Il Potere di Non Decidere? La Pace Liberale come Paradigma Politico delle Organizzazioni Internazionali

Why do Intergovernmental Organizations (IOs) still frame peacebuilding within a liberal framework despite its lack of success? Over the past two decades, many authors have shown how peacebuilding failed in its goal of avoiding a relapse into conflict and building the foundations for a stable and lasting peace. While the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), the two main IOs in the field, ascribe these failures to changes in the external environment and lack of resources, scholars agree, albeit for different reasons, in attributing the causes to the persistence of a 'liberal' model that became so entrenched in peacebuilding ideas and practices as to constitute a policy paradigm. Although peacebuilding has been subject to permanent reinvention in response to failures, liberal assumptions and theories remained unchanged. Critical literature has hitherto mainly focused on the sources of failure, while little attention has been paid to explaining the seemingly illogical persistence of the liberal model. Therefore, our attention lies on the policy change processes in peacebuilding and focuses on examining the behaviour of IOs, in their bureaucratic-supranational component, as the main agents of peacebuilding. We posit that legitimacy rather than effectiveness guides bureaucratic decision-making in peacebuilding, and hence, in facing crises, IOs trigger isomorphic processes aimed at reasserting the liberal paradigm as their foundational motif. After testing the validity of our hypothesis through a quantitative content analysis of peacebuilding missions' mandates confirming the persistence of liberal peace main features, we use process tracing to put it under critical test by gauging bureaucratic behaviour in the UN and EU peacebuilding in the Sahel. The results show that both IOs reproduce a similar set of organisational mechanisms (groupthink, backlash prevention, and pathological behaviours) influencing and reinforcing each other in a 'rhizomatic' way. The study provides a novel lens for the study of peacebuilding, while also expanding our knowledge of the impact of international bureaucracies in decision-making and contributing to bridge the gap between foreign policy analysis and the study of public policy.