1. Peacebuilding Compared and the Solomons conflict

Statebuilding that neglects specific sources of conflict

The Solomon Islands conflict of 1998–2003 is often read simply as a story of a failed or fragile state. It was not a state that had been built and then failed. Rather it was a state that had never consolidated after decades since independence of taking at least as many steps back as steps forward. It was not a formed state; up to this point in its history, it has been a state in a process of formation. In this book, we conceive peacebuilding as the craft of supporting institutions, including non-state institutions, in a process of growing to provide human security. We do not conceive it as a process of following an outside architect’s plan to erect core pillars of the state such as law, economic governance and public administration. We will argue that there is little that is generic about statebuilding in Solomon Islands and much that is shadowy in a distinctively Solomons way. There is a formal state defined by the nation’s Constitution, but it is shadowed by economically, politically and diplomatically powerful figures who have shaped the nation’s history, and particularly its history of conflict. In our text, we consider William Reno’s (1995) metaphor of the shadow state and the earlier metaphor of the shadow (or underground) economy. And we ponder the possibility that when pillars of the state are driven into the sand of shadow governance that envelops the formal state to influence the outcome in moments of crisis, a false sense of security is created.

We read the Solomons conflict as occurring at the conjunction of a complex of fragilities—some in the Parliament, some in the police, some in a fragmented nation where the dignity of ethnic identities was exploited, some in the global political economy, others in institutions that regulate a scramble for key resources: land, forests, fish. Given this intricate knot of fragilities that is a legacy of Solomons history and culture, the peacebuilding[1] that has been done has been surprisingly successful. And in the event, this conflict that seemed forebodingly out of control did not spread to most villages of the nation, affecting only Honiara and its surrounds, the Weather Coast, parts of North Malaita and pockets of Western Province. Perhaps 90 per cent of villages continued peacefully working at their village economies throughout, not dependent on the modern state and economy, and therefore also not greatly affected by the statebuilding intended to rebuild peace.

We conclude in the final chapter that while peacebuilding in Solomon Islands made many large and small mistakes, people learnt from these mistakes. This learning of greater humility in peacebuilding could be one reason why the Solomons peace has not failed so far. On the pessimistic side, we find it to be slow and costly learning. We wonder if there is not some inevitability about this. Nevertheless, we draw some lessons from the Solomon Islands intervention on how slow learning might be quickened somewhat by rethinking the peacebuilding craft. This rethinking involves overcoming fear of ‘mission creep’. It means seeing ‘peacebuilding creep’ as about mission contraction as much as mandate expansion. The craft of peace as learned in Solomon Islands is about enabling spaces for dialogue that define where the mission should pull back to allow local actors to expand the horizons of their peacebuilding ambition. This leads us to compare the slow-learning approach of the ‘heavy’ Solomon Islands intervention initially aimed at rebuilding core pillars of the state with the ‘slow-food’ approach (Boege 2006; Bowden et al. 2009) of the Bougainville ‘light intervention’ (Regan 2010) next door.

Peacebuilding as launched in Honiara in 2003 has been lauded by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2005:47) as an example of ‘good practice’ in a whole-of-government approach. Our analysis is more mixed. We see the intervention from 2003 to 2010 as involving a crude statebuilding agenda; it was not about unpicking the specificities of a knot of fragilities. For the most part, fragile strands in the web of Solomons society have been neither strengthened one by one nor rewoven into a more sturdy fabric of Solomons society. With such an important set of specific fragilities, we worry that there is considerable risk of Solomons society unravelling into violence again. Chapters 8 and 9 summarise the structural factors and proximate factors that led to armed violence and the peacebuilding weaknesses that were also ably identified in the National Peace Council (NPC 2004) strategic plan for 2004–09. The peacebuilding that has occurred has barely begun to tackle these specific weaknesses and sources of the original conflict (summarised in Table 8.1). Lise Howard’s (2008) comparative study of completed UN multidimensional peacekeeping operations found an organisational learning culture in the peace operation to be the best predictor of its success:

