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IB DP Global Politics — Thematic study: Peace and conflict | SL | Peace and conflict
📋 What You Will Learn
- Define peacebuilding and distinguish it from peacekeeping and peacemaking
- Describe the key approaches to peacebuilding: liberal peacebuilding, local/hybrid peacebuilding, and transitional justice
- Explain the roles of different actors — states, IGOs, NGOs, civil society, and local communities — in peacebuilding
- Analyse the conditions that make peacebuilding efforts more or less effective
- Compare theoretical perspectives on what peacebuilding should achieve and how
- Evaluate the claim that international peacebuilding efforts are effective in building sustainable peace
🔍 Guiding Question Can externally driven peacebuilding efforts produce genuine, lasting peace — or do they risk imposing outside agendas on societies that must ultimately build peace for themselves?
🌍 Why This Matters In 2023, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) marked its twelfth year of operation in a country still experiencing intercommunal violence and political instability, despite a 2018 peace agreement and billions of dollars in international support. The case raises an urgent question: when does international peacebuilding help, and when does it fall short of the peace it promises?
🔑 Key Concept Link Peacebuilding engages all four key concepts. Power determines who sets the peacebuilding agenda and whose vision of peace prevails. Sovereignty is at stake when external actors intervene in post-conflict states. Legitimacy — of peace agreements, transitional institutions and peacebuilders themselves — shapes whether populations accept and sustain peace. Interdependence explains why conflicts in one state draw in regional and global actors and why no state rebuilds alone.
What Is Peacebuilding?
The term "peacebuilding" emerged in international policy after the Cold War, when the international community faced a surge of intrastate conflicts. It is often confused with related but distinct concepts — clarifying the differences is essential for exam precision.
📖 Definition — Peacebuilding Peacebuilding refers to long-term efforts to address the structural, political, economic and social root causes of conflict in order to prevent its recurrence and build sustainable peace. It goes beyond ending violence to transforming the conditions that produced it.
Distinguishing the three "peace" concepts
- Peacekeeping: the deployment of international personnel (usually military/police) to monitor ceasefires and protect civilians during or after conflict — it manages violence rather than resolving its causes.
- Peacemaking: diplomatic efforts to bring conflicting parties to a negotiated agreement — ceasefires, peace talks, mediation. It ends active fighting but does not rebuild society.
- Peacebuilding: the sustained, multi-dimensional work that follows — institution-building, reconciliation, development, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR), transitional justice. It is the hardest and longest phase.
- In practice, the three