Peacebuilding
Peacebuilding is an activity that aims to resolve injustice in nonviolent ways and to transform the cultural and structural conditions that generate deadly or destructive conflict.
It revolves around developing constructive personal, group, and political relationships across ethnic, religious, class, national, and racial boundaries.
[1] Strategic peacebuilding activities address the root or potential causes of violence, create a societal expectation for peaceful conflict resolution, and stabilize society politically and socioeconomically.
Researchers and practitioners also increasingly find that peacebuilding is most effective and durable when it relies upon local conceptions of peace and the underlying dynamics that foster or enable conflict.
Peacekeeping prevents the resumption of fighting following a conflict; it does not address the underlying causes of violence or work to create societal change, as peacebuilding does.
Before conflict becomes violent, preventive peacebuilding efforts, such as diplomatic, economic development, social, educational, health, legal and security sector reform programs, address potential sources of instability and violence.
Peacebuilding efforts aim to manage, mitigate, resolve and transform central aspects of the conflict through official diplomacy; as well as through civil society peace processes and informal dialogue, negotiation, and mediation.
Peacebuilding efforts aim to change beliefs, attitudes and behaviors to transform the short and long term dynamics between individuals and groups toward a more stable, peaceful coexistence.
Peacebuilding strategies must be coherent and tailored to specific needs of the country concerned, based on national ownership, and should comprise a carefully prioritized, sequenced, and therefore relatively narrow set of activities aimed at achieving the above objectives.
Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term "peacebuilding" in 1975, arguing that "peace has a structure different from, perhaps over and above, peacekeeping and ad hoc peacemaking...
[14] However, Lederach's influence in the conceptual evolution of peacebuilding still reflects Galtung's original vision for "positive peace" by detailing, categorizing, & expanding upon the sociocultural processes through which we address both direct and structural elements of violent conflict.
[15] Peacebuilding has since expanded to include many different dimensions, such as disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and rebuilding governmental, economic and civil society institutions.
The report defined post-conflict peacebuilding as an "action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict".
[18] National governments' interest in the topic has also increased due to fears that failed states serve as breeding grounds for conflict and extremism and thus threaten international security.
[15]Following periods of protracted violence, peacebuilding often takes shape in the form of constitutional agreements, laying out a path for co-operation and tolerance between former warring factions.
Identified by four aspects: grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality and segmental autonomy; it aims to generate peace across societies that have been torn apart by their internal divisions.
In an effort to de-emphasise the importance of ethnicity, critics of consociationalism such as Brian Barry, Donald L. Horowitz, and to a certain extent, Roland Paris, have developed their own brands of constitutional peacebuilding that rely on the existence of a moderate society.
Barnett et al. divide postconflict peacebuilding into three dimensions: stabilizing the post-conflict zone, restoring state institutions, and dealing with social and economic issues.
Activities within the first dimension reinforce state stability post-conflict and discourage former combatants from returning to war (disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, or DDR).
According to Karl von Habsburg, founding president of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare.
Women have traditionally played a limited role in peacebuilding processes even though they often bear the responsibility for providing for their families' basic needs in the aftermath of violent conflict.
It calls for the adoption of a gender perspective to consider the special needs of women and girls during conflict, repatriation and resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration, and post-conflict reconstruction.
The report outlines the challenges women continue to face in participating in recovery and peacebuilding process and the negative impact this exclusion has on them and societies more broadly.
Both women utilized their gender to harness "the power of maternal symbolism - the hope that a woman could best close wounds left on their societies by war and dictatorship.
[5] Regarding the debate about the role of the liberal democratic model in peacebuilding, one side contends that liberal democracy is a viable end goal for peacebuilding activities in itself but that the activities implemented to achieve it need to be revised; a rushed transition to democratic elections and market economy can undermine stability and elections held or economic legislation enacted are an inappropriate yardstick for success.
Another side contends that liberal democracy might be an insufficient or even inappropriate goal for peacebuilding efforts and that the focus must be on a social transformation to develop non-violent mechanisms of conflict resolution regardless of their form.
[78] He describes autonomous recovery as a "process through which countries achieve a lasting peace, a systematic reduction in violence, and postwar political and economic development in the absence of international intervention".
Virginia Fortna of Columbia University, however, holds that peacekeeping interventions actually do substantively matter following the end of a civil war.
He argues that international donors typically do not have the knowledge, skills or resources to bring meaningful change to the way post-conflict societies are governed.
[84] Barnett also comments that the promotion of liberalization and democratization may undermine the peacebuilding process if security and stable institutions are not pursued concurrently.
