This article presents the newly developed 'Aid for Peace' approach. This approach facilitates the planning and evaluation of peacebuilding, development and humanitarian policies and programmes, in latent or manifest violent conflict or in the aftermath of a violent conflict or war. The 'Aid for Peace' framework consists of four parts that focus on the needs for peacebuilding in a given country or area. It tailors the intervention's objectives and activities towards these needs through identifying its peacebuilding relevance, and develops or evaluates peace and conflict results chains and indicators for understanding its effects on conflict and peacebuilding. Based on the same methodological framework, the approach provides separate guides for planning and evaluating peace and aid policies and programmes.

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Peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding have generated considerable interest in the areas of education, research, and politics. This can be attributed in part to the growing recognition that there are limits to violence and that proactive violence prevention is more cost-effective than reactive conflict prevention. Peacebuilding became part of the official discourse when the United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali introduced the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding in the Agenda for Peace. The agenda specified four areas of action relating to preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. Two important documents have helped bring peacebuilding to the mainstream: the 2000 Brahimi Report, a response to the failures of complex UN peacekeeping in the 1990s, and In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights, which led to the establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission. Conflict prevention and peacebuilding have also been mainstreamed in the European Union and in most of the foreign offices of the member states. A central focus of studies on peacebuilding is the interrelationships between peacemaking, political change, development, peacekeeping, and reconciliation. Despite the progress made in terms of research, there are a number of gaps and challenges that still need to be addressed. Many analysts, for example, leave the end state vague and implicit and make no systematic differentiation between different types of peace. With respect to context, two salient issues require more attention: the qualities of a peacebuilder and the role of integrative power. The widest research gap is found in the planning of the peacebuilding process.

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