The title of the conference, the subject of the conference, is the Serious Study of Peace and what is strikingly obvious.
In particular in the area of peace building that this area still heavily under theorised and under conceptualised.
Why? Because it's still a relatively young subject. Why?
Because the study of peace has somewhat shifted, speaking with Galtung from a focus on negative peace.
So basically, absence of war two positive peace, which is far more holistic, addressing the root causes of conflict.
So addressing this, the question of how to achieve positive peace is a far greater challenge in a
far more complex undertaking which creates challenges in terms of governance.
Let me tell you how actually we arrived at this topic, because in a way,
the paper I'm talking about is an ongoing conversation I have with this gentleman sitting the far left.
We had to kind of consultancy a few years ago where we brought the kind of background paper,
which was part and parcel of what's called the consultation of peace in Africa was
a kind of undertaking to support the implementation of the G8 Africa Action Plan.
So in the Africa G8 Africa implementation plan,
there was one line or a kind of call on the international community how we can actually
improve our collective ability to support the consolidation of peace in Africa,
especially in countries emerging from conflict. So basically, we looked at various documents and various efforts within organisations,
institutions and coordination and learning appeared as a kind of policy mantra,
kind of policy prescription that seemed to be a cure, to achieve better results, to achieve better peace building operations.
So that's basically how we are.
We arrived at coordination and learning and and began to struggle with those two policies, prescriptions.
But as you see, I call those two policy prescriptions misplaced analogies.
And I hope to make clear at the end of my talk why I think that in a way they are misplaced
analogies and we perhaps would rather focus on on on far more important elements.
So basically, the underlying questions of our paper are why has improvement in coordination been so elusive?
Because despite all these calls for coordination,
we don't see necessarily very astonishing results where we can see improvements in terms of coordination.
And then if the underlying problems are actually known, why our lessons are actually not learnt.
So why our mistakes are repeated.
So what we actually suggest that there are deeper underlying causes that we should look at are and I think that's important.
We need to highlight in particular, one, we want to get a better understanding of peacebuilding and want to develop better concepts,
how peacebuilding actually works or how we can actually achieve better results.
So we introduce the coordination and learning challenge as a kind of multi level governance problem and conceptualise it as a nested game,
a nested game, basically, that takes place at multiple levels.
Let me perhaps perhaps you may see it.
We don't have PowerPoint here, but illustrate the problems as such.
We have basically a multiplicity of actors and a large diversity of actors.
We have NGOs and and firms involved in the building of peace.
We have states and state it state agencies. We have international institutions, the agencies, funds and programmes.
And all these actors come together in the building of peace.
So basically, we have intra agency coordination games going on.
We have inter. Agency coordination games going on.
And then we have multiple actor coordination games.
And that's basically it's part and parcel of a large peace building coordination game.
So this is basically the challenge we are talking about when we when we look at peace building as a coordination problem.
And as you may imagine, first of all,
the large and character of this enterprise and also the diversity of the actors involved creates huge challenges that cannot be easily overcome,
because it's not only this problem I have talked about, they are so different.
Another problem adds a problem that this coordination game takes place at multiple levels.
We have a global level of coordination efforts going on at U.N. headquarters level with an IMF World Bank and so on and so forth.
Then we have regional and subregional levels. We are a regional organisation address a particular problem and they coordinate amongst each other.
And then last but certainly not least and most importantly,
we have the field level where the conflict is basically should be addressed with the peacebuilding operations going on.
And that's actually the most important level of engagement.
And once we understand peacebuilding or the challenge of coordination and learning in this peacebuilding exercise as a nested game,
we learn to appreciate the limits of coordination and this larger game.
And we come up with very unsurprising findings that that coordination and learning are very
difficult in large and situations like the one I've just described that another problem refers to.
Not every peace building games.
The same changes in the active engagement from one crisis to another basically weakens what we call in the in the game theoretical literature,
the shadow of the future. So because the different actors do not, they will not basically see a future prospect of cooperation.
And for that reason, they will rather they will appreciate or see peacebuilding as a one off game.
So basically, for that reason, issues of turf issues.
Off, off, off, off, off of parochial interests play a very important role in this peace building game.
So had the rigidity of relevant actors also reduces the probability that the utility functions of these various actors actually lying,
then the possibility of defection from international coordination is very high due to the nested quality of the gains I've just referred to.
And what we can see is, although coordination is likely to prove than hierarchical situations, are it, or in hierarchical institutions.
This is not how peacebuilding actually evolves. It's a highly decentralised process.
And when you look at the structure or the quality of the United Nations system, it's a highly decentralised system.
And coordination is basically done by persuasion rather than imposed on on on on different actors.
And but we should also keep in mind is that many agencies and programmes, NGOs do not want to be coordinated.
Independence as part of the mission statement.
So it's not so easy just to advocate coordination or streamlined engagement of the UN system as a whole.
Pretending as if the U.N. could deliver as one, delivering as one as the latest of the latest policy statement mission document,
which was basically produced as a kind of follow up of the World Summit 2005 as a result of another High-Level
Panel who looked into how coordination between various human turn agent agencies could could be improved.
So we do have a problem here that need to be addressed.
We do have its policy relevant.
So for that reason, it's really important to actively engage with the question.
