Introduction: the study of just and durable peace

Abstract

Just peace is elusive and the quest for peace and justice is perpetual. In the Middle East and the Western Balkans, peace and war co-exist, and the aim of establishing just and durable peace is a fundamental challenge to contemporary peacemakers and academics alike. Attempts to capture the interplay between peace and justice and to develop an agenda for just peace have so far been in vain. Aspirations for just peace are often represented through descriptions of war and violence. This is indicative of Johan Galtung’s conceptualization of positive and negative peace, which is widely recognized. Peace is most often negatively defined as the absence of war and direct physical violence. From a realist perspective, order and justice are interlinked in the way that the quality of an order reflects a voluntary acceptance of norms and rules by the parties to restrain the use of violence (Welch 1995; Nardin 1996; on the English school, Friman 2007). This negative definition may be contrasted with a more affirmative understanding of positive peace as suggested by Johan Galtung (Galtung 1964). A positive notion of peace includes the absence not only of direct and organized violence, but also of structural and cultural violence. Hence positive peace includes aspects of social, economic and political justice. Even though these two notions are obviously related and commonly referred to, there is surprisingly little research and few explicit conceptualizations of the interplay between justice and peace, which is central to any understanding of just peace (Allan and Keller 2006a; Dower 2009; Margalit 2010). One of the core ambitions of this volume is therefore to generate conceptual and empirical insights into the interplay between justice and peace. Three core challenges are probed by the contributing authors. The first challenge focuses on the quest for justice in contemporary peace processes, which is increasingly apparent as several violent conflicts and wars are distinguished by gross human rights violation and ethnic cleansing. The second challenge revolves around the quest for durable peace. Several contemporary conflicts tend to resist negotiated settlement. Yet the ones that do reach a peace agreement still have a poor track record on implementation. The third challenge concerns the quest for effective peacebuilding strategies, particularly relating to international actors and the European Union (EU).1 To address these challenges, this book takes aninterdisciplinary approach, which draws on research from such disciplines as peace and conflict research, international law, political science and international relations. It presents a number of innovative theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives to the study of just and durable peace.