Approaches to Peacebuilding
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Book Review Approaches to Peacebuilding Ho-Won Jeong (ed.) Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2002. 216 pp. $65.00 hardcover International Politics (2004) 41, 279–281. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800049
The field of conflict resolution has expanded in the past decade as scholars have become more aware of the complex nature of conflicts. Intrastate conflicts have replaced interstate wars as the chief area of focus, with a corresponding emphasis on the differential nature of internal ethnic, religious, and social strife. As such, conflict studies increasingly straddle the line between international relations and comparative politics. With this expansion of the field has come an expanded view of the role of outside involvement in conflict resolution. The earlier emphasis on peacekeeping between states has given way to the study of ‘peacebuilding’, which emphasizes the much broader political, social, psychological, and economic tasks of remaking societies torn asunder by war. It is this area to which this edited volume speaks. The primary task which Approaches to Peacebuilding sets for itself is conceptual. In the Introduction, Jeong points out that ‘[r]esearch on peacebuilding is mostly based on single or comparative case studies’ (p. 9). In a traditional theoretical call to arms, Jeong argues that his ‘edited volume aims to fill the gap created by the insufficiency in conceptual knowledge and a demand for more sophisticated policy’ (pp. 8–9). In this, the book assumes a well-defined role as bringer of theoretical clarity and builder of bridges between theory and policy practice. The strength of edited volumes, their ability to bring diverse points of view into one place, is unfortunately not well suited to this task. What is called for is a single conception, an overarching framework that we can use to understand the complexities of peacebuilding. What this volume offers instead is a selection of building blocks — many well chosen and cogently discussed — with which such a framework could be built. Issues of peacekeeping, reconciliation, gender, and organizational design are all discussed. But the framework itself is not yet there. To the editor’s credit, most of the chapters of the book do address the same set of issues (the exception being chapter 4 on ‘Negotiation Readiness’, which appears to have been written for a different purpose entirely). But as is often
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true in the edited volume format, the chapters do not talk to one another. For example, Charles-Philippe David raises a number of excellent conceptual critiques of peacebuilding in the second chapter (indeed, the book is worth reading for this discussion alone), but his points on the realities of power are largely ignored elsewhere in the volume. Some of his concerns parallel those in the fifth chapter on ‘Reconciliation’, but the connection is not drawn. Overall, the effect is much like listening to a set of panel presentations at a conference, without the Q&A afterwards; the reader is left to wonder what sorts of synthesis might come out of
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