UN peacekeeping tends to be more successful when the peacekeepers are actively learning from the environment in which they are deployed. In other words, rather than seeking to impose preconceived notions about how the missions should unfold, peacekeeping is at its best when the peacekeepers—both civilian and military—take their cues from the local population, and not UN headquarters, about how best to implement mandates. (Howard 2008:2)

The Solomons’ experience is consistent with Howard’s results. The intervention was a mix of success and failure that might have been more successful had it been adapting and learning earlier and more assiduously from indigenous organisations such as churches, women’s groups and the National Peace Council. The peace almost unravelled completely on the streets of Honiara in 2006 at the hands of people who felt they were not listened to by the state or by the foreigners who were propping up its pillars. While recognising the limits that the narrower statebuilding strategy might place on the sustainability of the peace, we must acknowledge that strengthening the core of the state, especially its institutions of law and order, quickly re-established peace and mostly maintained it between 2003 and 2010. Or has it been the simple presence of peacekeepers for seven years that has maintained it?

This book tells the story of a country that might have had a much more calamitous conflict than it did. An international peace operation with an unusually strong rule-of-law agenda prevented a larger catastrophe. It is a case of a complex of structural grievances being exploited by men with political ambitions in a context in which holding power is a fragile accomplishment. These electoral conditions arose from a tragic interplay of social fragmentation, indigenous traditions of local politics (wantokism)[2] and global resource politics. Indigenous politicians were used by shadow governments of ethnic others (and vice versa). This book argues that the initial policy settings of the peace operation that saved Solomon Islands from deeper tragedy might not be settings that would work to create a secure future. Those settings might require a further shift of emphasis from statebuilding back to village building, from national policing to village policing, from incarceration to reconciliation in civil society, from an economics of short-term fiscal stabilisation to education for long-term leadership. This is even though statebuilding, police-led peacekeeping and fiscal stabilisation have saved the day up to a point.

If indigenous leadership is strong enough, island communities might seize back control of sustainable logging and sustainable fishing from foreign interests to fund the large investment to create a highly educated future generation who can develop new opportunities in tourism, agriculture and mining. A new generation of leaders might fix insecure land tenure and the host of other specific problems that led to this conflict. If they fail, the Solomons will be an interesting test in the decades ahead of whether generic statebuilding that for the most part neglects the specificities of a conflict can nevertheless secure continuing peace.

The Solomon Islands case differs from our Bougainville case in that indigenous leadership has so far (until 2010) been less effective in seizing a peacebuilding agenda. We will argue that an important reason for this is because it has been given less space to do so on a peacebuilding stage crowded with foreigners (Kabutaulaka 2006). As the resistance of the government of Manasseh Sogavare (2006–07) to the Australian-led intervention will illustrate, Solomons society has been more constrained by external forces from fully seizing that local control. To date, the Solomons shows much less resilience of reconciliation than Bougainville. We will see that when the National Peace Council showed promise as an enabler of participatory indigenous peacebuilding and reconciliation, it was snuffed out. Sustained reconciliation at many levels of society is important in conflicts such as Bougainville and the Solomons because both involve complex, multi-layered identity politics (see Chapter 7). In part, we read violence as a means to assert the dignity of different layers of identity that proponents believe have been treated with contempt by others and by the government. In the process, identity defenders have sought to heap indignity on the other, including on outside identities such as waku (Chinese/Asian). Healing indignity suffered at these multiple layers of identity is an unfinished reconciliation agenda. Like Morgan Brigg (2009), we see strengths and opportunities in harnessing wantok identities for peacebuilding, even as these identities have been factors in the conflict (Chapter 7).

