Peacebuilding needs?

Abstract

Coincidentally, I started to review Approaches to Peacebuilding just as the United States was beginning to comprehend that the military victory in Iraq was truly the easiest (and most exciting) part of its latest world project. It was frantically changing its appointed overseers in an attempt to end the chaos that had been engendered by the military victory. And America was just about realizing what it might be facing in terms of the full drudgery involved in redeveloping Iraq onward to full democracy, peace and harmony, as well as imbedding it into the world capitalist system from the ashes of social and economic chaos.The situation in Iraq provides an interesting background against which to judge the utility of this book that purports to focus on "diverse processes and strategies for the transition from violent conflict to post-conflict reconstruction" (p. 3). As I read the book, I kept asking myself what would those who are trying to sort out Iraq have to learn from this book? The good news is that there are at least some chapters that I believe could have been productively photocopied for U.S. government administrators. The bad news, however, is that the overall lack of focus, and the prevailing terminological confusion that besets the field of conflict resolution, is unfortunately far too evident to make it seductive reading for anyone who strays into the book in the hope of finding a great deal of useful wisdom.Chapter 2, by Charles Phillipe David, is the most useful of all of the chapters. It sets out the three necessities to be faced in a postviolence stage of a conflict-that is, the need for a security transition, a democratic transition, and a socioeconomic transition-and includes a useful analysis of what is required in all three. The chapter also makes relevant needs even clearer by providing an appendix, which can be used to evaluate peacebuilding missions. This appendix represents a very useful check-

Peace Education as a Post-conflict Peacebuilding Tool

“…37 Finally, peace education programmes are considered critical in terms of linking top-down and bottom-up approaches to peace-and state-building. 38 These assumptions, however, as this next section will demonstrate, are based on limited empirical evidence and research.…”