December 2004/January 2005
Vol. X, No. 4
Filling the Gaps
A new Institute project focuses on how to stabilize war-torn states
As daily news from Iraq attests, the United States faces enormous challenges stabilizing countries emerging from conflict. Yet Iraq is only the most recent and most prominent instance in a recurring pattern, says Dan Serwer, Peace and Stability Operations director for the United States Institute of Peace. From Somalia to Kosovo, from Haiti to Afghanistan, the United States has persistently faced the challenge of stabilizing and reconstructing states, and just as persistently failed to address some of the underlying problems that arise in such states.
To distill the lessons learned from such failures and to help policymakers develop more effective responses, the Institute has launched a series of working groups focusing on specific areas, including the following:
- Role of Women
- Mass Media
- Governance
- Natural Resources
- Civilian/Military Planning
- Measuring Progress
- Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration
- Transitional Justice
- Reconciliation
- Successor Generations
- Telecommunications
For each of the focus areas, the Institute will convene a group of experts to assess the problems, analyze possible solutions, and recommend policy options. An Institute Special Report with a presentation of the main findings will be published following the conclusion of the work of each of the groups. Five groups have already begun working; six others remain to be established. The goal is to complete the work by April 2006, when the Institute will hold a public meeting to highlight the global findings of the eleven special reports and the broader lessons to be learned.
“The United States hasn’t had a lot of recent success re-establishing stable, self-governing states in the aftermath of violent conflict,” says Serwer. “But as we’ve come to appreciate the transnational dangers posed by failed states, we’ve realized just how important it is to help countries get back on their feet. We hope that this project will help policymakers in this important task.”
The initiative is being overseen by Serwer and coordinated by Beth DeGrasse, who has worked on peace and stability operations from Somalia to Iraq. DeGrasse, who has served as a consultant for the Institute in the past, says that the popular term “postconflict” may be a bit of a misnomer in this case. “Almost inevitably, there are pockets of resistance left. So it may be more accurate—if a bit less catchy—to say that we’re studying how to stabilize countries in the context of vestigial conflict.”
The Institute has already conducted a significant body of work on this topic. DeGrasse, Bob Perito, and Mike Diedzic have studied how to establish public security and the rule of law in postconflict environments. Their work helped spur the creation of an office in the State Department whose task is to develop a rapidly deployable civilian capacity that would provide the full range of civilian functions—from governance to rule of law to economic reconstruction—to hasten the transition to a stable peace. In addition to DeGrasse, Dziedzic and Perito’s work, Garland “Winkie” Williams, a former U.S. Army fellow at the Institute, has written about how military engineering brigades accompanying peacekeeping contingents can restore vital infrastructure and social institutions.
DeGrasse says that in some instances the lessons have been learned; they simply have not been sufficiently incorporated into postwar planning. The academics and practitioners in the working group on the Role of Women noted that it has long been known that women are integral to economic and social development. For example, when women control income, child survival rates go up dramatically; when they control agriculture, productivity rises; and when they enjoy property rights, domestic violence declines. “If women aren’t incorporated into the solution, real peace is difficult or impossible to achieve,” said one member of the working group. “We know these lessons; the question is why it is so hard to institute them.”
In other cases, DeGrasse says, the lessons are far from clear. “If you take the media, for example, it’s not at all clear how we can help establish indigenous media without undermining their position and credibility, nor is it clear how we can stand up our own media to effectively convey our message.”
On one matter, however, DeGrasse is confident. Before coming to the Institute, she studied the effect of peacekeeping operations on the military, in part under an Institute grant. “The conventional wisdom used to be that any military operation that was not strictly limited to warfighting degraded morale and readiness. That turns out not to be true,” she says. “My colleagues and I interviewed fifty senior commanders involved in peacekeeping operations, and they all-but-unanimously affirmed that these operations generally improved morale, increased retention rates, and taught the troops the very skills needed in the War on Terrorism.” The military may find it has many new roles to play and many gaps to fill, says DeGrasse, but it is ready and prepared to do what is needed. Now it is time to build the same capacity on the civilian side.
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