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The term "peacemaking" is used in several different ways. According to the UN, peacemaking is "action to bring hostile parties to agreement, essentially through such peaceful means as those foreseen in Chapter VI of the Charter of the United Nations; Pacific Settlement of Disputes."[1] In this sense, peacemaking is the diplomatic effort intended to move a violent conflict into nonviolent dialogue, where differences are settled through representative political institutions. The objective of peacemaking is thus to end the violence between the contending parties. Peacemaking can be done through negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and arbitration. International law provides another channel through international courts.[2]
| United Nations peacemaking is an extension of the parties' own efforts to manage their conflict. When they cannot, the parties, the Security Council or the General Assembly may call upon the United Nations Secretary General to exercises his "Good Offices" to facilitate the resolution of the conflict. The Secretary General may also undertake independent peacemaking initiatives by offering his "Good Offices" to parties to resolve the conflict in a peaceful way. In An Agenda for Peace, former United Nations Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali defined peacemaking as "action to bring hostile parties to agreement, essentially through such peaceful means as those foreseen in Chapter VI of the Charter of the United Nations; Pacific Settlement of Disputes." These actions are carried out during a conflict, violent or latent. They entail the diplomatic process of brokering an end to conflict, principally through the use of mediation and negotiation skills. United Nations Peacemaking excludes the use of force, unless imposed action is taken by the Security Council to facilitate the peacemaking process. [3] |
Outside the UN context, peacemaking is sometimes used to refer to a stage of conflict, which occurs during a crisis or a prolonged conflict after diplomatic intervention has failed and before peacekeeping forces have had a chance to intervene. In this context peacemaking is an intervention during armed combat.
Third, the term is sometimes used is to mean simply "making peace." Peacemaking is necessary and important in cases of protracted violence that do not seem to burn themselves out and in cases where war crimes and other human devastation demand the attention of outside forces. In the latter two cases, peacemaking implies the threat of violent intervention as an act of last resort. In the third case it may demand violent intervention sooner rather than later. This module will describe peacemaking in this context.
Peacemaking Constraints: Political and Economic
Understood simply as an outside intervention in a violent conflict, peacemaking should imply a few obvious things. First, outside interveners are unlikely to want to sacrifice their own troops in order to make peace. This implies that the most peacemaking effort and energy should initially be devoted to negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and the like. In fact, Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter is largely devoted to this very concept. [4] While the U.N. Charter does allow for active military intervention under Chapter VII of the Charter, the ordering of processes in Chapter VII clearly favors negotiation as a first step. This level of negotiation usually takes place at the level of Track I diplomacy, negotiations involving high-level elites.
Track I diplomacy at this level of conflict is likely to be multinational in nature. Because the potential costs of getting involved in negotiation and because the collective willpower of the international community is stronger than any individual nation, multinational diplomacy in violent conflicts has a higher probability of initiation and success. These two issues, troop commitments and economic and political costs, represent basic constraints on peacemaking actions, but peacemaking also entails certain moral obligations as well.
Moral Obligations to Peacemaking
Additional insights into peacemaking are offered by Beyond Intractability project participants.
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States that are party to the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter have implied, though not legally binding, obligations to intervene in cases of genocide, disturbances to international peace, and other cases of human devastation.[5] Article 33 of the U.N. Charter states:
- The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
- The Security Council shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties to settle their dispute by such means.[6]
Similar clauses exist in the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. Unfortunately, constraints often outweigh obligations in the minds of state leaders; however, by signing on to these treaties, states have accepted an implicit moral obligation to intervene. In fact, weak as this obligation is, we do still see it as the motivating factor behind many of the interventions that take place in the world today.
Methods of Peacemaking
Article 33 of the UN Charter specifies, "negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, [and] resort to regional agencies or arrangements" as modes of peaceful intervention in violent conflicts. Articles 41 and 42 of the Charter also allow for sanctions, blockading, and violent intervention in order to restore the peace between warring states. It is important to note that all U.N. Charter justifications for peacemaking were based on the concept of sovereign states. That is, there is no support for intervention in civil wars in the U.N. Charter itself. However, the Agenda for Peace, written under the auspices of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, changes the conception to allow for intervention in civil wars.[7] Other modules have explored negotiation, mediation, and arbitration in depth. The following sections will look at some of the methods of peacemaking not discussed in other modules.
