Project for Peace-Building Consolidation

Project Members: Mark Sedra

Building peace after conflict is inevitably a long-term endeavor. Significant resources have been dedicated to analyzing the tasks that face peace builders in the immediate post-conflict period: providing humanitarian assistance, nurturing political dialogue, disarming and demobilizing combatants and the deploying peace support missions. Comparatively little analysis has been undertaken on the long-term dimensions of peace-building processes. However, it is in this longer-term phase of the process, at its five-, seven- and even ten-year marks, that peace-building initiatives typically succeed or fail. It is during the long-term phase of peace-building consolidation, that a range of complex priorities emerge: political reconciliation, transitional justice and good governance principles. Comparative research will be undertaken on peace-building process in three countries -- Haiti, Afghanistan and South Sudan -- which offer unique perspectives on long-term post-conflict transition.

Related Materials

Article
Michael Valpy
While Barack Obama promises a war on terror, the enemy has grown ever more elusive. Michael Valpy tracks the new, scattered web of al-Qaeda
Article
Paul Weinberg
In the back offices of the multiple-pizza-box structure where Canada’s Foreign Affairs is housed, the conversations must be getting pretty frenzied right about now.
Article
By taking on Honduras as a foreign policy priority, Brazil is expressing a powerful Latin American consensus. The notion that this could somehow damage Brazil and its global objectives is profoundly mistaken.
Article
This week the UN General Assembly returns to the "responsibility to protect." Since its formal adoption at the 2005 UN Summit meeting, R2P has been a doctrine honoured rather more in principle than in practice, but earlier this year the secretary general produced a major report, "Implementing the responsibility to protect," in an effort to shift it from the abstract to the concrete.