The following two chapters (chapters 2 & 3) constitute the conceptual underpinnings of the study. Just peace is the key theoretical concept for the whole conceptual discussion, but I locate it in the wider field of peacebuilding (chapter 2). Since the EU’s formula for a just peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has developed into meaning a Palestinian state,
the second conceptual chapter deals with statebuilding as an approach to peacebuilding. This is in line with the logic of the abductive approach and the interplay between theory and empirical findings in the study. The chapter about statebuilding as an approach to peacebuilding is constructed to function as a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of the EU’s efforts to build a Palestinian state.
Chapter 4 is about the EU as a global peace- and statebuilding actor and this chapter serves as a bridge between the conceptual underpinnings and the empirical parts of the dissertation. Here, I discuss the EU as a political system, its notions of peace, peacebuilding and the statebuilding approach in a more general EU context. The EU chapter serves both to conceptualize how the EU defines the key theoretical concepts of the study and to operationalize the concepts related to the statebuilding approach to peacebuilding within an EU context. The second half of the EU chapter and the two empirical chapters on Palestinian statebuilding are constructed after the categories provided by the conceptual framework, which also guides the analysis.
The next three chapters (chapters 5,6 & 7) constitute the empirical parts of the study. Chapter 5 is about the declaratory work of the EU to define a just peace in the conflict. In this chapter, I analyze how the EU’s formula for a just peace in the conflict has transformed, from not explicitly including the Palestinians at all as an explicit party to the conflict in 1971, into legitimizing a Palestinian state as the key to a just peace in the conflict. I also analyze how the parties and other actors have reacted to the EU’s statements on the conflict throughout the years.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the EU’s efforts to realize concretely its formula for a just peace in the conflict, by building a Palestinian state. Since security is seen as a precondition for all types of development in statebuilding, and since a large part of Palestinian statebuilding is about security, Chapter 6 deals with the EU’s involvement in the security-related aspects of Palestinian statebuilding. Here, I analyze the measures taken by the EU and other international actors to support the PA in creating security in the West Bank and what consequences these measures have had for other aspects of Palestinian statebuilding, not least for the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories. In chapter 7, I analyze the EU’s involvement in the political and economic aspects of Palestinian statebuilding. The focus in this chapter is on how the international community, led by the EU, has made
the Palestinians technically ready for statehood, but without solving the underlying issues in the ongoing conflict with Israel.
The final chapter 8 provides the conclusions of the study. Here, I summarize the main conclusions of the dissertation and identify issues for further research.
2 Just peace in the context of peacebuilding
"As the world changes and history continues, a specific Just Peace formula will not necessarily be, as in a Kantian perspective, a perpetual one. Just Peace needs to be maintained, and therefore adapted to changing societal circumstances, in order to survive."
Pierre Allan & Alexis Keller (2008b:vii-viii)
The term peacebuilding has become something of a popular expression for describing almost every action undertaken by international actors in conflict and post-conflict societies. In 1992, the then United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali published An Agenda for Peace in which peacebuilding was defined as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.” (Boutros-Ghali 1992) The term peacebuilding and the practice surrounding it originally evolved out of an institutional response to handle the challenges of peacekeeping operations and humanitarian interventions that responded to internal conflict situations (Jeong 2005:1). In the 1990s and in the first years of the 2000s, many still saw peacebuilding solely as a post-conflict enterprise. For example, in 2004, Paris (2004a:38) defined peacebuilding as
action undertaken at the end of a civil conflict to consolidate peace and prevent a recurrence of fighting. A peacebuilding mission involves the deployment of military and civilian personnel from several international agencies, with a mandate to conduct peacebuilding in a country that is just emerging from a civil war.
The initial post-conflict focus of peacebuilding has gradually been expanded into addressing violent conflicts at different phases of the conflict cycle (Duke & Courtier 2009:4). As peacebuilding is increasingly not seen as confined to a specific phase of the conflict, most researchers and practitioners would today probably consider Boutros-Ghali and Paris’s definitions erroneous (See, for example, Schirch 2004, Sandole 2010, Porter 2007, Ponzio 2011, Merlingen & Ostrauskaite 2006, Little 2008).
The nature of many contemporary conflicts, with failed peace agreements, instability, unresolved issues and sporadic outbreaks of violence, has made it hard to distinguish between what is conflict and what is post-conflict. For example, in the definitions by Boutros-Ghali and Paris, the European Union’s provision of judicial assistance to Kosovo after the war there would be considered peacebuilding, while the same type of assistance to Iraq, launched in 2005, in the middle of a full-blown insurgency, would not be considered peacebuilding. In addition, peacebuilding must of course also be possible in conflicts that are not civil wars, even if few such conflicts remain.
In the peacebuilding literature, there seems to be a widespread consensus that peacebuilding encompasses the overarching political and economic factors that are necessary to sustain peace (See, for example, Lederach 1997:20, Lute 2007:439, Paris 2004a:39). Peacebuilding therefore involves a wide variety of both military and what might be termed civilian or non-military activities, including the administration of elections; the retraining of judges, lawyers and police officers; the nurturing of indigenous political parties and NGOs; the reorganization of governmental institutions and the delivery of emergency humanitarian and economic assistance. It is quite common to think of peacebuilding on different levels and then usually in terms of some kind of elite top-down approach versus some kind of grass root bottom-up approach (See, for example, UN Peacebuilding Architecture 2008, Richmond 2005:104). In general, the literature on peacebuilding emphasizes the importance of having a long-term perspective, but peacebuilding entails both short-term and long-term frameworks. The former focuses on emergency relief and the control of violence, while the latter focuses more on development, conflict transformation and social change (See, for example, Kumar 2001:184, Jeong 2005:4, Chetail 2009).
The aim of peacebuilding, at least in the words of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is “to create the conditions necessary for a sustainable peace in war-torn societies” (quoted in Paris 2004a:2). In Paris’s (2004a:2)
words that is “a peace that would endure long after the departure of the peacebuilders themselves.” Despite its enormous popularity in the academic literature, policy circles and the wider public debate, peacebuilding remains an elusive term. Repeated attempts at definition and conceptualization have in general not created more clarity, but instead raised questions of efficiency, coordination and sustainability (Duke & Courtier 2009:3).
In the light of the fact that peacebuilding is such a broad term that usually involves a wide variety of activities by various actors on different levels, more and more researchers have come to use peacebuilding as an umbrella term for a wide range of approaches that address conflict, violence, peace (See, for example, Schirch 2008, Abu Nimer & Lazarus 2007, Porter 2007). This makes sense to me, because as Lisa Schirch (2008:2) has pointed out, the questions related to peacebuilding are usually the same questions that are addressed within the broader field of peace and conflict studies, such as whether conflict is something to be managed, mitigated, negotiated, mediated, resolved, prevented or transformed, and consequently if peace is something to be kept, made or built? Like these researchers, I will treat peacebuilding as an umbrella term for the conceptual discussion in this dissertation. More specifically and in line with this reasoning, I see peacebuilding as holistic and comprehensive, in the same vein as Charles Call who has defined peacebuilding as “actions undertaken by international or national actors to consolidate or institutionalize peace.” (Call 2008a:5)