International Courts
Boutros-Ghali suggests in the Agenda for Peace that the International Court of Justice would be an effective tool for peaceful adjudication of disputes.[8] In the case of interstate wars or the threat thereof, the ICJ would be an effective entity for settling disputes. Two problems exist, however: first, only states can be party to disputes in the ICJ. Thus, civil wars could not be adjudicated in the ICJ. Second, the ICJ has no effective enforcement mechanisms. Thus, any unfavorable decision made by the court is likely to be ignored. Other international courts exist but their jurisdiction is more limited. The European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice are examples. Because international courts often lack enforcement mechanisms, effective peacemaking strategies should rely on the threat of force, should other negotiating strategies fail. Negotiation, arbitration, and mediation are still the first choice for third parties in armed conflicts, but the threat of force should not be ignored.
Threat or Use of Force
Within the broader category of peacemaking is the concept of peace enforcement. The UN defines peacemaking as the diplomatic efforts to end conflict, whereas peace enforcement is the active use of force.[9] Peace enforcement in this case is a separate but subsidiary concept within peacemaking. It is therefore appropriate in this peacemaking module to discuss peace-enforcement tools.
Among the tools that might fall in the peace-enforcement categories are sanctions, blockades, and military intervention. Sanctions are the mildest in terms of military force, though the effect of sanctions can be quite devastating. The difference between sanctions and blockades is quite small; however, one is considered an act of war while the other is not. Sanctions can generally be seen as limiting exports and imports from a country or group in question, while blockading involves the active prohibition of all material trying to enter or leave a country or region. Because blockading is an active intervention in another state's trade it is considered a "casus belli" (reason to go to war).[10]
Example: Military Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina
As stated earlier in this module, military intervention is not usually unilateral. A good example of the methods and context of military intervention in a peacemaking context is the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) and Stabilizing Force (SFOR) in Bosnia.[11] Prior to the General Agreement Framework (The Dayton Accords) Bosnia-Herzegovina was rife with civil violence. Operation Deliberate Force, begun on August 29, 1995, was a massive bombing campaign against Serbia and Bosnian-Serb targets designed to halt Serbian attacks on safe areas and bring Serbia to the negotiating table.[12] Ultimately the action was successful and led in part to the General Agreement Framework of December 14, 1995. Subsequent to Operation Deliberate Force, NATO put in the Implementation Force for a year before changing over to the Stabilization Force. What should be evident in this case is the fluid change and interaction between active military intervention, first-track diplomatic efforts and peacekeeping forces.
Not all peacemaking efforts will proceed along the lines of IFOR/SFOR, but effective peacemaking missions will shift fluidly between all the available tools. What this highlights, in fact, is the small difference between second-generation peacekeeping and traditional peacemaking efforts. First-generation peacekeeping was simply to guarantee ceasefires with neutral interposition forces. Second-generation peacekeeping has evolved to allow flexibility of function and mission, from guaranteeing ceasefires to election monitoring to subsequent peace enforcement.
Conclusion
Recent theory on civil wars urges people to think of the conflict as a highly fluid situation.[13] Peacemaking efforts are often closely intertwined with preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding.[14] Because of this, the diplomats and soldiers involved in these missions must maintain high levels of communication in order to ensure common goals and shared information. Peacemaking in the post-Cold War era occurs most often within states where battles lines are not clearly drawn and the strategic situation fluctuates frequently. Peacemaking in this context is but one tool to use in violent conflicts. By itself, it is insufficient to deal with intractable conflicts.
The hope, of course, is that preventive diplomacy will prevent the outbreak of violent conflict. In the event that those efforts fail, third-party diplomatic efforts must continue in the form of peacemaking. As a last resort, particularly in the face of widespread human devastation, peace enforcement units must be seen as a viable solution. The point of peacemaking efforts -- diplomatic and otherwise -- is to get the opponents to the bargaining table, at which point peacekeeping units can help to guarantee any agreed-upon ceasefire.
