Moving beyond the technical: facing up to peacebuilding's inherent contradictions

摘要

There is an assumption that we can enhance peacebuilding by improving the tools that we use for assessments, planning and evaluation. However, the focus on tools creates the impression that peacebuilding challenges are technical. Improving tools is not meaningless, but our preoccupation with tools has a negative effect when it becomes a front for avoiding dealing with the deeper inherent contradictions in peacebuilding. There are limits to our knowledge and our ability to engineer specific outcomes in complex systems. There are unrealistically high expectations of coherence, unity of purpose and cooperation among peacebuilding actors. Peacebuilding agents are interconnected, but that does not imply that they have the same objectives, mandates, principles and values. Interconnected problems call for interconnected responses, not for one coherent response. Coherence should not be about negotiating a common position, and then promoting it regardless of changing dynamics. Coherence should be about continuously managing competing interests and interdependencies. The interaction between dissention, competition for resources, and the tension between different approaches and policy choices is not only normal but necessary to ensure the optimal functioning of the system.