Seminar Report: Post Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding

In the course of the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, the international community, acting through international organisations or ad hoc coalitions, has been increasingly engaged in often vast programmes of postconflict reconstruction and peacebuilding.

Peacebuilding has formed a core issue in international intervention in post-war societies ever since United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali introduced the concept as key to successful preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping. In An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali defi ned peacebuilding as the medium- to long-term process of rebuilding war-affected communities through identifying and supporting structures to consolidate peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.

In these complex situations the international community faces the critical gap between ‘blueprint’ top-down strategies, focusing at the state level, and the actual interests and politics of the national, local and regional actors involved. Especially local-level initiatives are often overlooked. Given the widespread recognition that context and local ownership are of critical importance, the focus should then be on the means and potential available to the international community to effectively assist post-conflict reconstruction processes and dynamics.

The primary objective of this seminar was to bring together researchers, practitioners and policymakers to reflect critically upon the nature of current post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts, assess the challenges of fostering peace and security in post-conflict societies, and provide a practical framework for such undertakings.

The seminar sought to generate policy proposals and track progress in the following key areas:

• Examining the nature of current peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts – terms often used interchangeably – and the validity of the normative basis on which these undertakings are built, the objective being the clarification of vocabulary and processes
• Assessing the practical implementation of these strategies by the international implementing agencies
  
• With a focus on the security dimension, articulating the challenges faced in implementing some specific elements of peacebuilding by drawing from in-country experiences and addressing key practical concerns such as local ownership and accountability