PEACEBUILDING AFTER CIVIL WAR

The term peacebuilding is generally agreed to have become part of diplomatic discourse in 1992 when it appeared in UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali's Agenda for Peace. Initially defined by Boutros Ghali as "action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict, " post-conflict peacebuilding was conceived as a key conflict management tool, along with preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, for use by the UN in its efforts to promote peace (UN 1992, para 21). On the face of it, peace building is but one component of a multidimensional approach to fostering peace. In practice, as part of the activist international agenda that was adopted in the post-Cold War era, post-conflict peace building has entailed the "re-engineering" of societies emerging from civil war along liberal lines in an effort to prevent their return to conflict (Tschirgi 2004, 4). This chapter seeks to provide an overview of what has transpired in the peace building realm during the twenty years since the international community first formally took up the practice. The first three parts of the chapter consist of an effort to disaggregate peacebuilding. This focuses on the ambiguity of the concept; debates surrounding the liberal peace, the theory that underpins contemporary peacebuilding; and the lack of clarity associated with the goals peacebuilding seeks to achieve. I then turn to efforts that have been made to assess whether peacebuilding works before concluding with suggestions for future directions for research on the topic. Disaggregating peacebuilding, part 1: conceptual ambiguity As first defined by Boutros Ghali in An Agenda for Peace, peacebuilding was the~nd point on a continuum of activities external actors could employ in an effort to sustain or foster peace. "Preventive dipromacy, " according to this line of thinking seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out; peacemaking and peacekeeping are required to halt conflicts and preserve peace once it is attained. If successful, they strengthen the opportunity for post-conflict peace-building, which can prevent the recurrence of violence among nations and peoples