Privatizing the Democratic Peace

By: Henry F. Carey

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Synopsis: NGOs have become one of the main instruments in building peace, especially as UN sanctioned peacekeeping missions begin to streamline or are tranformed into formal peacebuilding missions, and as bilateral consensual or unilaterally imposed peacekeeping, like the US in Iraq and Russia in Georgia, endure for decades. During the past three decades, the UN has relied more and more on NGOs and sub-contractors in peacebuilding. The greater the number of multi-dimensional challenges and dilemmas that emerge for these NGOs, the more the sponsoring governments and intergovernmental organizations and host states are directly affected by these transitional efforts. Henry F. Carey analyzes the difficult choices, consequences and lessons learned from the UN and foreign governments commissioning NGOs and other subcontractors working on six peacebuilding policy goals: reconciliation, security, human rights, the rule of law, foreign aid, and election monitoring. The study examines the effects of the UN and powerful states increasingly relying on NGO peacebuilding in diverse cases like Bosnia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, the Philippines, Chechnya, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.