[1] Boutros Boutros-Ghali, "An Agenda for Peace," [document on-line] (New York: United Nations, 1992, accessed on 17 July, 2003); available from http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html, Internet.
[2] "Peacemaking -- Overview" Conflict Management Toolkit. (Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Conflict Management Program). accessed on 15 Feb. 2006. Available from http://www.sais-jhu.edu/cmtoolkit/approaches/peacemaking/.
[3]Nita Yawanarajah, Political Affairs Officer and Project Manager for the UN Department of Political Affairs Peacemaking Databank Project: UN Peacemaker ( www.un.org/peacemaker).UN Peacemaker is a publicly available website on the United Nations'experience in peacemaking and mediation.
[4] United Nations, United Nations Charter, Chapter VI & VII [document on-line], (accessed on July 17, 2003); available from http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/.
[5] Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement, (New York: Praeger, 2001).
[4] Society of Professional Journalists, Reference Guide to the Geneva Conventions (accessed on July 17, 2003); available from http://www.globalissuesgroup.com/geneva/texts.html.
[5] United Nations, United Nations Charter.
[6] Boutros-Ghali, Agenda for Peace.
[7] Ibid
[8] United Nations, Preventive Diplomacy (accessed on July 17, 2003); available from http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/prev_dip/fst_prev_dip.htm.
[9] United Nations, United Nation Convention on the Law of the Sea [document on-line] (accessed on July 18, 2003), available from http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/closindx.htm, Section 3, Article 17, 25, 30.
[10] North Atlantic Treaty Organization, "Stabization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina," (accessed on July 18, 2003); available from http://www.nato.int/sfor/.
[11] Military Analysis Network, "Operation Deliberate Force," [document on-line] (accessed on July 15, 2003); available from http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/deliberate_force.htm.
[12] George Downs and Stephen J. Stedman, "Evaluating Issues in Peace Implementation," in Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements, eds. Stedman, S., D. Rothchild, and E. Cousens (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2002), 43.
[13] Jane Boulden, Peace Enforcement.
Use the following to cite this article:
Ouellet, Julian. "Peacemaking." Beyond Intractability. Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2003 <http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/peacemaking/>.
Sources of Additional, In-depth Information on this Topic
Additional Explanations of the Underlying Concepts:
Online (Web) Sources
Carter, Jimmy and James Laue. A Conversation On Peacemaking With Jimmy Carter.
Available at: http://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10008/.
Washington, DC: National Institute for Dispute Resolution, 1992 Conversation took place at the Fifth National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, Charlotte, NC, June 7, 1991.
Brahm, Eric. "Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict -- Summary." Conflict Research Consortium, 2000.
Available at: http://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10047/.
This is a summary of Nigel Biggar's "Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict."
Brahm, Eric. "Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective -- Summary." Conflict Research Consortium, 2000.
Available at: http://www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10185/.
This is a summary of Jon Elster's "Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective."
"United Nations Charter." , 1900
Available at: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/index.html.
The UN Charter. Article 2[4] says that countries must refrain from the threat or use of force, although force is allowed for self-defense under article 51.
Offline (Print) Sources
Biggar, Nigel, ed. Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, March 2001.
This is a collection of essays drawn together by Nigel Biggar (Professor of Theology at the University of Leeds) that explores the challenges of establishing democracy after a period of violent and prolonged civil conflict. Relationships within the populace must be restored so that reprisals and revenge do not undermine or subvert emerging democratic processes. Click here for more info.
Elster, Jon. Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, September 6, 2004.
This books examines historical examples of the process of transitional justice. It discusses how different countries have dealt with the fall of regimes, war criminals, and moving past the memories of conflict. Click here for more info.
Anderson, Mary B. and Lara Olson. Confronting War: Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners. Cambridge: Collaborative for Development Action (CDA), 2003.
