Peace and Conflict Studies - From Conflict Resolution Via Liberal Peace- and Statebuilding To Trans-rational Peace and Elicitive

From Conflict Resolution Via Liberal Peace- and Statebuilding To Trans-rational Peace and Elicitive

Scholars working in the areas of peace and conflict studies have made significant contributions to the policies used by non-governmental organisations, development agencies, International Financial Institutions, and the UN system, in the specific areas of conflict resolution and citizen diplomacy, development, political, social, and economic reform, peacekeeping, mediation, early warning, prevention, peacebuilding, and statebuilding. This represented a shift in interest from conflict management approaches oriented towards a ‘negative peace’ to conflict resolution and peacebuilding approaches aimed at a 'positive peace'. This emerged rapidly at the end of the Cold War, and was encapsulated in the report of then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace. Indeed, it might be said that much of the machinery of what has been called ‘liberal peacebuilding’ by a number of scholars rests, or ‘statebuilding’ by another groups of scholars is based largely on the work that has been carried out in this area. Many scholars in the area have advocated a more ‘emancipatory’ form of peacebuilding, however, based upon a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P), human security, local ownership and participation in such processes, especially after the limited success of liberal peacebuilding/ statebuilding in places as diverse as Cambodia, the Balkans, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nepal, Afghanistan and Iraq. This research agenda is in the process of establishing a more nuanced agenda for peacebuilding which also connects with the original, qualitatively and normatively oriented work that emerged in the peace studies and conflict research schools of the 1960s (e.g. see the Oslo Peace Research Institute research project on "Liberal Peace and the Ethics of Peacebuilding" and the "Liberal Peace Transitions" project at the University of St Andrews and more critical ideas about peacebuilding that have recently developed in many European and non-western academic and policy circles. The UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck/Austria proposed in 2008 a culture-based classification of peace interpretations: energetic, moral, modern, post-modern and trans-rational approaches. The trans-rational approach unites existing spiritual interpretations of society and relation with the mechanistic methods of modern peace. Hence this school prefers the strictly relational and systemic method of elicitive conflict transformation (Lederach) to the prescriptive approaches of modern conflict resolution.