External support for statebuilding has been much more intensive than in Bougainville or Timor-Leste or perhaps any other case known to us.[3] To a degree, we will conclude that statebuilding, including state prosecutions, has crowded off the political agenda the kind of iterative building of reconciliation we see in Bougainville (and to a lesser extent in Timor-Leste). Yet Solomon Islands is not like the Indonesian cases of Peacebuilding Compared, where there is both elite and grassroots support for what we called ‘non-truth and reconciliation’ (Braithwaite et al. 2010a). Especially today in Solomon Islands, there is formidable support for both truth and reconciliation. The absence has been of effective implementation of that commitment to reveal truths of the root causes of the conflict and to ground reconciliation in an acknowledgment of those truths. One of the problems here is that reconciliation has been gamed for cash compensation that was then embezzled by elites. This in turn was a result of the opportunities for extortion from and by powerbrokers of multiple shadow states that feast off the opportunities created by instability in the formal state.

As in Indonesia (Braithwaite et al. 2010a), in Solomon Islands, anomie—a breakdown of normative orders that previously secured peace—has been part of the problem. Breakdown of the sense of duty to the nation among police was a key part of this anomie; but so was a willingness of certain politicians to risk the future of the nation by playing the ethnic card in a forlorn effort to secure their personal political future; and so was the ambition of certain young militant leaders in certain parts of the country who cut their followers off from the traditional normative guidance of village elders. Anomie created conditions in which it was possible for the politicians and militants of 1998–2002 to loot the state, saddling the current generation with a crippling national debt. An intractable part of the problem so far has been the resilience of norms of Solomon Islands ‘political culture’ (Morgan 2005) that leave national politics available to the highest bidder, and therefore vulnerable to the kinds of crises and breakdowns in the confidence in institutions that we saw between 1998 and 2006.[4] Formidable resources have been pumped into rebuilding state institutions with inattention to Melanesian realities that compel politicians to be servants of networks of obligation and reciprocity with their wantoks much more than servants of the nation and its institutions (Allen and Dinnen 2010). We see the current Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the transformation of education, effective national regulation and ownership of fishing and logging and a ‘raising-the-bar’ approach to anti-corruption enforcement (as opposed to an across-the-board assault on corruption)[5] as gradualist opportunities for that nation building. We see elements of the strategic plan of the National Peace Council (NPC 2004) that, among other things, provided for nurturing national sporting, religious, artistic, indigenous, professional, business, youth and women’s associations as another road to nation building via civil society not yet fully taken. While that plan was quickly superseded by other developments, many of these strands of civil society have been strengthening by dint of their own resilience and with support from donors.

In the development of our comparative thinking about peacebuilding, we think the most instructive aspect of this case is in its lessons about the strengths and limitations of a strategy of strengthening the core pillars of the state. The Solomons is not quite statebuilding ‘neat’, but the focus has been on rebuilding the core pillars of the central state to the comparative neglect of the specific factors that fuelled conflict. Put in its best light, the Solomons intervention could be seen as succeeding by strengthening core pillars of a fragile state to the point where that state was then able to chart its own path to addressing the specificities of the conflict. Yet we will argue that not all aspects of the Solomons state were working badly compared with most developing countries finding their own path in the aftermath of colonialism. Moreover, village governance in Solomons society continued throughout the conflict years to do an outstanding job of caring for its most vulnerable and dependent members, as did the church. While the Solomons peacebuilding intervention has had some success, our conclusion will be that it might have been a more resilient success had it worked with Solomons civil society to identify the key peacebuilding risks and opportunities where civil society and the state most sought outside assistance. Some of those specific priorities would have included elements of statebuilding that might have been read off a generic World Bank good-governance template. Yet most of them, we will argue, would not have been about core pillars of the state. Most would have had a unique connection to Solomons history and to specific weaknesses and strengths of its social fabric.

The structure of this book is to first outline the historical context of the conflict in the next chapter, then the story of the descent into conflict and the climb back to peace. After attempting to understand the identity politics of the conflict, we then reach some conclusions about the drivers of the conflict and how well peacebuilding was attuned to those drivers. Finally, we draw some lessons on learning the craft of a contextual peace. The present chapter now outlines the ambitions—methodological and substantive—of the Peacebuilding Compared project, of which this Solomons volume is the third. Readers who have read the first chapter of previous volumes (Braithwaite et al. 2010a, 2010b) can skip to Chapter 2 without missing much.

