Organizing Peacebuilding

Coordination between different United Nations (UN) entities has become an issue of increasing concern for scholars and practitioners. With the UN taking on ever more ambitious roles in countries emerging from conflict, no single unit can master the task of post-conflict reconstruction alone. However, efforts at reorganizing the way the UN works in peacebuilding have not yielded the desired result of ensuring a more effective UN presence. To offer fresh inputs for the debate, Organizing Peacebuilding looks at coordination from a theoretical perspective. It develops a framework for interorganizational coordination and applies it to the UN and to two selected case examples, the UN missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The research suggests that in order to improve coordination, the UN should acknowledge its network character and cultivate those social and structural control mechanisms which facilitate coordination in networks.