Peacebuilding, governance and development

Abstract

Peace can be defined negatively, as the absence of violence, or positively, as the presence of social justice. The post-Cold War era has been characterized by an ebbing ambition, in global policy as to the possibility of positive peace. Early conviction that the spread of liberal governance would prompt the realization of universal values and human rights along with development in post-conflict countries faded over the course of the 1990s. After the start of the War on Terror in 2001, the liberal peace was replaced by a "security-development nexus" which regarded peace as something to be enforced in the interests of deterring radical extremism and promoting the free flow of capital. Radical calls for a "local turn" which would support locally driven and culturally resonant approaches for peace were co-opted into the security-development agenda, prompting attempts to harness civil society and non-state authority structures in post-conflict settings to international agendas. Increasingly, those agendas focused narrowly on management of risk associated with endemic grievances in the context of dislocating structural change, rather than on the pursuit of social justice in the interests of peace.