Understanding Conceptions of Peace Building in Post-Conflict Scenarios

When a ceasefire is signed and the guns fall silent, the hardest work often begins. A society emerging from violent conflict faces shattered institutions, deep mistrust, broken economies, and unhealed wounds. Simply stopping the fighting rarely guarantees that the peace will last. This is precisely the gap that peace building attempts to fill. As a concept, it has grown from a narrow post-war task into a sprawling, ambitious project aimed at transforming entire societies. Understanding how scholars and practitioners have defined peace building, and why those definitions keep expanding, is essential to grasping how the world tries to keep fragile peace from collapsing back into war.

Where the concept came from 🔗

The term “peacebuilding” entered the international vocabulary through a single landmark document. In 1992, then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali released An Agenda for Peace, a report written at the request of the Security Council to rethink how the United Nations should respond to conflict after the Cold War. The report identified peace building as one of several distinct instruments, alongside preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping.

Boutros-Ghali defined peace building as action to identify and support structures that would strengthen and solidify peace in order to prevent a relapse into conflict. The phrasing matters. Peace building was initially conceived as something that happens after the violence ends, picking up where peacekeeping leaves off. The Security Council itself had recognised a crucial truth during its 1992 summit: the absence of war between states does not by itself ensure lasting security, because economic, social, humanitarian, and ecological instability could equally threaten peace.

Why the focus shifted to within states 🔗

One major reason peace building gained such prominence has to do with the changing nature of conflict itself. Most conflicts of the 1990s were not inter-state wars between national armies but intra-state conflicts fought within the boundaries of a single country. Civil wars, ethnic violence, and insurgencies replaced the classic image of two nations facing off across a border.

This shift created new problems for the international community. Internal conflicts often arose from and dissolved into sporadic, low-intensity violence, blurring any clean line between war and peace. The relationships between warring parties were frequently asymmetric, with a state on one side and rebel groups or civilians on the other. These features drew in civil society actors and external agencies to ensure that a state could not simply walk back its commitments once a ceasefire was signed. Peace building emerged as the specialised enterprise meant to “stay on” in this messy, post-ceasefire terrain, long after traditional peacekeepers would normally have departed.

Two foundational conceptions of peace 🔗

To understand peace building properly, it helps to step back to the deeper theoretical question: what exactly is peace? The most influential answer comes from the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, often called the founder of peace studies. His distinction between two kinds of peace continues to shape how scholars think about the entire field.

Negative peace 🔗

Negative peace refers simply to the absence of direct, physical violence. A ceasefire, the end of armed clashes, or a halt to repression all represent negative peace. It is “negative” not because it is bad but because it is defined by the absence of something, namely war. According to Galtung’s framework, negative peace means the absence of direct violence, the visible kind we usually associate with conflict.

Positive peace 🔗

Positive peace goes much further. It means the absence of structural violence, the harm built into social structures that prevents people from meeting their basic needs through poverty, inequality, discrimination, or exclusion. Positive peace is, in Galtung’s words, a situation of social justice. As Galtung argued, positive peace goes beyond the mere absence of war to include the presence of social justice and the integration of human society.

Galtung later added a third dimension, cultural violence, referring to those aspects of a culture, such as religion, ideology, or language, that can be used to legitimise direct and structural violence. The crucial implication for peace building is this: Galtung argued that peace should be built after the problems caused by structural violence are eliminated, with positive peace as the target rather than mere negative peace. Lasting peace cannot be achieved by stopping the shooting alone. The underlying conditions that generated the conflict must be addressed.

Peace building as long-term transformation 🔗

This is where peace building becomes genuinely ambitious. If real peace requires dismantling structural violence, then peace building cannot be a quick post-war clean-up. It must be a long-term process of societal transformation. The scholar-practitioner John Paul Lederach has been especially influential here. In his view, peace building means moving beyond traditional diplomacy that focuses only on top-level leaders and short-term deals, toward a holistic approach that involves many peacemakers, takes a long-term perspective, and builds an infrastructure that empowers resources within a society.

Lederach’s framework places reconciliation at the heart of peace building. He understands reconciliation as a multi-dimensional process that brings together truth, mercy, justice, and peace, focused on rebuilding relationships and promoting justice so that people can heal from the past. This is a far cry from the original 1992 definition. Peace building here is about the repair of human relationships fractured by violence, not just the rebuilding of roads and ministries.

Modern peace building therefore typically bundles together a wide range of activities. These include capacity building to strengthen state institutions and the rule of law, economic recovery to address the deprivation that often fuels conflict, reconciliation efforts such as truth commissions and traditional justice mechanisms, the demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, and the protection of human rights. The common thread is an attempt to reach the root causes of conflict rather than merely managing its symptoms.

