Construire la paix: conceptions collectives de son établissement, de son maintien et de sa consolidation

Le présent état de littérature se propose dès lors d'explorer conjointement les apports des littératures anthropologique et constructiviste, les débats qui les traversent, leurs complémentarités et leurs conflits, et de mettre en lumière leurs limites. Dans un premier temps, l'analyse abordera les approches « par le haut », structurées autour de deux thèmes principaux : la culture diplomatique et les styles de négociation nationaux, d'une part ; le paradigme de la paix libérale, d'autre part. Après avoir mis en évidence les apories de ces approches, l'on explorera deux controverses clés des approches « par le bas » dans les écrits constructivistes : l'existence (ou non) de divergences entre les répertoires culturels des intervenants et ceux des populations locales, d'abord, l'enjeu des cadres professionnels et organisationnels des entrepreneurs de paix, ensuite. En conclusion, plusieurs pistes de recherche seront suggérées

There’s another way to build peace. And it doesn’t come from the top down.

We tend to look at what went wrong when we’ve tried to resolve conflicts. My new research takes a different approach and looks at what has gone right. To stop wars, an essential first step is to understand how people have actually succeeded in building peace

D. R. Congo: Explaining Peace Building Failures, 2003-2006

As a corrective to the emphasis on national and international reconciliation during peace building processes, I develop here a conceptual analysis of the dynamics of violence during the transition from war to peace and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2003 and 2006. I locate the sources, at the local, national, and regional levels, of continued local violence during this transition. Through an analysis of the situation in the provinces of North Kivu and North Katanga, I illustrate how local dynamics interacted with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict. I demonstrate that, after a national and regional settlement was reached, some local conflicts over land and political power increasingly became self-sustaining, autonomous, and disconnected from the national and regional tracks. Thus, peace building action was required not only at the national and regional levels but also locally

Peacetime Violence: Post-Conflict Violence and Peacebuilding Strategies

This synthesis provides an overview of academic findings on the sources of violence in post-war environments and on the strategies to address them. It distinguishes between unaddressed pre-war tensions, war-induced cleavages, and peace-generated conflicts. It shows that, according to the best research, current peacebuilding strategies have two major weaknesses. First, they neglect the micro-level dynamics of violence. Second, they do not devote sufficient attention and resources to state reconstruction (which is distinct from merely holding elections). These weaknesses explain why peacebuilding efforts often fail to end violence even when they produce other positive outcomes

The Crisis of Peacekeeping: Why the UN Can’t End Wars

UN peacekeeping missions fail because they rely on top-down solutions rather than bottom-up strategies that draw on local knowledge. Note: Included is a letter to the editor commenting on the article, along with the author's response

Here’s what Congo can teach the world about peace

Congo is usually associated with war, violence and chaos. News reports focus on strife and bloodshed. The coverage of electoral protests last month is no exception. But that’s not true everywhere in the country. I have researched solutions to war and violence in Congo for the past 15 years. With that pursuit in mind, I went to Idjwi

Going Micro: Emerging and Future Peacekeeping Research

In the past fifteen years, scholars have started studying the local and micro-level dimensions of peacekeeping. They have investigated the nature and effectiveness of bottom-up peacebuilding, assessed the local versus national impacts of peacekeeping interventions, and studied the decentralized actions of international peacebuilders on the ground. This commentary shows that, despite the approach’s limitations, delving into these three topics opens up fruitful areas for further research, in particular analyzing micro-to-macro linkages, evaluating peacekeeping’s subnational impacts across cases, explaining peacebuilding successes, and understanding the causes of peace itself

The Only Way to Help Congo

The situation in Congo keeps deteriorating even though its civil war has officially been over for years and the United Nations’ second largest peacekeeping mission is based there. The international community has failed to help Congo achieve peace and security because it fundamentally misunderstands the causes of the violence

What the Uproar Over Congo's Elections Misses

Over the past year, as the Democratic Republic of the Congo has descended into a political crisis, journalists, activists, foreign diplomats, and the leaders of international and nongovernmental organizations have focused mostly on the drama surrounding President Joseph Kabila’s attempts to cling to power by delaying elections. This narrow political focus recalls the outside world’s approach to Congo the last times the country prepared for general elections, in 2006 and 2011. Now, as then, the preoccupation with elections distracts from the issues whose resolutions are most likely to lead to peace: the poverty, unemployment, corruption, criminality, and poor access to land, justice, and education that are at the root of Congo’s long-standing violence. Bringing peace and prosperity to Congo will require a change in attitude, away from the crisis in Kinshasa and toward the local actors who have the power to address the deeper sources of the country's troubles

Penser les Conflits Locaux: L'Échec de l'Intervention Internationale au Congo

This chapter takes stock of the international intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to explain why it failed to end violence in the eastern provinces. Based on field observations in the Congo, document analysis and over 330 interviews, it demonstrates that massive violence continued between 2003 and 2008 in part because of the presence of local conflict. The international actors left these local tensions to fester because they perceived them as a consequence of broader problems and as a humanitarian issue. International actors thus focused on national and regional reconciliation, especially through the organization of "free and fair elections," and they passed onto each other the responsibility of working on violence at the local level. They paid attention to local issues only in case of shocking events or when they realized that micro and macro tensions were linked. As a result, they neglected many critical local conflicts, which regularly erupted into major crises