6 Albrecht Schnabel and Anara Tabyshalieva
and to lay the foundation for sustainable peace and development. Peacebuilding is a complex, long-term process . . . [that] . . . works by addressing the deep-rooted, structural causes of violent conflict in a comprehensive manner.”4 The Canadian Peacebuilding Network has developed a most useful definition of peacebuilding as guidance for its own conceptual and operational work.5 As others before and after, it draws a direct link to the term as it was applied by former UN Secretary-General Boutros BoutrosGhali in his 1992 “An Agenda for Peace”, where it is identified as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict”.6 As Boutros-Ghali further argued, once peacemaking and peacekeeping have achieved their objectives, “only sustained, cooperative work to deal with underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems can place an achieved peace on a durable foundation”.7 These key activities are still essential components, particularly of postconflict peacebuilding, a term that will be discussed in the subsequent section and shall be the focus of our book. However, Since then, peacebuilding has come to be understood and used as an umbrella concept reflecting a more comprehensive and long-term approach to peace and security including: early warning, conflict prevention, civilian and military peacekeeping, military intervention, humanitarian assistance, ceasefire agreements, the establishment of peace zones, reconciliation, reconstruction, institution building, and political as well as socio-economic transformation.8
For the Canadian Peacebuilding Network, peacebuilding thus identifies and supports relationships, governance modes, structures and systems, and provides capacities and resources to strengthen and consolidate the prospects for internal peace in order to avoid a resort to, an intensification of, or a relapse into destructive conflict [and] seeks to mitigate sources of tension that increase the probability or intensity of armed violence [while involving] a range of approaches and transformative processes – for specific contexts or on a larger systemic level – that identify and address both the root causes and effects of violent conflict.9
This is a useful approach to a concept that encompasses multiple layers of activity by multiple actors at multiple phases of peace, conflict and violence – and which is thus very difficult to define and delineate for both analytical and practical purposes. However, conceiving peacebuilding as an approach that “emphasizes both the relational and structural elements of violence and conflict” enables one to move beyond “sequential limitations of peacebuilding and [take a view that] accommodates both short