The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider’s Guide to Changing the World

Abstract

Séverine Autesserre has persistently made noteworthy and invaluable contributions to the literature on peacebuilding and conflict management, and The Frontlines of Peace is no exception to this trend. Autesserre notes that war has cost the international community $10 trillion annually, which equates to 13% of the world’s gross domestic product and an expenditure of $4 per person per day (p. 17). This mass expenditure, according to Autesserre, is a significant flaw of the peace industry at present. Autesserre argues that ‘[c]contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn’t require billions in aid or massive international interventions’; rather, for Autesserre, ‘[r]eal, lasting pace requires giving power to ordinary citizens’ (pp. 18–19). With this premise in mind, Autesserre proceeds to review the peace industry: what she refers to as ‘Peace, Inc’. Peace, Inc adopts a top-down approach in terms of which peacebuilders and interveners originating from outside a conflict zone arrive in a conflict zone with the view that they know best. This approach is often rooted in stereotypes of the populace residing in the conflict zone in question. In order to prove her point, Autesserre points to her own experiences in the field. She recounts an episode, for example, where a European diplomat likened the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to that witnessed during the Middle Ages. On a different occasion, a humanitarian worker posited that sexual violence was commonplace within Congolese society due to the existence of an extensive rape culture. Such stereotypes result in the perpetuation of negative perceptions of those residing in conflict zones. In the DRC context, locals gained a reputation associated with the idea that ‘Congo is as Congo does’ (p. 71). Reputations of this kind result in external interveners perceiving populations in conflict zones as weak and incompetent, which in turn leads to the former operating on the assumption that they have a better sense of how to resolve conflict than the latter. Against this backdrop, again drawing from her experiences in the field, Autesserre makes the case that insiders and outsiders need to ensure that they interact outside of the workspace in their efforts to bring about peace, as doing so will help disrupt habitual patterns and defuse tense relationships between different sides. Doing so would help to challenge, and in time reset, the top-down approach practised by Peace, Inc. Towards the end of the volume, Autesserre reflects on her years in the field, offering the reader her version of what she terms the ‘Model Intervener’; for Autesserre, such an individual understands that (p. 153):