Multilateral peacebuilding endeavors have had a mixed record at best. Several post-war societies have either relapsed into violent conflict or undergone decades of international peacebuilding assistance with uncertain outcomes. While the reasons for the success and failure of peace(building) processes are complex, many observers have noted the ubiquity of standardized or template approaches. A commonly cited explanation for this holds that peacebuilding organizations at the UN and beyond are large international bureaucracies that seek to rationalize their work. Having a ‘template for peace(building)’ that can be applied anywhere would thus help streamline their work.

Peacebuilding organizations dedicate considerable time and effort towards best practice learning and improvement. Their staff at headquarters and the field level have comprehensive experience working in post-war societies. Yet these organizations do not seem to apply their context-specific expertise. As peacebuilding interventions have often been marred by setbacks and failures, countless studies, reports, and UN panels have emphasized the importance of local knowledge and of addressing local conflict dynamics, issues, and agendas, including political ones. What, then, compels international organizations to ignore their own expertise and rely on standardized approaches? In other words, why can’t this lesson be learned?

To make sense of this apparent puzzle, we need to consider that peacebuilding was originally conceived of as a multilateral effort to assist the implementation of an existing peace agreement. In other words, the UN and other international organizations were supposed to provide local actors with technical expertise for implementing a settlement whose political aspects had already been agreed upon. Following some early peacebuilding successes in the aftermath of UN-sponsored peace negotiations, this conception of peacebuilding became a standard practice from the early 1990s. The post-Cold War period was also a time of declining aid budgets for development and humanitarian organizations. Since these organizations had often already worked in conflict-affected countries and had the technical expertise in areas such as refugee return, rural development, or institutional reform, they were quick to add peacebuilding to their portfolios.

International humanitarian and development organizations are committed to the twin principles of impartiality and/or neutrality. Unsurprisingly, however, these principles are frequently at odds with the highly political goals of peacebuilding interventions. If a comprehensive political settlement has been endorsed by all parties, these organizations can ‘implement’ their initiatives in line with their principles. This was the case in Namibia following the Tripartite Accords of 1988, or in Timor-Leste following the post-referendum violence of 1999 and Indonesia’s subsequent acquiescence to international intervention. However, if a political settlement has either been enforced or remains otherwise contested, humanitarian and development organizations face an acute dilemma regarding their  professed claims to impartiality and/or neutrality. The ongoing efforts to ‘implement’ the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina provide ample evidence of UN systems agencies trying to enact controversial aspects of that agreement whilst retaining their impartial and/or neutral stances. As development and humanitarian organizations persistently encountered ‘obstacles’ to their ‘implementation’ efforts, they thus began to revise and reframe their practices in ways that claimed to uphold their impartial stance in  otherwise highly contested settings. Examples of this include reframing the causes of conflict in purely structural terms that are devoid of any present-day political agency, or the redefinition of impartiality against purportedly universal standards rather than the perceptions of local actors. What all these approaches have in common is that they omit the political content of peacebuilding interventions to carve out a legitimate role for humanitarian and development organizations. This is why standardized templates are so ubiquitous in the peacebuilding field. They allow humanitarian and development organizations to frame their highly political interventions in seemingly neutral and universally agreed terms. 

The functions and meanings of claiming impartiality and neutrality vary for humanitarian and development organizations. Among humanitarian organizations, acting impartially implies rendering assistance based on need. For them, impartiality is not only a means to gaining access to contested settings, but also fundamental to the overarching principle of ‘humanity. Given the importance of impartiality in mainstream humanitarian practice, it is thus little  surprising that many humanitarian actors have resisted UN efforts to coordinate and integrate peacebuilding actors under common strategic frameworks. Nonetheless, humanitarian organizations like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have continuously been involved in the political objectives of peacebuilding interventions. See, for instance, UNHCR’s involvement in the politically charged return of refugees and IDPs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Timor-Leste. 

The situation is slightly different when it comes to development organizations, which are of two kinds: international and bilateral. International development organizations like the UN Development Programme are committed to neutrality in the domestic affairs of states, but bilateral development organizations such as USAID, GIZ, or SIDA are not. Both kinds of organizations usually work based on agreements with the host state government. The degree to which development organizations are willing to address conflict and contestation depends on their relationship with the host state government. On one hand, development organizations such as the UNDP seek to preserve their reputation as a partner to governments, particular given the rise of ‘new’ donors. On the other hand, the proximity to government authorities likely limits their capacity to engage in truly transformative peacebuilding interventions.

