Last year International Alert’s Secretary-General Dan Smith was selected to review the UK Department for International Development’s policy on state-building and peacebuilding, an issue which is a bit of a hot topic in many of the countries where Alert works. Smith challenged some of the UK Government’s key assumptions and provided new ways of thinking about the interlinkages between state-building and peacebuilding.
This year, our work took a step forward with our invitation to attend an international conference in Dili co-hosted by the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), DfID (the UK Department for International Development) and the Timor-Leste Government. We took a front row seat alongside senior government and donor officials, and civil society activists from around the world, and had our photo taken with Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister, Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão.
Dili has a wonderful seafront with lush tropical mountains providing a dramatic backdrop to the developing city. The streets were hot, busy and colourful and it seemed hard to imagine that Timor-Leste still grapples with the challenges of peacebuilding and state-building. But a closer look reveals unresolved problems. There are deep levels of poverty in some parts of the country and people still struggle with justice and reconciliation. The UN presence is very obvious, but although they are in the process of scaling down, they still seem to be the main provider of security on the streets. There are large numbers of unemployed young men on the streets who seemed bored and disinterested. And observing the market stalls, it is evident that most goods are imported and not much is produced locally, but there is oil, which we learned is a divisive issue.
The conference, therefore, presented an important opportunity for people to explore some of the contradictions and dilemmas facing countries like Timor-Leste from as far away as the Solomon Islands, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Liberia.
For many people at the conference, state-building and peacebuilding were perceived as separate and even divergent goals requiring parallel strategies. There was little understanding that state-building was an essentially political process, or that emerging states needed to strengthen the relations between state and society. We know from our work that state-building invariably takes place in undemocratic systems where the separation of executive functions is absent or contested, where civil oversight and accountability are limited, and where institutions capable of managing conflict peacefully are few and far between.
At the conference, Alert was able to join with other civil society activists from around the world to present an alternative view and to ensure that the final Dili Declaration reflected our key concerns. We argued that political and peacebuilding goals needed to be reconciled and seen as two sides of the same coin and that state-building had to be seen as an inherently political process aimed at the establishment of a peaceful and responsive state based on an inclusive political settlement. This was reflected in the speech given by Prime Minister of Timor-Leste at the closing session of the conference. “State-building”, he said, “[is] a process that is inter-related with the building of peace. As two sides of the same coin, it is important that emergency international support does not withdraw when peace appears to have been reached, and that we understand that peacebuilding is consolidated when state-building is strong”.
While we argued that peacebuilding could not be an ‘add-on’, we also emphasized that the ‘HOW’ mattered, and not just the what. And finally we stressed the importance of civil society participation and the role of women and youth as peacebuilders, and not just as victims.
The declaration agreed by all participants at the end of the conference, the Dili Declaration, acknowledged many of these arguments. It was titled ‘A new vision for peacebuilding and statebuilding’ and recognised the urgent need to address conflict and fragility by supporting country-led peacebuilding and state-building processes, including the development of an International Action Plan on peacebuilding and state-building.
So, what next? A conference is just a conference, and not an end in itself, so all the civil society activists in our group agreed that the International Dialogue process emerging from the conference would benefit from our active participation. We will establish an advisory group to ensure the participation of civil society from different countries in supporting the international dialogue process through to the next conference in Seoul in 2011.
