Positive Peace and the Methodology of Costing Peacebuilding Needs: The Case of Burundi

Abstract

Studies on conflict and social justice issues are increasingly focusing on positive peace instead of violence itself. Accordingly, a key challenge facing the international community in promoting positive peace is the cost of peacebuilding needs. This is a particularly difficult issue for the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, tasked with developing peacebuilding programs for fragile countries at risk of returning to civil war and putting them on the path to positive peace. Peacebuilding efforts address a wide variety of issues rooted in positive peace. Such a developmental approach to peacebuilding requires significant resources which must be properly targeted. That is to say, a central problem in implementing the peacebuilding mission and promoting positive peace is simply determining what needs should be focused upon and what amount of resources should be allocated. In this article, we develop a novel and creative way to costing the peacebuilding needs that underpin positive peace based on a project that we recently undertook for the UN Peacebuilding Commission and applied it to Burundi. We refer to our approach as the Adjusted Comparative Historical Method (ACHM). This work contributes to the theory and praxis of positive peace by addressing both conceptual and practical issues in administering positive peace.