What is Peacebuilding?

Peacebuilding is the attempt to create sustainable social structures that can “...remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur.” . In other words, peacebuilding is a process of social change and conflict transformation from violence (direct, cultural, and structural violence), and towards the optimum human well-being.

The underlying structural roots of violent conflicts are considered to be the socio-economic contradictions or the sources of socio-economic grievances, like deprivation, inequality, insecurity, social injustice, poverty, exploitation, servitude, etc. Here peacebuilding initiatives attempt to remove those structural pre-conditions for violent conflict which are built into the structure of the society.

On the other hand, the relational aspect entails transforming the inegalitarian patterns of socio-political power relations at the interpersonal, and intergroup levels. That is because these unbalanced relationships are inherently unstable and are considered as pre-conditions or root causes for violent conflicts.

Finally, the cultural aspect in peacebuilding focuses on removing the attitudinal pre-conditions or sources of violent conflicts, like hate, contempt, distrust, harmful stereotypes, conspiracy theories, othering, demeaning, demonizing, condescending, and resentment.

To those who are engaged in humanitarian work and are not trained in peace and conflict studies, peacebuilding might seem to them as a vague and elusive neologism. To those who are engaged in the development work, peacebuilding might seem to them nothing but development tautology. However, peacebuilding is technically different from both humanitarian and development programs. That is because, peacebuilding focuses on two specific tasks namely; preventing violence and fostering self-sustaining peace.

Preventing relapse into violence: Preserving Peace

This task involves disarmament and demobilization of rival regular and irregular forces and the re-integrating former combatants into the civilian society or a national army and police force. In this way, peacebuilding aims at the “re-establishment of a functional political system, restoration of essential services, return of refugees and other urgent priorities.” (Ramsbotham, et al., 2005, p.186).

This peacebuilding task also includes humanitarian assistance, community empowerment, and capacity building for local security and law enforcement institutions in order to avoid reversion to violence.

Roy Licklider also contributed to this with two important suggestions;

• • (1) A shift in the way conflict issues are perceived by the conflict parties.

  • (2) Peace-mongers should predominate over war-mongers.

Fostering sustainable peace: Promoting Peace

This second peacebuilding task aims at establishing a long-term and durable peace by transforming the society from a state of fragility or superficial stability into a state of deeply rooted peace. It’s a process of social change characterized by social justice, equity, egalitarianism, and prosperity. This is called structural-peacebuilding and addresses four deficient domains in post-war societies;

• • Political/constitutional incapacity,

  • Economic/social debilitation,

  • Psycho/social trauma,

  • Cultural violence,

The process of recovering these domains involves;

• • (a) Good governance through institutional and constitutional reform,

  • (b) Reconstruction and recovery through equitable socio-economic development,

  • (c) Healing and reconciliation, through psycho-social rehabilitation,

  • (d) Changing the cultural attitudes that foster violence through peace education and media. This process of sustainable peacebuilding emphasizes the importance of bottom-up peacebuilding by local civil society actors.