Richard Gowan
What should people who care about international organizations and conflict management order for their summer reading this year? Closely following the back and forth of day-to-day events can sometimes make it hard to get a clear sense of the health of the international system. The Biden administration has promised that “multilateralism is back,” for instance, but when it comes to handling crises like the coup in Myanmar and challenges like global vaccine distribution, international cooperation still seems distinctly lackluster. With summer here, it’s a good time to sit back, pick up a smart book and try to see the big picture instead.
A good place to start is “Diplomacy and the Future of World Order,” a collection of sober and thoughtful essays edited by Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall. The editors are seasoned observers of conflict resolution, with a series of hefty volumes on the topic to their credit, and they are not easily impressed by alarmist claims that the rules-based world order is collapsing. They are indeed mildly optimistic that “many elements” of the current international system “appear likely to survive today’s turbulence, because many important states and groupings of states wish it to survive.” A perspicacious phalanx of authors looks at these elements of the post-1945 system, such as the nonproliferation regime and peacekeeping, plus institutions like the United Nations and the policies of major powers.
Most of these contributions support the editors’ wryly pragmatic view that “peace and conflict diplomacy increasingly will become an exercise in creative ‘muddling through,’ navigating complexity via negotiated arrangements and the formation of ad hoc coalitions where parties have mutual and divergent interests.” This claim will annoy both hawkish readers who believe that the U.S., China and Russia are doomed to fight a new Cold War—a faddish phrase that gets short shrift here—and idealists who think that the only way out of the current mess is major reforms to the U.N. and other global bodies. But it will resonate nicely with the diplomats and international officials who actually work in and for those institutions.
To understand what creative crisis diplomacy looks like on the ground, it is worth turning to “Whose Peace Are We Building? Leadership for Peace in Africa,” by Youssef Mahmoud, a former U.N. Special Representative in Burundi and Chad, with Albert Mbiatem.* This is a mix of memoir and policy tract, and U.N. historians will find Mahmoud’s accounts of his postings in Africa useful. It is unusually humble for a book written by a senior international figure, who have a certain tendency to self-mythologize. Mahmoud even includes a series of anonymous comments on his performance from former staff members. Many of these are complimentary, but some are harsh—like the one that says he was “too humble” when in Burundi.
With summer here, it’s a good time to sit back, pick up a smart book and try to see the big picture.
Mahmoud’s overall message, however, is that in resolving conflicts, humility is key. Unfortunately, that’s not always what he observed on the ground. “Since moving into the peace and security field over two decades ago, and even more so now,” he notes, “I have come to the conclusion that building peace is now what outsiders do, however well-intentioned and resourced they may be.” He fumes at Security Council diplomats and aid officials who want quick results in complex situations and emphasizes that peacemakers should not impose a “pre-determined vision of what peace should look like” on a society. To work out what a society actually needs to sustain peace, Mahmoud instead emphasizes the importance of listening to grassroots movements and civil society, rather than just elites.
In this, his arguments mesh with that of the most widely discussed, and rightly praised, book on conflict issues so far this year, Severine Autesserre’s “The Frontlines of Peace.” Autesserre is also convinced that organizations like the U.N., which she lumps together as “Peace Inc.,” have adopted an excessively “top down” approach to peace processes and should embrace alternatives based on the needs of specific individuals and communities. She emphasizes that the resulting solutions to violence will be “localized, ad hoc, at times even only temporary,” but these are more realistic than more grandiose proposals imposed from New York, Washington or Brussels. Combined, Autesserre’s and Mahmoud’s volumes make a powerful case for a humble, flexible approach to peacemaking that will surely appeal to policymakers burned by the failures of operations like that in Afghanistan.
I should flag that I know Youssef and Severine personally, but this is because we are all members of an intellectual community that is pithily anatomized in “The ‘Third’ United Nations” by Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. (I know them personally, too). The title refers to the authors’ contention that there are three United Nations: first, the intergovernmental sphere inhabited by diplomats; second, the international secretariats and agencies that deliver policy; and third, a nebulous but influential universe of researchers, NGOs and other actors who generate a lot of the knowledge and ideas that the official arms of the U.N. act on. Youssef Mahmoud has, for example, been based at the International Peace Institute think tank since leaving U.N. service. Carayannis and Weiss’ book explains “how non-state actors help the UN think” and shows how these players shaped multilateral agreements such as the Sustainable Developments Goals, or SDGs.
Carayannis and Weiss are unromantic and sometimes mischievous in their descriptions of these processes. When it comes to the process of drafting the SDGs, which infamously ended up involving 17 goals and nearly 200 individual targets, they conclude that “it is fair to describe the Third UN as having added to the confusion rather than clarified thinking and priorities.” Nonetheless, they make a solid case that ideas matter at the U.N. and that “if the world organization is to survive and remain relevant, the vast bulk of ideas necessary to meet these challenges will come from the outsider-insiders of the Third UN.”
This is an excellent handbook for researchers wondering how to get the U.N. to listen to their big ideas and a must-read for anyone who wants to get into the U.N. advocacy business. As someone already embroiled in that business, I was left with one more insight from my reading of Carayannis and Weiss’ frank account of the ups-and-downs of NGO interactions with the U.N.: I need a vacation. I might even do some reading.
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