Today, US troops formally withdrew from Iraq, ending a two-decade military presence. They leave a scarred and struggling country, in a region that is reeling from war between two of Iraq’s most powerful allies. A new era of winner-takes-all approaches is contributing to deadlier conflicts with more violence aimed at civilians. Governments and armed actors show less constraint, while contempt for the ‘rules-based order’ only makes peacebuilding, already suffering the erosion and defunding of its post-WWII institutions, even harder. Peace-related official development assistance (ODA) is now only 0.99% of military expenditure, a decline that shows few signs of reversing. Under such pressure, is building peace still feasible?

At this time of renewed enthusiasm for military action, peace seems to have few powerful promoters. Its institutions are regularly criticised by detractors in the international community and by conflict-affected people who question their impact. The challenges range from weak evidence and data that have failed to prove correlations between preventative actions and peace outcomes, to fraying relationships between states and peace operations. Underlying this is that modern conflicts are more internationalised, tech-driven, and protracted, with fewer peace agreements being reached. Faced with these complexities, some doubt that the international peacebuilding architecture is up to the task of building peace.

Yet the argument for peacebuilding remains as strong as ever. The World Bank and the United Nations have put a figure on it – savings of up to $70 billion globally each year – even though it’s hard to estimate the actual value of protecting lives and livelihoods. At its best, peacebuilding acts as a connector and an accelerant, bolstering local agreements to end violence with the support necessary to build more sustainable peace, enabling people not just to end hostilities but to develop the conditions necessary to prevent further violence.

But we must also confront the politics of peacebuilding. For some governments, taking effective actions to prevent conflict and support peace would require confronting their own vested interests. In conflict settings, peace and recovery interventions are often accused of being blind to the political voice and agency of local people while being steered by their donors’ ‘national interests’. For example, the rush to state building in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up conferring too much authority, too quickly on leaders who lacked the support of local constituencies. But it is not clear that the international community has learned its lessons.

Peacebuilding requires a careful balance of nationally led institutions that are rooted in international norms. Take the example of Syria, where the justice system must address past torture and killings while also building trust with Syrians that it can turn legal principles into protection and accountability. To do this, it cannot reinstate the systems of security and justice that existed prior to the civil war; it must create new ones. 

International peacebuilders often assume that existing institutions can be made to work properly again once violence has abated. But violence is not external to political, economic and social systems – it is embedded within them and central to their functions. One of the greatest challenges is balancing the need for tangible progress with the space for domestic political processes to create new ‘rules of the game’ suitable to the changed reality.

This means that peace needs international norms as well as local and national agency. There is a need to:

• Strengthen the definition of peacebuilding. Peace-related ODA has a range of meanings. Tightening the definition focuses funding and enables better evidence of effectiveness.
• Make inclusion a reality. Calls for non-state actors’ involvement in negotiated peace deals and conflict recovery processes are long-standing and founded on evidence that inclusion helps build sustainable peace.
• Ensure peacebuilding funding is longer-term and flexible. Peacebuilding is not linear; funding needs to be able to flex and adapt to unpredictable circumstances.
• Analyse the international drivers of conflict. Peacebuilding and recovery support is restricted by partial knowledge of conflict dynamics. Ensuring more sophisticated understanding of cross-border drivers is essential to effective, multi-level peacebuilding.
• Understand the fluid political economy of localised peacebuilding. Effective civilian peacebuilding and conflict resolution requires updated knowledge of fast-changing situations that can impose restrictions and close down local peacebuilding.

Supporting peace is a long-term endeavour and needs an increasingly vocal constituency. Kirsty McNeill, the UK Minister for International Development and Africa, underlined in a recent speech that “we are involved in mankind”. What better way to show this than to recommit to solidarity for building peace?