Peacebuilding’s Origins and History

Historical Memory-Oriented Peace Education and the Sustaining Peace Agenda

“…Beyond the UN and the broader inter-governmental environment, the new focus on sustaining rather than building peace has been met with both interest and critical interrogation. Aiming at cutting through the fog surrounding this major work-in-progress, the UN's sustaining peace agenda has sparked a flurry of activity on the part of academics and analysts of global affairs (see, for instance, Cahill-Ripley and Hendrick 2018; Chandler 2017; de Coning 2016;International Peace Institute 2017a, b, 2018Kustermans et al 2021;Metcalfe-Hough et al 2017;Ponzio 2018;Pugh 2021). If there is one common denominator in this variegated stream of analysis and commentary, it is the tacit consensus that international peacebuilding as a rationally enlightened global governance project rolled out in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union is reaching its limits.…”

“…Pragmatic approaches of resilience remove this possibility of external accountability" (Chandler 2017: 187). Still others question whether peacebuilding as a "liberal" international governance project is effectively ending or whether it stands to persist, even in the face of adversity, owing to the West's powerful interests that have been driving it for decades, making it unlikely that peacebuilding as we have known it will be abandoned anytime soon (Pugh 2021).…”