Why should any of this be a problem? After all, it could be argued that development agencies are simply not equipped to engage in political contestation and should restrict their efforts to redressing structural issues such as inequality. However peacebuilding is usually conducted in heavily contested environments that require some form of ‘local peacemaking.’ Even if one was to follow the propositions of the liberal peace paradigm, peacebuilding cannot be successful if it is restricted to establishing institutions for the peaceful negotiation of future conflicts, without being willing to address ongoing ‘political’ issues on those precise terms. Against this backdrop, humanitarian and development organizations arguably are simply not the most suitable candidates for peacebuilding, or at the very least not on their own. This conundrum might provide part of the answer as to why peacebuilding fails to deliver on its promises, but it accounts for why peacebuilding persists in its current ‘depoliticized’ and standardized form.

Disasters are frequently associated with higher risks for armed conflict and political instability. Both scholars and policy makers have linked droughts to the civil war onsets in Sudan and Syria as well as cyclones with the recruitment of combatants in the Philippines. Debates about climate security often also conceive such disasters as threat multipliers that increase armed conflict risks. With the number and intensity of disasters on the rise due to climate change, urbanisation and persistent poverty, will this result in a more insecure world?

This is possible, but not necessarily the case. When a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean hit the civil-war ravaged province Aceh in Indonesia, hostilities quickly declined. The disaster provided a moral high ground to politicians on both sides to engage in negotiations. It also increased public and international pressure to stop the conflict in an area suffering from both fighting and the tsunami. Less than a year after the tsunami, a peace agreement ended the civil war for good.

How generalisable are such patterns beyond the specific case of Aceh? My recent book addresses this question by analysing 36 cases of large-scale disasters striking armed conflict zones. The answer is pretty straightforward: While conflict dynamics sometimes do not change or fighting even escalates, disasters have caused a significant reduction of fighting intensity in 25% of all cases. Such de-escalations usually persist for six to twelve months and provide an opportunity to seek diplomatic solutions while peace spoilers are less active. After all, research has shown that reduced battlefield violence increases trust, reduces bitterness, and provides more fertile ground for mediation efforts.

In order to utilise such post-disaster opportunities, decision makers need to know when and how do disasters facilitate a reduction in armed conflict intensity. My study answers both of these questions. 

To start with, armed conflicts usually de-escalate when the disaster provides relevant constraints to the conflict parties. The 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, for instance, killed many fighters and destroyed camps of the Lahkar-e-Toiba (LeT) insurgents. The group also felt obliged to conduct relief operations for the local population in both India and Pakistan. Taken together, this reduced LeT’s capability to wage violence against the Indian military. The latter could not exploit the weakness of its opponent as it was busy with disaster relief and infrastructure reconstruction itself. More recently, the heavy 2022 floods were one of the factors causing the Boko Haram extremists to withdraw from contested areas in north-eastern Nigeria.

Less frequently, conflict parties also reduce their use of force to cultivate a positive image among internal or external audiences. Once Myanmar allowed some international assistance to enter the country after cyclone Nargis in 2008 and was in the spotlight of the global public, the regime’s forces temporarily constrained their violent activities. Likewise, the 1999 Marmara earthquake provided the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels with an opportunity to save their face and label their ceasefire as a humanitarian gesture (even though they declared it due to other reasons).

So, contrary to earlier theories about post-disaster solidarity and diplomacy, disasters rather facilitate a short-term, negative peace: a reduction in conflict intensity due to disaster-related constraints. However, as discussed above, such as situation can still provide windows of opportunity for humanitarian aid delivery and mediation efforts. Such windows are most likely to occur if one conflict party is weakened by the disaster (for instance because it had lost fighters or resources or needs to deal with increased public scrutiny) and the other conflict party cannot exploit this weakness (for instance because it is generally weak or busy with the disaster response itself).

Disasters cause immense human suffering and economic disruption, and decision makers should therefore engage in comprehensive disaster risk reduction efforts. However, with current trends persisting, the world will not see a reduction in disaster frequency or intensity in the near future. Consequentially, it is crucial to recognise and utilise the opportunities such disasters can provide for peacebuilding and aid delivery.

Featured image: Disaster (Wikimedia)