Comparing conflict, comparing peacebuilding

The Peacebuilding Compared project hopes over more than 20 years to code 670 variables in relation to the major armed conflicts that have raged across the world since 1990. The first large volume covered seven different Indonesian armed conflicts (Braithwaite et al. 2010a), the second the Bougainville conflict. It is hoped the fourth volume will appear in quick succession to cover Timor-Leste. The project started with the region around the home country of the authors simply because it was easier to learn how to do it in the region with which the research team was most familiar. As it happens, this region experienced a great deal of armed conflict during the 1990s.

Peacebuilding Compared started in 2005. During the project’s first five years, the senior author managed to do some serious fieldwork across each of the sites in the nations where these first 11 conflicts occurred.[6] In some cases, including Solomon Islands, he was joined by co-authors for that case with far greater knowledge of that site and its languages. Joint is better, more reflexive and reliable than solitary fieldwork, but often is not logistically possible. Thankfully in the Solomon Islands case, John Braithwaite was able to share two fieldwork trips with Sinclair Dinnen and one with each of the other authors in 2006 and 2009. Peacekeepers and other key international players were also interviewed in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu between 2005 and 2010. The Appendix summarises the types of people interviewed. Sinclair Dinnen and Matthew Allen have also conducted their own research on Solomon Islands over many years; where these data are relied on, this earlier work is cited. We encourage a participatory approach to the research and invite readers to check out the Peacebuilding Compared web site at <http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au>, where more information can be found. Please feel encouraged to post your ideas and information on that web site at any time throughout the 20-year life of the project.

For the project in general so far, we have been surprised by the level of access won to key players such as prime ministers (one current and six former prime ministers of Solomon Islands and one of Australia in this case), state and insurgent military commanders, foreign ministers, peace agreement negotiators and peacekeeping commanders. Yet, as is clear in the Appendix to this volume, in comparison with the appendices in our first two volumes that summarised the types of players in the conflict who were interviewed, there was always uneven coverage in the types of stakeholders accessed. In every case, there were regional specialists in the study of this conflict who had secured broader access to the key players and who had talked many times to decision makers we did not mange to tap. This means it is always more important to attend to the published fruits of the fieldwork of others than to one’s own fieldwork notes.

Yet this raises the question of what added value there could be in research of inferior coverage led by a team coordinator with an inferior background in the regions of conflict. One added value is that sometimes inferior researchers whose fieldwork engagement is thin are nevertheless lucky enough to gain superior access to some significant bits of information. So there is some value from our research in adding a little to the superior body of data and insights accumulated by the very best experts in each conflict. Yet this is not the main contribution of comparative research. Its main added value is in the comparison, and in the different ways of seeing that a comparative lens opens out. In each case study of Peacebuilding Compared, there tend to be a few scholars who have done the most insightful or thorough research on that case. The frequent citation of the work of these scholars makes it clear who they are. We are deeply grateful to them. Their work remains the scholarship to read on that case, but we do hope that by standing on their books, we might be able to peer over their shoulders to begin to see more clearly a comparative landscape of conflict patterns across the globe.

Peacebuilding Compared offers a different kind of comparativism than the dominant kind that is based on quantitative analysis of statistical information from databases maintained by organisations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and national statistics bureaus. Peacebuilding Compared uses these data sets as well to code one-third of its 670 variables in relation to each conflict. But most codes are of things not available in these databases, such as whether insurgents received training from a foreign power and whether significant numbers of the combatants were female, based on our interviews (and published fieldwork of others). Good examples of the kinds of variables never coded in the leading quantitative research are the dynamics and shape of reconciliation processes post-conflict. This is a particularly important gap according to some of the theoretical frameworks we address in this volume.

