Building Peace, Creating Conflict?

One of the most significant challenges facing the international community today is how to secure stability and rebuild societies emerging from civil wars. International peace-building missions have been deployed in a range of countries emerging from civil war. The empirical record of international efforts to advance peace has been mixed. While some post-war countries have made significant strides towards peace and democracy, other countries have experienced a return to war. In yet other cases the outcome has been a partial implementation of peace where new conflicts have been generated in the process. In this book a group of experts discuss the conflictual dimensions of peace-building. The authors specialise in various aspects and cover several themes such as 'frozen conflicts' and 'unending peace processes'; the efficiency of peacekeeping operations in promoting democracy, and individual and collective dimensions of justice and reconciliation.