Approaches to Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: The UK Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit (PCRU) and US Office for the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS)

摘要

In 2004, two separate but remarkably similar organizations were founded in the United Kingdom and United States: the British Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit (PCRU) and the American Office for the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stability (S/CRS). Both represent national strategic-level endeavors to do the following: (1) institutionalize humanitarian-military coordination, and (2) provide preemptive planning capacity for peacebuilding scenarios. This paper first addresses the conditions that motivated the establishment of these organizations, focusing on the separation between warfighting and nation-building doctrines and communities that contributed to failure in post-Cold War peacekeeping. The author suggests that a new security paradigm revealed by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, created an imperative for improved post-conflict peacebuilding. The paper then evaluates prospects for success of the PCRU and S/CRS based upon their respective cultural and institutional histories, and analyzes the merit of national strategic-level peacebuilding capacity in principle, seeking the ideal locus of planning and coordinating functions. The author concludes that the need to replace the local-level ad hoc coordination that characterized post-conflict reconstruction operations throughout the 1990s with a more institutionalized framework is legitimate. However, what is more important than doing something is doing the right thing, and national strategic-level coordination organizations such as the PCRU and S/CRS must re-align to maximize their effect.