As the renowned diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi put it, ‘When you go from one place to another, you go with experience, you don’t go with prescriptions. No two situations are alike.’[154] There is reason to be sceptical of ‘lessons learned’ exercises which attempt to draw broad lessons for very different countries – they often do little credit to the complexity of social dynamics. Intervening in fragile states is not a science, and there have been few unambiguous success stories that could easily be copied to other contexts.

However, the experiences of MONUSCO and the I4S have taught a few important lessons about the mind-set of international interveners, which differs significantly less from one country to the next than conflict dynamics do. As such, this epilogue will not make recommendations for ‘what should be done’, but rather ‘what to be wary of’: a few assumptions that seem to come up in different (post-) conflict contexts and which should be handled with some care. These assumptions relate to the need for phasing, speed, definitions, strong institutions, state ownership and coordination. They are more or less as follows:

‘We need a phased approach, security comes first.’ There is little doubt that security is the first priority for people in post-conflict environments, but security is a political matter as well. It may be better to say that ‘politics comes first’. Before decisions are taken about what an area needs, there should be an assessment; this could be a relatively rapid as­sess­ment of how communities interact with the state and with each other, followed by a plan that targets particular sensitivities. Deploying troops and police always changes the local balance of power and can sometimes do more harm than good. There is no single right format for phasing interventions.

‘We need to go in fast, to show a peace dividend.’ Rapidly rolling out activities in an area that has recently been liberated can certainly help, but only if those activities have been discussed in some depth with the communities in question. A ‘peace dividend’ is perceived between people’s ears, and communities may react badly to outside support if they do not feel they have been consulted. This may take time, but speed is not more important than impact. Haste is often a bad counsellor, as it makes international partners fall back on simple formats, which may be inappropriate – see the Islands of Stability discussion. As you’re likely to be in the area for a while, you may as well take some time to think it over: what is the conflict really about, what is at stake, and what are people’s perceptions of how it all works? If so, where is our added value?

‘If it helps, it stabilizes.’ No, it really doesn’t. Good practice requires good theory, and if you do not define how you want to go about diminishing tensions and preventing conflict, you are not going to do so. To have effect, stabilization should be based on an in-depth analysis of harmful as well as positive dynamics, and an approach should be crafted that addresses the first and builds on the second. Stabilization programmes should be clear about assumptions, what they want to achieve, why and how. Only then can one begin to define what ‘stabilization’ means, which will be different for every context. If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Having an impact on complex conflict dynamics is not supposed to be easy, otherwise people would have solved it by themselves. ‘Stabilization’ is an ambitious-sounding ‘development word’, but may in reality very well mean minimalistic, targeted and localised support for conflict prevention, confidence building and damage control, more than anything else.

‘Fragile states need strong institutions.’ What fragile states perhaps need more than anything else are institutions that are responsive to their people’s needs, and these may not be the same as the ones we are used to in donor capitals. We have a natural tendency towards mirroring in the international community, thinking that for a state to get from A (bad) to B (good) it requires the same sort of institutions that we in the West are used to. Western institutions, however, have had centuries to become inclusive. As we have seen in the case of the DRC, fragile states’ institutions are mechanisms for patronage. Simply expanding the range of that system, through a blueprint of infra­struc­ture and training, without trying to make it more responsive to people’s needs, can be harmful. Substance does not automatically follow form.

‘The government owns the process.’ It does, and most activities stand or fall with the government’s engagement, but that is no excuse to be naïve about what ownership means. Congo is not the only fragile state where the government plays a role in the conflict and has a particular agenda that may not chime with what communities want. International partners need to find a balance between understanding and working with the government and keeping them engaged, while also ensuring that programmes target local people and build on locally grounded positive dynamics. If you are unwilling to do so and either implement just those programmes the government tells you to implement, or only undertake (humanitarian) activities requiring minimal government engagement, then you may not be ready to engage in ‘stabilization’, which requires a constant dialogue between the government, affected communities and outside partners.

‘Stabilization requires a coordinated approach.’ It does indeed, but there are different ways of defining ‘coordination’. Too often it takes the form of rubber-stamping, with partners implementing programmes as usual – adding a few indicators to a joint monitoring and evaluation framework. That, however, is not coordination: someone needs to be fully in charge. Stabilization will run into all sorts of ingrained institutional interests. Ideally, you would have one single framework and one person, or one unit, with the authority and the power to force partners back into the framework if that’s required. Such a unit could be composed of mission staff, agencies, NGOs and donor-seconded staff and be under the authority of a mixed committee consisting of those groups and the government. But whatever its composition, it must be given the authority to keep the programme in hand. If partners complain (and they will) that such a section is there to control them and slap them on the fingers, then yes, that is exactly why it is there. They should (pro-actively) coordinate, and not (reactively) facilitate, which are two fundamentally different functions.

Just to be clear, the assumptions above may not at all be wrong – some cases may very well require a fast roll-out of activities, and fragile states do require technical support for state institutions, but the point here is not to automatically assume that this is the case or that there is a standard format to do so.