The Frontlines of Peace by Severine Autesserre

Author:Severine Autesserre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Top-Down Tyranny

The Swedish diplomat Lena Sundh paid a heavy price in this fight, and she also happens to be one of my heroes. Not only because she is a woman who made it in a male-dominated world—she has been ambassador to Angola, second-in-command of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo, and Sweden’s Special Envoy for the African Great Lakes. Not only because she is kind, funny, and approachable—she was one of the few people who treated me like an intellectual equal, and not a student to be lectured, when I interviewed her for my doctoral research. But also because she was one of the first outsiders to realize the importance of local conflict resolution in Congo, and she has spent most of the past 20 years advocating for a reform to the Peace, Inc. approach in the region.

When Sundh was deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary-general in Congo (2002–2004), she set up a unit with a few trusted collaborators and, together, they advocated for a new approach to the ongoing violence: managing the conflict from the bottom up until the time was ripe for top-down action. They felt they had much more influence with local and provincial leaders than with national and international ones, so working with the former would be a better use of their time and energy.

As Sundh recalled, this was such a new and controversial idea that her team first had to write a policy document to explain that addressing grassroots tensions was indeed part of the United Nations peacekeepers’ jobs. Sundh also realized that, if she wanted her colleagues to pay attention to local conflicts, her best bet was to argue that local problems threatened national reconciliation.

The headquarters endorsed her new strategy in mid-2003, but apart from a few analyses of violence in various eastern provinces, a couple of action plans for approaching these conflicts, some training sessions, and a handful of negotiations toward ceasefires between select villages, nothing much materialized. Indeed, Sundh did not benefit from the credibility, power, and influence usually attached to her rank. She and her collaborators faced tremendous resistance whenever they tried to implement their ideas. Some of their peacekeeping colleagues launched a smear campaign, criticizing them as “authoritarian” and “arrogant,” deriding them as having slept their way to the top, and ridiculing them through countless creepy jokes. Sundh herself was rumored to be a lesbian—a libelous accusation meant to undermine her in the eyes of her many sexist and conservative colleagues. And unfortunately, it worked. Sundh was hurt, deeply, and she and her team never managed to put her alternative strategy in practice.

Another local peacebuilding advocate, François Grignon, tried to keep the initiative going after Sundh left the mission in 2004, but again without much success. Within a few years, Sundh’s idea became a guarded secret. Only a few United Nations staff members agreed to talk to me about it, only under conditions of strict confidentiality, and only after I had gained their trust through repeated meetings.

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