We also attempt to deal with two fundamental problems in the quantitative literature. One is that quantitative scholars are often interested only in data coded at the national level. The study of ‘civil wars’ dominated by the disciplines of political science and international relations is often, moreover, interested only in armed conflicts in which one of the combatants is a state.[7] Peacebuilding Compared seeks to maximise coding at the local or provincial level. Hence the code recorded for the separatist conflict in Aceh might be quite different from that of the separatist conflict in Papua at the other end of Indonesia. Another difference is that Peacebuilding Compared is content to code conflicts that are many things at once. Hence, for example, Peacebuilding Compared codes both Aceh and Papua as separatist conflicts and also as ethnic conflicts. This is different from the approach in the quantitative literature, which tends to force conflicts into one category or another. Third, as is clear from the summary in Table 8.1, we also enter certain codes as ‘consensus’ codes among scholars and other expert commentators on the case, others as ‘contested but credible’.

A difference from the ethnographic/qualitative literature is that Peacebuilding Compared is much less engaged with adjudicating the most contested debates about the case. We just code them as contested interpretations and report the nature of the contestation in our narrative. What we are interested in doing is ruling out non-credible interpretations. Conflict zones are teeming with them—wild, unsubstantiated rumours, ridiculous theories propagated by people who spread lies to protect their culpability, clever pieces of misinformation planted by double agents, imagined histories concocted by supposed combatants with grandiose visions of their self-importance to saving their nation. A significant level of fieldwork on the ground and in the capitals of combatant and peacekeeping states (or at UN headquarters) is needed. The intent is not to get the research team to the point where it can settle the most contested debates among the experts, but to the point where it can rule out most (hopefully all) the myriad non-credible interpretations.

A distinctive comparativism

This renders Peacebuilding Compared a distinctive form of comparativism. The approach was motivated by reading most of the best research as falling into one of two camps. The first is a large number of wonderful studies of particular conflicts, or comparing a couple, written by scholars who have deep knowledge and long experience of that region. The second is the more recent quantitative tradition led by outstanding comparativists such as Ted Gurr, Jack Goldstone, Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, Virginia Page Fortna, James Fearon, David Laitin, Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, among others cited in the references. In choosing a method that aspires to significant fieldwork engagement that is inferior to the best ethnographic work, and is on a smaller number of cases to the best quantitative work, we are simply filling a methodological niche that has been under-exploited in the literature. We do not have the view that it is necessarily a superior method to the dominant two.[8] One of its demands is that it requires one person to read very extensively on each case and to be in the room or under the tree for most of the fieldwork. Otherwise it would be impossible to code the 670 variables consistently across cases. The thematic unity of narrative volumes such as this might offer no advance on an edited collection of haphazard comparisons, insightful though such casual comparativism can be.

By 2030, we hope that some sort of cluster analysis or fuzzy-set analysis to the best quantitative standards of that time will reveal something new about types of conflicts. We would also hope to define which might be the most important of probably a long list of risk factors that conduce to the persistence of armed conflict—and which are the most important protective factors for preserving peace. Narrative and analytical books such as this lay an important foundation for this future quantitative work. They discover new variables that are worth coding for all cases, new complexities in the dynamics among these variables that might ultimately account for why certain quantitative models will not explain much and why others might do so.

A final part of the method was to invite the people who seemed to be producing some of the best insights on the case to be members of an advisory panel. We asked the advisory panel to suggest important people to interview, to read our first draft, comment on erroneous insights within it and on research and lines of inquiry that needed to be pursued before the next draft.

Our ethical obligations under The Australian National University’s Research Ethics Committee approval were explained to all participants. These included an obligation to report quotes and insights from each informant anonymously unless they specifically indicated that they wanted to be quoted as the source of an insight. Wherever a quote appears without a citation to some other source in the literature, it is an anonymous quote from an informant interviewed for Peacebuilding Compared.