Peacebuilding - History

History

In the 1970s, Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung first created the term peacebuilding through his promotion of systems that would create sustainable peace. Such systems needed to address the root causes of conflict and support local capacity for peace management and conflict resolution. Galtung's work emphasized a bottom-up approach that decentralized social and economic structures, amounting to a call for a societal shift from structures of coercion and violence to a culture of peace. American sociologist John Paul Lederach proposed a different concept of peacebuilding as engaging grassroots, local, NGO, international and other actors to create a sustainable peace process. He does not advocate the same degree of structural change as Galtung.

Peacebuilding has since expanded to include many different dimensions, such as disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and rebuilding governmental, economic and civil society institutions. The concept was popularized in the international community through UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 report An Agenda for Peace. 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" At the 2005 World Summit, the United Nations began creating a peacebuilding architecture based on Kofi Annan's proposals. The proposal called for three organizations: the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which was founded in 2005; the UN Peacebuilding Fund, founded in 2006; and the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, which was created in 2005. These three organizations enable the Secretary-General to coordinate the UN's peacebuilding efforts. 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. Some states have begun to view peacebuilding as a way to demonstrate their relevance. However, peacebuilding activities continue to account for small percentages of states' budgets.

The Marshall Plan was a long-term postconflict peacebuilding intervention in Europe with which the United States aimed to rebuild the continent following the destruction of World War II. The Plan successfully promoted economic development in the areas it funded. More recently, peacebuilding has been implemented in postconflict situations in countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and South Africa.