The Birth of a Mission

Abstract

The ‘twenty years’ crisis’ of peacebuilding from 1997 onwards cannot be grasped without an understanding of the rise of peacebuilding in the decade of the 1990s. In this decade, the framework of international sovereignty and of non-intervention rapidly corroded, opening up a new international agenda based on the blurring of the domestic and international realms. Peacebuilding was not a matter of international relations based on sovereign equality but one premised on the selective opening up of the domestic realm to international regulation and external conditionalities. While the UN Secretary General’s 1992 Agenda for Peace introduced the concept of ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’ as an ad hoc extension of international peacekeeping, it was not until after the interventions in the wars of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the establishment of formalised international peacebuilding regimes that the UN was able to clarify the meaning of peacebuilding and the transformed nature of its relationship to international peacekeeping.