Roundtable Meeting on Responsibility to Protect and Post-conflict Recovery in Africa (13.10.2009)

The Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) together with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) organized a roundtable meeting on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and post-conflict recovery in Africa on October 9th. In addition to CMI and FIIA, representatives from the of Institute of Security Studies (ISS), University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland participated in the meeting.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept was launched unanimously at the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the World Summit in 2005. Even though derivates of the R2P framework, such as the responsibility to rebuild, are very consequential, actual R2P policy instruments remain largely underdefined.

The field of security has transformed following the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The end of the Cold War led to a shift away from state security to new concept of human security. After 9/11, however, state security regained its centrality, and the focus international community swung strongly towards failed states. Intervention in such cases is not a panacea. The roundtable concluded that the international community clearly needs more understanding of when to intervene and when not to. Sometimes non-interference can yield better results than interference.

It is also difficult to evaluate the ‘success’ of peacebuilding efforts. There is a clear need for an evaluation mechanism that would guide programming. Some participants argued that we should not evaluate the success of peacebuilding by looking only at the short-term trends. In addition to adopting a long-term time-frame, focus should not always be on what has gone wrong; positive developments need to be highlighted as well.

In addition to rebuilding, some participants saw the greatest potential of R2P in early-warning. Early-warning needs to be separated from the concept of early action. The importance of NGO networks as a channel to produce early-warning information to the United Nations was highlighted.

All participants agreed that state-building is usually seen as a very technical matter, kept separate from the political process. Also, today the viability of states is often ranked by the international community according to technical facts and statistical data. According to these rankings African states are failing because of failures in tax revenues and insufficient school enrolments. The roundtable concluded that, above all, managing a state is a political process. Instead of looking carefully at statistical data, more attention should be directed towards strengthening this process. The technical aspects of state-building form only one dimension of state management. Ignoring politics in state-building is a recipe for failure.


The roundtable panelists were:
Dr. Wafula Okumu, Head, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Pretoria,
Mr. Richard Cornwell, Senior Researcher Fellow, ISS,
Dr. Touko Piiparinen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research, University of Helsinki,
Dr. Mika Aaltola, Academy of Finland Research Fellow, FIIA,
Ms. Kirsi Joenpolvi, Deputy Director, Programmes, CMI