The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 31 LOSING THE PEACE in the Central African Republic T he international community has amassed a great deal of experience in failed-state stabilization in Africa in recent decades. Sadly, it has had a remarkably poor return on its investment. In South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and the Central African Republic, to name a few, stabilization efforts have dragged on for decades and spent vast sums. Yet Laurence Wohlers is a retired Foreign Service officer. He served in the Central African Republic as public affairs officer (1985-1987), ambassador (2010-2013), and as the Deputy Special Representative of the Sec- retary General for MINUSCA (April-July 2014). He was also the interim U.S. special representative for the African Great Lakes (2017-2018) and served as a team leader for the Security Gov- ernance Initiative in Mali and Niger (2015-2019) and for a separate security governance agreement with the Central African Republic (2018-2019). How the international community spent its way to losing the peace— and opened the door to Russian mischief—in the Central African Republic. BY LAURENCE WOHL ERS FEATURE in each of these conflicts, not only have years of effort and expense failed to enhance stability, but the roots of conflict have actually become deeper andmore entrenched. To understand why, this article reviews the sad fate of a coun- try I have followed closely: the Central African Republic (CAR). For the last decade, this desperately poor country of fewer than 5 million inhabitants has been mired in chronic violence. The international community’s response has been robust, spending more than $1 billion annually—a sum that represents 50 percent of CAR’s GDP—on a multifaceted stabilization effort. And yet the conflict in CAR has descended into a stagnant and dysfunctional status quo, a dysfunction that Russia has recently succeeded in adroitly exploiting for political and commercial gain. What accounts for this failure? It would be easy for the inter- national community to shrug its collective shoulders and bemoan the challenges of working in “failed states.” And certainly there is some truth to that. Is that, however, the only reason? Is it possible that the very size and complexity of the response created an illu- sion of progress, thereby blinding the international community to deep conceptual flaws in its stabilization strategy? Could it be that ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/OLEKSIILISKONIH