Darby, John and Roger Mac Ginty. Contemporary Peacemaking: Conflict, Violence and Peace Processes. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Downs, George W. and Stephen John Stedman. "Evaluating Issues in Peace Implementation." In Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements. Edited by Cousens, Elizabeth M., Donald S. Rothchild and Stephen John Stedman, eds. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, January 1, 2002.
This introductory chapter to the book, Ending Civil Wars, establishes some of the key variables that affect the success of peace agreements. Downs and Stedman argue push for a more limited role for the Security Council and the UN. The core of their argument revolves around the high level of complexity of each case and the importance of major or regional powers in ensuring the viability of the peace agreements.
Aall, Pamela, Lt. Col. Daniel Miltenberger and Thomas G. Weiss. Guide to IGOs, NGOs, and the Military in Peace and Relief Operations. Herndon, VA: USIP Press, November 1, 2000.
This book explains the roles, organizational cultures, and structures of inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and militaries. It argues that the increased understanding of the three basic types of international peace building actors offered in the book will assist people in one sort of organization to understand and work with people in other sorts of organizations during peace operations. Click here for more info.
Aall, Pamela. "Nongovernmental Organizations and Peacemaking." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict. Edited by Crocker, Chester A., Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall, eds. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, January 1, 1996.
The author argues that NGOs have the potential to play key roles in restoring civil society and building peace. First, however, NGOs must recognize that their interventions do affect the course of conflicts, and "that their work in relief and development affects not only the social and economic well-being of their target groups, but also the larger political situation."
Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques. Herndon, VA: USIP Press, August 1, 1997.
This book assesses the usefulness and limitations of the skills and methods needed for international peacemaking. Along with describing traditional approaches, newer, "nonofficial" approaches are also discussed. Click here for more info.
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Examples Illustrating this Topic:
Online (Web) Sources
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peacekeeping. United Nations.
Available at: http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html.
Lays out vision for the UN's role in post-Cold War world. Consists of preventive diplomacy, peace enforcement, peace making, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding.
Zarembka, David. "Friends Peacemaking in Burundi." Friends Journal, June 2005 Issue , June 2005
Available at: http://www.friendsjournal.org/contents/2005/0605/feature.html.
This article describes a number of peacebuilding processes that are being used in Burundi to bring about reconciliation.
Posthumus, Bram. "Liberia: Seven Years of Devastation and an Uncertain Future." , 2000
Available at: Click here for more info.
This article describes the series of political conflicts that have taken place in Liberia over the past twenty years or so. The paper discusses the various peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts that resulted in a fragile era of peace.
Asuni, Judith Burdin. "Nigeria: The Tiv-Jukun Conflict in Wukari, Taraba State." , 1999
Available at: Click here for more info.
This is an article about a key ethnic conflict in Nigeria between the Tiv and Jukun people. The conflict is deeply rooted in the history of the region, but only became severely violent with the introduction of party politics to Nigeria in the 1950s. The article discusses ways in which this conflict may be resolved, in spite of of the lack of intervention by official authorities.
Padilla, Luis Alberto. "Prevention Successes and Failures: Peace-making and Conflict Transformation in Guatemala." Conflict Early Warning Systems (CEWS), 1900.
Available at: Click here for more info.
This essay examines the causes of the conflict in Guatemala, and details the subsequent peace process. It also looks at factors associated with this conflict that can be used to better understand how conflicts can be prevented or transformed.
Reference Guide to the Geneva Conventions. Society of Professional Journalists.
Available at: http://www.genevaconventions.org/.
This website provides the text of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions provide much of the legitimacy for interventions into civils war. On this account they are important by themselves, but also important as they pertain the international peacemaking and peacekeeping.
Lewer, Nick and Joe William. "Sri Lanka: Finding a Negotiated End to Twenty-Five Years of Violence." , 2002
Available at: Click here for more info.
This article examines the attempted peace processes in Sri Lanka, which aimed to bring an end to violence between the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Prendergast, John. U.S. Leadership in Resolving African Conflict: The Case of Ethiopia-Eritrea.
Available at: http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr74.html.
