Paths to a Disappointing Success Story: UN Peacebuilding Strategy in Guatemala.

With the end of the Cold War, member states increasingly asked the UN to resolve civil wars through mediation, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding. As widely noted in the literature, the UN's peacemaking record has been positive but marked by some notable failures, usually the result of mandates imposed by the member states that greatly exceeded the resources that the organization could bring to bear. A central question for the UN Secretariat is how it can act more strategically - that is, achieve an effective fit between goals and available capacity. Both the academic literature on peacemaking and policy discourse within the UN tend to favor "multidimensional" missions as these are empirically associated with better outcomes and also conform to the UN doctrinal emphasis on addressing "root causes." But are comprehensive missions and mandates appropriate where the UN's political leverage is very limited? The peace process in Guatemala presented the UN secretariat with this problem. On one hand, the Guatemalan civil war had effectively ended even before a final peace agreement was signed, making basic peacemaking success very likely. On the other hand, Guatemala suffered from very serious institutional problems, and gross social and economic inequities, that rendered its political system prone to violence and instability. The UN mission's mandate called on it to verify and support all aspects of the peace accords, but provided little leverage to ensure compliance. This paper examines the approaches adopted by the UN at various stages of the Guatemalan peace process, and demonstrates that key decision makers chose to approach the strategic problem in Guatemala by reaching out directly to civil society rather than depending upon (limited) international political leverage vis-a-vis the government. The paper proposes alternative strategies and considers the limitations of each. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]