursue sound policies and strengthen institutions, these efforts need to be complemented with financial and technological support from the international community. Unfortunately, the foreign aid is decreasing overall. In the last decade, the Official Development Assistance (ODA) of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries has gone down from 0.35 per cent to 0.22 per cent of the gross national income and far below the 0.7 per cent target the developed countries had promised to meet. In 2003, only five donor countries reached or exceeded the UN target. According to the World Bank estimate, due to this failed promise, developing countries are loosing USD 100 billion every year. The donor community has been...