Working Paper #2017-016
Post-conflict peacebuilding: A critical survey of the literature and avenues for future research
How and why do some civil wars end in a peace that endures while other
civil wars re-ignite? The existing literature comes to contradictory and
puzzling conclusions. For example, while some scholars and development
practitioners argue that differences in post-conflict peace-building
outcomes were to be explained by the intervention of the international
community, other scholars focus on how a civil war ends -whether it
ended in a government victory, a rebel victory or a negotiated
settlement. By contrast, more recent studies find that states'
attributes such as the level of economic development; pre-war level of
democracy; the degree of ethnic fractionalisation; and state dependence
on oil exports influence the outcomes of post-conflict peacebuilding.
Although these explanations focus on different aspects and use different
explanatory variables to explain the variation in post-conflict
peacebuilding, they are complementary and overlapping in many important
ways. This paper presents an in-depth review of a wide body of
theoretical and empirical research on post-conflict peacebuilding. The
review covers three stands of literature on peace and conflict research
which include: (1) those that focus on the root causes of the initial
conflict, (2) those that focus on how the original war was fought, and
finally, (3) those that focus on post-conflict peacebuilding. The
insights from this literature reveals that while existing studies on the
transition from civil war to peace have yielded considerable insights,
there are a number of weaknesses and gaps. Some policy conclusions are
drawn and directions for future research are suggested.
- Keywords
-
- Civil war
- Peacebuilding
- Post-conflict relapse
- International community
- JEL codes
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- D74
- F50
- F53
- O50
- N40
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Adedokun, A. (2017). Post-conflict peacebuilding: A critical survey of the literature and avenues for future research (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2017-016). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=6387