A New Agenda for Peace
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201206700201 |
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
| International Journal | Spring 2012 | 275 |
Elisabeth King is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Earth Institute and Centre for the
Study of Development Strategies at Columbia University. Robert O. Matthews is professor
emeritus in the department of political science at the University of Toronto. This issue of
International Journal is rooted in a workshop they organized at the University of Toronto
in October 2011 with their co-organizer and co-editor, Ian Spears. They would all like to
gratefully recognize funding from the Munk School of Global Affairs and the department
of political science, both at the University of Toronto, as well as the Centre for International
and Defence Policy at Queen’s University. At these institutions, they extend special thanks
to Steven Bernstein, David Cameron, and Kim Nossal, respectively; to the workshop
participants included as authors in this special issue and to Alex Costy, Ernie Regehr, and
Vijaya Sripati. They are likewise grateful for the contributions of all attendees and the special
roles played by students Vanessa Abban, Katie Degendorfer, Alison Duffy, Stefanie Freel,
Marion Laurence, and Naomi Williams. Taisier Ali, Cristina Badescu and James Milner
offered helpful thoughts on this article. Thanks finally to Rima Berns-McGown, Joseph
Jockel, and David Haglund at International Journal for their support and encouragement.
This year, 2012, marks the 20th anniversary of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s
seminal “An agenda for peace.” Penned in response to a request by the
United Nations security council to prepare and circulate an “analysis and
recommendations on ways of strengthening and making more efficient
within the framework and provisions of the Charter the capacity of the United
Nations for preventive diplomacy, for peacemaking and for peacekeeping,”
Elisabeth King &
Robert O. Matthews
A new agenda for
peace
20 years later
| 276 | Spring 2012 | International Journal |
| Elisabeth King & Robert O. Matthews |
the 1992 document took advantage of a unique moment in history. The end
of the Cold War provided fresh resolve among security council members
to fulfil “the Purposes and Principles of the Charter [of the UN]” and
presented new opportunities for building sustainable peace.1 Alongside
recommendations for more thorough and activist preventive diplomacy,
peacemaking, and peacekeeping, the agenda for peace added a fourth tool,
postconflict peacebuilding, to the international toolkit. This issue focuses
principally on this fourth tool.
Over the past 20 years, there has been much development in the
practice and study of peacebuilding.2 The meaning of peacebuilding and its
application on the ground have lengthened in time, broadened in scope,
and deepened in engagement. Peacebuilding has become institutionalized
within the UN and the broader international community, and peacebuilding
endeavours have shown successes in their ability to respond to violent
conflict and prevent its recurrence. But there have also been challenges and
even failures in peacebuilding. Peacebuilding has had to contend with the
aftermath of September 11 and the falls of the Taliban in Afghanistan and
Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Most recently, peacebuilding must be envisioned
in the context of the 2011 Arab Spring. 2012 thus presents an opportune
moment to revisit “An agenda for peace.”
This issue stems from a workshop held at the University of Toronto in
October 2011. The workshop brought together peacebuilding practitioners,
including a UN fieldworker based in the Middle East and a member of
the peacebuilding commission working in west Africa, alongside scholars
engaged in peacebuilding work, to reflect upon the state of peacebuilding
today—nearly 20 years after “An agenda for peace” was published—and to
move forward the possibility of a new agenda for peace. The seven articles
that follow consider critically the goals of “An agenda for peace” and evaluate
peacebuilding successes and failures. In this introduction, we consider what
the last 20 years have taught us about peacebuilding, focusing on several
lessons for moving the peacebuilding agenda forward into the next decades.
This article proceeds as follows. In the first section, we define
peacebuilding. In the second, we survey peacebuilding since 1992 from an
1 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “An agenda for peace: Preventive diplomacy and other
matters,” United Nations, New York, 1992 (paras. 1 and 3, respectively), www.un.org.
In subsequent references, we note the relevant paragraphs in the text.
2 See, for example, Elisabeth King and Robert O. Matthews, “Peacebuilding: An
annotated bibliography (2005-2011),” 2011, www.columbia.edu.
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