While coordination is in essence a good thing, the.
Limits and achieving coordination and the academic literature on coordination.
Well, appreciate it. Limit.
Somehow we could see authors like booze Jones wrote about strategic coordination.
But in our view, this is not the actual problem,
because what we can actually see in practise that operations can be successful even without coordination.
So the real problem here is to deconstruct or to highlight the actual the actual factors that contribute to operation success and failure.
And our our our point here is it's most of the time it's not coordination.
Once in the paper, we basically try to deconstruct the strategic coordination label.
Bruce Jones, see. He introduces of so-called facilitators of strategic coordination,
basically highlighting the role of special representatives on the ground, resident coordinators,
the continuous involvement of key actors and informal institutions like groups of friends, core groups, contact groups and so on and so forth.
But this is not so much talking about strategic coordination in our view.
It's far more about leadership. It's a long term commitment to to a conflict.
It's about personalities staying involved or assuming it's very often the engine and ingenuity.
I mean, once you once you look at various cases, Mozambique, for example, drove under our yellow on the ground,
how he basically creatively interpreted relatively vague mandate of the Security Council, creating a slush fund and things, things like that.
So basically then engaged basically the ambassadors of Security Council countries on the ground.
So basically to have this link between the field level and the and the headquarters
level to mobilise basically support for ongoing support for the poor,
the peace operation, then another continuous commitment of key actors, Italy's role very important.
And in that regard. So it's it's it's less this strategic coordination mantra that matters,
but more underlying factors like the continued availability of resources basically spent by Bob, but by key actors.
It's about that so-called veto.
Players basically support the peace process and then the role of informal institution.
I haven't touched on that. That's far less about strategic coordination.
It's far more giving actress a platform where they can basically either influence Security Council decision
making at headquarters level or basically engage actors on the ground or engage with actors at all,
with key people at international financial institutions, for example.
So basically, you're having this institutional mechanism to connect the various levels of engagement.
For example, the global level with the field level and so on and so forth.
How does our understanding of peacebuilding as a nested game affect our understanding of learning?
What we can actually see is that our idea of learning as a holistic exercise doesn't really play out so well.
When you look at various conflicts, I mean the question why we are why we have the problems in Sierra Leone that we had the
hostage hostage taking off of the peacekeeping force because although it was so obvious,
clear that you need a strong mandate, you need a Chapter seven mandate, you need a rather robust peacekeeping minded on the ground to be successful.
Why do these mistakes happen again? It's basically it's very difficult to know.
Well, it's perhaps easy to review individual operations.
Yes. But it's very difficult to apply lessons from one mission to the other.
And what we can actually see in. In recent literature is not what you can, in fact, see that within a mission.
If you have if you have the kind of learning infrastructure, it's it's it's relatively likely that you can achieve learning within a single mission.
Sierra Leone is, for example, one is is one good example in that regard,
because there was a review mission led by General Isolda that basically pinpointed problems
and and and and basically concluded with some forward looking policy prescriptions.
So information learning is possible. So it's important to have a kind of learning information, learning infrastructure in place.
And that's basically it. Slowly appreciate it at U.N. headquarters level.
So one one, in fact, is that, for example, some policy,
some some officers working on the ground take on additional functions, basically to review the mission on an ongoing basis.
And if problems arise, they basically try to to adapt the mandate or the terms of reference of the mission while the mission is actually going on.
So basically, this is a far more promising approach than trying to apply lessons across missions.
And the difficulty is, I mean, we can talk about the difficulty, even strikingly similar missions like Kosovo and East Timor, for example.
What we can learn from from from the current perspective is that it's not very easy to just to apply a kind of cookie
cutter approach that from what we have in Kosovo and the mission we have in Kosovo can be easily applied in East Timor,
because what we could see there are a lot of ownership problems and so on and so forth.
So in conclusion, the coordination debate resembles, in a way,
analogical discourse that has actually emerged in response to the complexities of peacebuilding and humanitarianism in the post-Cold War world.
In a way, it's a natural reflex, a means to reduce the complexity of the peace building exercise because the discourse is basically undertaken.
Policymakers, diplomats who don't have the time or even the capacity to deeply penetrate peace building as a whole.
So labels like Coordination, Learning Our World Come are basically a welcome policy prescription to basically highlight problems.
But the problem I tried to I tried to.
What I tried to highlight is that there is a danger that the coordination label basically
obscures the real factors that contribute to mission success and mission failure.
And very interesting. Where does it leave us and how do we basically steer peacebuilding as a process?
It's very interesting that John Manley, you know,
before he actually assumed the position of Undersecretary General for Peace peacekeeping operation at U.N. headquarters.
He wrote The Peace and Survival in 99.
Why are you basically comparing the interdependent post-Cold War world?
The weather system that needed to be as described by chaos theory?
And I think he has a really good point, that it's very difficult to steer the process of peace building as a whole.
In particular, when we talk about positive peace. So applying Germany, great a suggestion.
I think we could basically compare the role of global institutions, perhaps the actors working at headquarters level,
perhaps as people who create the right weather conditions, conditions conducive to to facilitate the actual peacekeeping process on the ground.
And I think this is a far more promising prospect as.
Hand-wringing over coordination, failure or how to achieve better coordination.