Rising Powers & Peacebuilding : Breaking the Mold?

This book emerged from a multinational research project originally called “New Actors and Innovative Approaches to Peacebuilding.” With the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Relations, six research institutions embarked in 2014 on a two-year effort to investigate the role of the rising powers in the Global South in aiding and supporting other countries to attain and sustain peace. The institutions were the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) in Durban; the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta; the Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) in Istanbul; the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo; the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC; and the United Service Institution of India (USI) in New Delhi. We explicitly sought to create an opportunity for critical thinkers from rising powers and more traditional thought-centers to shed light on their own government’s practices and approaches, and to bring those ideas into international fora. The project sought to answer one central question: What exactly is new and innovative about the peacebuilding approach of the new actors from the Global South, and what results are they having? Building on this question, we sought to achieve three more specific objectives: 1. To provide a structured analysis of the values, content, and impact of recent peacebuilding initiatives of rising powers, comparing them to one another and to approaches by Western donors and international organizations. 2. To offer new theoretical claims about the role of the rising powers in peacebuilding, rooted in empirical work. 3. To make key policy audiences aware of alternative approaches and their empirical records and theoretical underpinnings. The latter objective reflects the policy goals of the project, whereby the partners sought to educate one another in their own concept and activities, and then to stimulate exchanges of ideas about these approaches with more traditional centers of thought regarding peacebuilding. Ultimately, the project sought to influence the exchange of ideas among rising powers in the Global South and between Northern and Southern centers of policy. We held insightful (and fun) seminars in Jakarta, Istanbul, Addis Ababa (in conjunction with the African Union), New York, Washington DC, Brussels, and The Hague to advance these policy aims. This book reflects the outcome of the former two project objectives. It captures the inputs of the project partners and a few additional intellects, offering in-depth, comparative studies of the rising powers, with case examples, aimed at also contributing to mid-level theoretical generalizations about these phenomena. We hope you enjoy the results.