Post Conflict Peacebuilding

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The restoration of sustainable peace after violent conflict remains one of the major challenges worth taking up in post-conflict peacebuilding. The analyses of multiple experiments at peacebuilding reveal frequent failures or mixed results at best (Dobbins et al. 2007; Paris, 2004; Duffield, 2007; Ismail, 2008). That is why Krause and Jutersonke (2005:448) concludes that “not only do about half of all peace support operations (including both peacekeeping and more expansive peace building operations) fail after around five years, but there also seems to be no clear idea of what ‘success’ or ‘failure’ actually means, nor of what an appropriate timeframe for measuring success might be”. One of the impediments to the restoration of sustainable…show more content…
Although the term ‘peacebuilding’ was coined by Johan Galtung in 1975 with the publication of “Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding,’ it first became part of the official discourse at the United Nations (UN) in 1992 when former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali used the term in his “Agenda for Peace”. For Boutros-Ghali, post conflict peacebuilding was an activity to be undertaken immediately after the cessation of violence. He asserted that post conflict peacebuilding was “an action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict” (Boutros-Ghali, 1992:11). What Boutros-Ghali had identified as ‘post conflict peacebuilding’ was not new. Similar post-conflict strategies, or interventions, were applied in the past. For instance, at the end of World War II, the United States, through its Marshall Plan, played a major role in the reconstruction of war-torn Europe and Japan. But what was novel in Boutros-Ghali’s reformulation of the concept was the realization that the demise of the Cold War had in fact opened up new possibilities for the UN system to play a major interventionist role in bringing both short-term and long-term resolution to outstanding conflicts. Indeed, Boutros-Ghali was…show more content…
Corruption can easily undermine this process, especially if military and rebel commanders (in their capacity as official representatives) embezzle funds for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants (Ghani et.al. 2007, Swarbrick 2007). In some instances, the international presence has even been accused of being complicit in corrupt behavior, as in the Congo‘s DDR program where Pakistani peacekeepers allegedly traded weapons in exchange for gold mined by the local militias ( A UN enquiry later found evidence of gold smuggling, but no evidence of gun-running (BBC News,

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