Over the past few years, peacebuilding has taken a more pragmatic turn. Most contemporary multidimensional peace operations now conduct both peacebuilding and protection activities. The overall goal of both peace operations and civil-military coordination remains civilian and locally-led peacebuilding. The overall approach to peacebuilding has shifted from top-down or pre-determined international ideas of what peace should look like to bottom-up or locally defined ideas of peace. This is leading to a convergence between civil-military coordination and Adaptive Peacebuilding.
In essence, Adaptive Peacebuilding is about learning by doing, together with the community affected by the conflict. Instead of a pre-determined idea about what peace may mean for such a community and how to arrive at such peace, Adaptive Peacebuilding is a process of working with the community towards self-sustainable peace. Given the complexity, dynamism, and unpredictability of most contemporary peace operation environments, peacebuilding — like civil-military coordination — must be a process of continuous learning and adaptation based on the experience and feedback gained from efforts to build peace across a wide range of dimensions and scales.
Adaptive Peacebuilding and the Civil-Military Nexus of Peace Operations
The centre of gravity of twenty-first-century United Nations peace operations shifted from peacekeeping to peacebuilding. In many peace missions, humanitarian action, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and conflict prevention often occur at the same time. Civilian and police tasks have taken over many formerly military peacekeeping roles to pursue new peacebuilding tasks, such as political participation, national dialogue, constitution writing, democratisation, judicial reform and rule of law, security sector reform, civil administration, fiscal and revenue management.
Civil-military coordination is at the heart of one of the central problems of complex peace operations, as it facilitates the dialogue and interface between peace and security actors and objectives on the one hand and humanitarian and peacebuilding actors and objectives on the other. The civil-military nexus is critical to achieving a holistic impact on the conflict that the peace operation seeks to transform — hence the importance of the ability of civil-military operators to think strategically while acting locally. Civil-military coordination is thus a critical element in any peacebuilding process, without which it would be impossible to achieve an appropriate level of coherence among the different policies and actions of the complex array of actors engaged in the peace process. Thus, civil-military coordination is inherently an exercise in adaptive, full-spectrum peacebuilding.
Given the complexity, dynamism, and unpredictability of most contemporary peace operation environments, peacebuilding — like civil-military coordination — must be a process of continuous learning and adaptation based on the experience and feedback gained from efforts to build peace across a wide range of dimensions and scales.
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Adaptive Peacebuilding is a process of operationalising peace in which peacebuilders (from local to global), together with the communities and people affected by the conflict, actively engage in structured processes to mitigate conflict and sustain peace through collaborative and iterative learning and adaptation. The aim of adaptive peacebuilding is to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacity of local and national institutions so that they can manage future shocks and challenges — natural or human — without lapsing into violent conflict.
It is thus crucial that the societies and communities intended to benefit from a peacebuilding intervention are fully involved in all aspects of the peacebuilding initiative. External fixes will not stick if not internalised because the local adaptation process is the critical element for sustainability. An Adaptive Peacebuilding approach requires a commitment to engage in continuous learning and adaptation together with the society or community affected by conflict.
Peacebuilding and civil-military coordination need to be understood as a means of support for the people and societies undergoing transition. This is often more psychological than physical, remembering how most populations in conflict and post-conflict situations are traumatised by the violence and upheaval of their lives. Peace cannot be built from the outside. The most important drivers and influences in any peace process are the degree to which the parties to the conflict and the people affected by the conflict are ready for and committed to the peace process.
Military Support to Peacebuilding
The most important contribution that police and military personnel provide is a safe and secure environment to protect civilians and facilitate peacebuilding. Civil assistance can be delivered in the form of the protection of civilians, support to DDR, SSR, and quick impact projects (QIPs). Other civil assistance activities include the support of critical peacebuilding and development areas such as the rule of law, gender mainstreaming, youth, and peace, and security.
Although military support to peacebuilding may be more focused on stabilisation and security than country-level peacebuilding in stabilisation contexts and may thus be more overwhelmingly security-driven and dominated by the military, such peacekeeping and civil-military principles, as well as the international criteria on the use of force with respect to civil-military coordination, nonetheless apply.
More important than “winning hearts and minds” is winning support for the overall, civilian-led peacebuilding efforts – i.e., the peace operations mission and external and internal actors working together to support the peace process. This can mean winning support for a peaceful negotiated settlement, the protection of civilians, and other objectives. Support for the peace mandate means support from rather than to the peacekeeping force.
Even in more hostile environments, military forces may find peacebuilding-related civilian organisations, especially humanitarian partners, working there at great risk to their lives. This makes the broad understanding of civil-military coordination even more important, as the margins for error are small, and the costs of those errors are potentially extremely high. Therefore, the civil-military coordination guidelines from humanitarian assistance organisations also apply to these situations and environments.
The most important drivers and influences in any peace process are the degree to which the parties to the conflict and the people affected by the conflict are ready for and committed to the peace process.
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Civil-Military Coordination and Peacebuilding
Civil-military coordination, like peacebuilding, is inherently strategic, integrative, and adaptive.
Like peacebuilding, it concentrates more on the drivers of conflict and instability, which are deeply rooted and long term, and therefore more strategic challenges, rather than superficial immediate threats, which are more of an operational or tactical problem. Many of these drivers emanate from the security sector, typically comprising a variety of police, intelligence, and military agencies.
Civil-military coordination is inherently integrative. As the nexus of political-military coordination, it merges civil and military capacities in peace and security operations, encompassing all aspects of national power (political, military, economic, informational, etc.) through civil analysis, coordination, and liaison. Civil-military operators play a central role in synchronising a host of multicomponent ways and means to manage and resolve conflict, helping leverage the comparative advantages of all actors to generate desired mission outcomes and effects.
Civil-military coordination is an inherently people-centric organisational learning endeavour. Its civil analysis and engagement capacities and activities help them to see, understand, and influence the civil environment. By helping to win the peace without fighting, civil-military coordination acts as a primary economy of force or effort capacity.
Like Adaptive Peacebuilding, civil-military coordination is applied adaptive leadership. More than managing the links between peace and security, drivers and threats, and strategy and tactics, it is about persuasion, collaborative problem-solving, and consensus-building; it is not about coercion and command and control. Moreover, civil-military leadership is done mostly by example. Given that actions speak louder than words, the personal behaviour of peace operations personnel has the greatest impact on gaining or losing influence, legitimacy, and credibility in the operations area.
This is why our newly updated Peace Operations Training Institute course, Civil-Military Coordination in Peace Operations, is structured around several key principles of general civil-military coordination. These include the primacy of civilian authority, the military as supporting entity rather than the primary force, the military’s role as an enabler, the distinction between indirect and direct support, and the effective management of civil-military interaction and transition. While this general civil-military approach is appropriate for supporting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief — or even conflict prevention — it is an ideal match for Adaptive Peacebuilding and supporting the transition from stabilisation or peacekeeping to peacebuilding.
Dr. Cedric de Coning is a senior advisor to ACCORD and a research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI).
Col. (Ret.) Christopher Holshek has over three decades of civil-military experience at all levels across the full range of operations, including in combat operations with the US Army and in UN field missions. He is the author of Travels With Harley: Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity, about his experiences in civil-military operations in Army, joint and multinational settings.