The liberal peace and its critics 🔗

As peace building expanded, a dominant model emerged that scholars call the liberal peace. This approach assumes that lasting peace flows from a particular package of reforms: democratic elections, market economies, and Western-style state institutions. International organisations, donor states, and agencies would intervene in a post-conflict society and help build this liberal order from the top down.

This model has attracted sharp criticism. Critics argue that liberal peace building is too often a one-size-fits-all template imposed from outside, ignoring local context, history, and culture. This concern gave rise to what is known as the “local turn” in peace building, which emphasises empowering local actors to participate directly in the process and work toward reconciliation. Rather than building peace for a society, the local turn insists on building peace with it, drawing on indigenous knowledge and grassroots institutions.

The hybrid and the local 🔗

Out of this debate grew the idea of hybrid peace, in which international liberal frameworks and local customary practices blend together. Examples often cited include Rwanda’s gacaca community courts and East Timor’s traditional restorative justice forums, where local mechanisms handled reconciliation that formal courts could not manage alone. Yet even hybridity has its sceptics. Some scholars warn that merging local and liberal systems can lead to the misappropriation of local practices, damaging their legitimacy and jeopardising their contributions to reconciliation. The local turn itself has been criticised for romanticising local communities and overstating their capacity to resist outside pressure. The debate over whose vision of peace gets built remains unresolved.

How the institutional understanding has evolved 🔗

The conceptual expansion of peace building has been mirrored by changes in how the United Nations organises itself. The 2000 Brahimi Report described peace building as activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide tools to build something more than the mere absence of war. This formulation kept the post-conflict framing but broadened the ambition.

A major institutional milestone came in 2005, when the General Assembly and Security Council adopted twin resolutions establishing a dedicated Peacebuilding Commission, mandated to bring together relevant actors, marshal resources, and propose integrated strategies for post-conflict peace building and recovery. Alongside it came a Peacebuilding Fund to provide financing and a Peacebuilding Support Office to coordinate the work. This architecture signalled that peace building had become a permanent, institutionalised part of the UN’s mission rather than an ad hoc response.

From post-conflict to sustaining peace 🔗

The most recent shift moves away from the original “post-conflict” framing altogether. In 2016, the General Assembly and Security Council adopted parallel resolutions endorsing the concept of sustaining peace. This reframing matters enormously. It treats peace building as something that happens across the entire conflict cycle, including prevention, and spanning the UN’s three pillars of peace and security, development, and human rights. The resolutions also underlined the importance of inclusivity, highlighting the role of civil society, women, and youth in preventing and resolving conflict.

In this newest conception, peace building is no longer just what you do after a war. It is a continuous effort to maintain peaceful societies and prevent the outbreak, escalation, and recurrence of violence in the first place. The idea of “post-conflict” peace building, with its tidy assumption that conflict has a clear beginning and end, is increasingly seen as outdated.

Why these conceptions matter 🔗

Tracing how peace building has been defined reveals more than academic word games. Each conception carries practical consequences. If you believe peace building is a short post-war task, you will fund it for a few years and then leave. If you believe it requires dismantling structural violence and rebuilding relationships, you will commit to decades of patient, locally grounded work. If you adopt the liberal peace model, you will prioritise elections and markets. If you embrace the local turn, you will start by listening to communities. The way we conceive of peace building shapes where money goes, which actors are empowered, and ultimately whether fragile peace holds or collapses.

What do you think? Should peace building prioritise rebuilding state institutions and holding elections quickly, or should it first focus on the slower work of reconciliation and addressing deep-rooted social injustice? And when international actors and local communities disagree on what peace should look like, whose vision deserves to prevail?

References

1. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/145749?ln=en
2. https://www.un.org/peacebuilding/sites/www.un.org.peacebuilding/files/documents/peacebuilding_orientation.pdf
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Agenda_for_Peace
4. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/political-science/approaches/41602863
5. https://blogs.gwu.edu/ccas-panamericanos/peace-studies-wiki/peace-studies-wiki/approaches-to-peace/negative-and-positive-peace-framework/
6. https://www.visionofhumanity.org/johan-galtung-1930-2024/
7. https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/06/on-johan-galtungs-approach-to-peace-studies/
8. https://www.johnpaullederach.com/2023/03/building-peace-sustainable-reconciliation-in-divided-societies/
9. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=pcs
10. https://peacereflections.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/some-thoughts-about-the-local-turn-in-peacebuilding/
11. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/12/13/critics-of-liberal-peace-are-hybridity-local-turn-approaches-more-effective/
12. https://www.un.org/peacebuilding/content/about-the-commission
13. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2020/12/resolution-on-the-2020-peacebuilding-architecture-review.php