Can peace be built? Can we achieve sustaninable peace or we are doomed to falling into violence again and again? For more than five decades scholars have tried to develop theories on what the conditions would be for achieving sustainable peace in countries affectaed by civil wars and other armed conflicts.
Such research has produced important debates on how concepts like peace and peacebuilding must be understood. One source of those controversies has been the defiinition of peacebuilding stated by the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in 1992. In the document An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali mentions that post-conflict peacebuilding is an action:
"[...]to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict. Preventive diplomacy seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out; peacemaking and peace-keeping 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 people" (UN 1992; my italics).
The ambiguity of this definition has motivated the appereance of, at least, three branches about how to read it. In this post I will try to present some of the controversies about the concept of peacebuilding and to describe two ways of interpret the definition given by Boutros-Ghali.
1. Historically, since the 60's, scholars have tried to formulate a set of general ideas on what is peacebuilding. The pioneer of those studies (called "peace studies" since then) is Johan Galtung. He and his followers stated that peacebuilding has to be understood in relation to a wide comprehension of the concept of violence. In their terms, there is not an homogeneous phenomenon called "violence", but kinds or levels of it. First, there is an explicit violence, in which the agents and the victims can be individualized, as would be the case of a murder or a genocide.
Second, (and this is the core of this position) there is a structural violence in which, at least, the agent cannot be identifed easily and where there are not explicit acts of violence that can be individualized. This is the case of social phenomena like poverty. Poor people are victims of a non-personal agent, like economic system or social exclusion.
The main idea behind this is that violence is closely related to an inequality in distribution of power or resources (in social, political or economic terms). In that sense, if peacebuilding is defined as the set of measures taken to put an end to violences, those measures must be thought of as long-term solutions, and must be created in order to counter the roots of violences. The main goal here is to achieve sustainable peace more than simply put an end to armed conflicts.
2. A second branch of scholars has pointed out that effectiveness is more important than sustainability, in order to put peacebuilding into practice. From that point of view, to design measures intended to combat the roots of conflicts, without taking into account how feasible is its accomplishment, is wrong. The reason is that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of long-term policies created in order to combat the structural causes of conflicts (such as State reforms); it is not clear when a process has been succesful. Moreover, it does not seem adequate to put the reliability of reforms into doubt if the expected results are not obtained, because there are several factors that have effects on the achievement of reforms, like the level of legitimacy of the State.
The concept of peace taken here is related to the absence of violence, where violence is understoood only in an explicit sense. This narrow understanding of peace and violence has effects on what kind of measures of peacebuilding must be designed: short-term measures, intended to attack immediate causes of armed conflicts (like access to natural resources or drug trafficking), are easier to accomplish and, then, more useful and realistic than deep economic or social reforms.
Up to here I have shown some differences about how to understand the concept of peacebuilding. There are two opposite positions whose main point of controversy is the scope of peacebuilding measures. In the next post I shall explain a third way to understand the concept of peacebuilding.
