International organisations frequently have high expectations about their interventions. Dutch researcher Mathijs van Leeuwen's work on peacebuilding reveals the need to exhibit modestly and to link into local agendas. Instead of wanting to realise ambitious programmes and to take the lead in social change, international organisations must instead try to be partners in peace.
Determining exactly what peacebuilding involves requires a detailed knowledge of everyday politics and the practice of community organisations. The day-to-day reality of peacebuilding is the outcome of negotiations between interested parties at different levels in the relief chain, both within and outside of the organisation. The specific roles that community organisations can play in peacebuilding strongly depend on local conditions, and how these affect the organisations. International development organisations tend to adopt certain ideal images of what community organisations do and how they should operate, and are particularly inclined to support those organisations who fit within their ideal image. International support of local community organisations must pay greater attention to the prevailing management, history and development of community organisations as well as their specific context.
Peacebuilding
Since the start of the 1990s, international organisations have increasingly recognised the contribution that local community organisations can make to peace. Yet the involvement of the international organisations in local peacebuilding is a fairly new phenomenon. Little is known about how peacebuilding at the local level proceeds and the role played by local organisations in this process. The social midfield is mostly envisaged as a non-political force that tries to mediate between conflicting parties. This study considers such issues by describing organisations and peacebuilding interventions in Southern Sudan, Burundi, the African Great Lakes region and Guatemala. Van Leeuwen analyses the everyday organisational practices of peace organisations. He is investigating the different meanings of peacebuilding, how conflicts are interpreted and how planned interventions work out in practice. In addition, he researches what peacebuilding actually is; how it works cannot simply be discerned from mandates and policy documents. Peacebuilding is strongly influenced by what organisations are, how they operate, and how they have developed over time.
At a more general level, the study discusses the processes that play a role in how international organisations interpret conflicts and how they determine their interventions. In order to do their work, development organisations must simplify the reality and reduce conflicts to manageable and predictable situations. One consequence of these practices is that important aspects of the reality are lost or that the attention for these is withdrawn, even though such aspects have a considerable effect on how the interventions work out in practice.