UNU Update: How to turn warlords into peacelords

With rare exceptions, international pressure is required to reform warlords into peace builders, yet the world community has yet to take a systematic, coordinated approach to creating this influence, according to a study by International Conflict Research (INCORE).

In From Warlords To Peacelords: Local Leadership Capacity In Peace Processes, researchers from INCORE, a UNU-affiliated peace studies centre at the University of Ulster, describe how warlords emerge, how they are sustained and what sparked their change from a seemingly negative to a more positive style of leadership.

Pictured at the New York launch of From Warlords
to Peacelords (from left): INCORE director Prof.
Gillian Robinson; project funder Milt Lauenstein;
and study co-author Cathy Gormley-Heenan.

The report was launched at an April 5 panel discussion at UN headquarters in New York, hosted by UNU and attended by experts from INCORE, the International Peace Academy, UNU and the UN.

The study, which focused on individuals in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, says that while such leaders "were adroit at dragging their countries and followers into conflict they were not so adept at pulling them out of it." The key force for change was not so much local leadership, but international leaders and their states and organizations, which are increasingly becoming a fixed part of the transition process.

"In Afghanistan, minimal pressure has been exerted, meaning that leaders continue to behave in as divisive and selfish a manner as before," the study says. "The international overlords of Kosovo have restricted the powers of local leaders, erecting new political institutions with limited functionality or competence. In Sierra Leone, the international community is sanctioning local leaders through a special court designed to prosecute those who bear greatest responsibility for crimes committed during the civil war."

The research says that in none of the countries studied did leaders provide the momentum to begin the peace building process; they were "either coaxed into settlements, or catapulted along as part of a process over which they have little control."

Says INCORE Director Gillian Robinson: "The three countries surveyed have all undergone protracted and often brutal conflicts, and in the case of Afghanistan, lasting up to a quarter of a century and costing perhaps one million lives.

"Throughout, leadership was a crucial issue, and even the relative and fragile peace that prevails in all three cases could not have come about without the leaders, or ‘warlords’ involved seeing either the need or benefit in ending conflict and beginning some form of political process."

Co-author Mari Fitzduff of Brandeis University, Boston, says the research shows that "purely ‘positive’ leadership is rare where there is violent conflict. In any case, even leaders with the best intentions cannot resolve such conflicts, needing intervention from the international community to make any conflict resolution process sustainable. The question remains, however, how best to enhance local-international leadership linkages, and use these to better manage and resolve violent conflict."