This report examines the role of Clinton Administration officials in helping to broker a peace settlement in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, at the end of the 1990s. The Ethiopia-Eritrea case demonstrates that high-level, sustained, continuous U.S. engagement in peacemaking in Africa can have a major positive impact.
Youth, Healing & Hope: Children as Peacemakers. 2004.
Available at: http://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/details.cfm?id=165.
An interview with Kheirallah Bazbaz, Mor Goshen, Linda Lantieri, and Jessica Raffi. Surveying a self-wounding civilization, kids have come to realize that if they're inherit a world worth living in, they'll have to teach as well as learn a few lessons in getting along with one another. Join us for the lesson in conflict resolution and the resulting messages of hope and healing.
Offline (Print) Sources
Bercovitch, Jacob. "Conflict Management and the Oslo Experience: Assessing the Success of Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking." International Negotiation 2:2, 1997.
The Oslo experience and the signing of an agreement between Israel and the PLO is used as an empirical case study to highlight the nature of successful mediation in international conflicts. To provide a structure for the analysis, the concept of intractable conflicts and their management is utilized. Factors affecting the mediation of intractable conflicts are grouped into two clusters: (a) contextual factors and (b) process factors. The paper focuses on the changing balance of contextual factors and how these created a ripe moment for mediation, and on the particular way the mediation process was carried out. Timing, ripeness and secrecy are identified as the crucial variables that produced the breakthrough in Oslo.
Andersen, Walter. "Multiethnic Conflict and Peacemaking: The Case of Assam." In Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies. Edited by Monteville, Joseph V., ed. New York: Lexington Books, 1991.
This chapter covers steps takes in the Indian state of Assam in the 1970s and 1980s, to mitigate local discontent over the immigration of large numbers of people of ethnicities foreign to the region.
Peacemaking and Democratization in the Western Hemisphere. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, September 1, 2000.
"This is the first comprehensive study of the multilateral political, electoral, and military peacemaking and peace-building missions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors cover electoral-observation missions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, as well as diplomatic/military missions in Nicaragua and along the Peru-Ecuador border. Also included are essays by UN officials on the current state and likely future of international missions. The book represents collaborative research sponsored by the North-South Center and funded by the Ford Foundation and United States Institute of Peace." -Publisher Review
Stedman, Stephen John. Peacemaking in Civil War: International Mediation in Zimbabwe, 1974-1980. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, January 1, 1990.
"Challenging the literatures on war termination, civil war, and revolution-which typically dismiss the possibility of negotiated settlement-Stephen Stedman examines the problem of negotiations during civil wars and demonstrates that third party mediation can help resolve such conflicts."
Bloomfield, David. Peacemaking Strategies in Northern Ireland: Building Complementarity in Conflict Management Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, January 1997.
This book analyzes the many roles played in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland and the ways these interventions complement each other. This analysis of complementarity concludes that many approaches are needed in peacemaking and that these activities should be coordinated.
Giro, Mario. "The Community of Sant'Egidio and its Peacemaking Activities." International Spectator, The 33:3, January 1, 1998.
Created in 1968 in Rome by high school students and enjoying a membership of 15,000, this organization volunteers in areas of the poor, and focuses on working for peace. Noted meditations have included Mozambique, 1990-1992, and Algeria 1994-5. As well as assisting in humanitarian efforts in Lebanon, El Salvado, Guatamal, Romania, Albania, Armenia, and the Horn of Africa.
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Audiovisual Materials on this Topic:
Online (Web) Sources
Analysis: Intensifying Israeli and Palestinians Clashes Pose Great Challenges for President Bush and his Road Map for Peace. NPR. June 12, 2003.
Available at: Click here for more info.
This audio link talks about President Bush's "Road Map for Peace" as clashing between Israeli and Palestine continues.
Offline (Print) Sources
Ralph Bunche An American Odyssey - Video. Directed and/or Produced by: Greaves, William. William Greaves Productions, Inc.. 1900.
Few remember the name, much less the historic achievements, of Dr. Ralph Johnson Bunche (1903-1971). Yet, this African American mediator and United Nations diplomat was the first person of color anywhere in the world to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. This video documents Dr. Bunche and his achievements.
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