The subfield of peace and conflict studies known as peacebuilding is still relatively young. Although established in the literature by peace studies pioneer Johan Galtung in 1975,it was not until 1992, when United Nations (UN) Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali highlighted the concept in his An Agenda for Peace– shortly after the onset of the genocidal unravelling of former Yugoslavia –that policymakers, development practitioners, conflict researchers and conflict resolution practitioners began to take the concept seriously. The hard work of designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating peacebuilding interventions into ‘broken states’ across the world then began in earnest.
Generally viewed as a comprehensive state-building, economy-building and civil society-building effort before, during and/or after the ‘new wars’ that have replaced the traditional, Clausewitzean interstate warfare as the dominant mode of warfare globally, peacebuilding has generally been a failure. A major reason is that most peacebuilding efforts have been ‘minimalist’ in nature, where third-party interveners have aimed to achieve and maintain ‘negative peace’ – the absence of hostilities. These efforts have been at the expense of the more ambitious and, within a realpolitik perspective, unrealistic objective of achieving and developing positive peace – the objective of maximalist peacebuilding – where third-party interveners identify and address the deep-rooted causes and conditions of conflict.
Because most peacebuilding efforts have treated violent conflicts only as symptoms, ignoring their underlying causes and conditions, there has been, in the past 15 or so years, a significant spike in conflict recurrence. According to the World Bank, for instance, war recurs five years after violence has stopped in 44% of all post-conflict cases.Paul Collier and his colleagues report that war resumes for 50% of post-conflict countries during the first 10 years of negative peace. More startlingly, according to the comprehensive datasets compiled and analysed by Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld and Ted Robert Gurr: “In recent years, the number of conflict recurrences has surged to unprecedented levels. Since the mid-1990s, recurrences outnumber new onsets by significant margins.” In their 2010 report, Hewitt and his colleagues reported that, “of the 39 different conflicts that became active in the last 10 years, 31 [79.5%] were conflict recurrences.” Accordingly, depending upon the source and the exact time period considered, roughly between 40% and 80% of the ‘new wars’ that have been dealt with by the international community have reignited into full-blown wars, reinforcing in their wake the status of ‘failed states’.
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