Abstract
Internal conflicts in the 1990s present the international community with a dilemma to which it is unaccustomed: by what means may these intractable crises be managed such that they do not result in the outbreak or resumption of armed hostilities? While there is still a role for those instruments of conflict management employed during the Cold War, such as peacekeeping operations, the conflicts we face now are no longer purely military in nature, nor will they be resolved by military solutions alone. Growing international recognition of the human cost of such protracted conflict, in addition to other post-Cold War developments, has led the international community to re-conceptualise security and its implications for policy planning. States such as Canada, Sweden and Norway have been at the forefront of this effort. This evolution in the perception of international security has contributed to the emergence of the concept of ‘human security’. Integrating socioeconomic and developmental concerns with recognition of the importance of political stability, human security also breaks new ground by looking at perceptions of security in a wider range of human communities than that defined by the modern state.
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Notes
Johan Galtung, ‘Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding,’ in Galtung, Peace, War, and Defense: Essays in Peace Research, vol. 2, Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, 1976, pp. 282–304.
See Michael Doyle, Peacebuilding in Cambodia, Policy Briefing, New York: International Peace Academy, 1996.
For an opposite view, stressing the need for effective peacebuilding to be preceded by a peace accord (thus limiting its application to ‘post-conflict’ situations), see Fen Osler Hampson, Nurturing Peace: Why Peace Settlements Succeed or Fail, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996.
Anthony Lake, ‘After the Wars — What Kind of Peace?’, in Lake (ed.), After the Wars, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990, pp. 13–14. Lake notes that case studies in this volume support several general observations, such as the need for local planning of reconstruction strategies, pragmatic flexibility, regional approaches, context sensitivity, and donor resource constraints: ‘With available international resources limited and the local capacity to use them also constrained, it is vital that careful attention be paid to priorities in reconstruction planning — that in every case there be a clear strategy rather than merely a summons to every possible task’ (p. 16).
This differs, then, from Gareth Evans’s suggestion that one may speak of peacebuilding in international regimes as well as of ‘in-country peacebuilding’: Cooperating for Peace, St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993, pp. 39–51.
For a survey of two such operations, see the various contributions in Michael Doyle, Ian Johnstone and Robert C. Orr (eds), Keeping the Peace: Multidimensional UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
See United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994, New York: UNDP/Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 23.
Space restrictions preclude an extended discussion of the dynamics and escalation of identity-based internal conflict. See, for example: Edward Azar, The Management of Protracted Social Conflict, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1990; John W. Burton, Human Needs Theory, New York: St Martin’s, 1990; Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1993.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Opening Message at the International Workshop, ‘Winning the Peace: Concept and Lessons Learned of Post-conflict Peacebuilding’, 4 July 1996. Reprinted in Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Winning the Peace, Ebenhausen: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, 1996, pp. ix–xii.
For further discussion of this perspective on conflict analysis, see my Towards Response-Oriented Early Warning Analysis’, in John L. Davies and Ted Robert Gurr (eds), Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
Other important surveys of the components of integrated peacebuilding operations have been conducted within the UN system, though all focus on the post-conflict phase and do not adopt the human security approach per se. See in particular: United Nations, An Inventory of Post-conflict Peace-building Activities, UN Doc. ST/ESA/246, New York: United Nations, 1996; United Nations (DDSMS and UNIDO), International Colloquium on Post-conflict Reconstruction Strategies, Vienna: UNOV, 1995; United Nations (ACC), Consultative Committee on Programme and Operational Questions, Survey of the United Nations System’s Capabilities in Post-conflict Reconstruction, Vienna: UNOV, April 1996; and UNDP, Building Bridges Between Relief and Development — A Compendium of the UNDP Record in Crisis Countries, New York: UNDP, 1997.
United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping, New York: United Nations, 1993, p. 9. See also Jim Whitman and Ian Bartholomew, ‘Collective Control of UN Peace Support Operations: A Policy Proposal’, Security Dialogue, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, pp. 77–92.
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Cockell, J.G. (2000). Conceptualising Peacebuilding: Human Security and Sustainable Peace. In: Pugh, M. (eds) Regeneration of War-Torn Societies. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62835-3_2
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