JPD is in transition. We are thrilled to announce both a new institutional home – the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies – and a new publishing arrangement, with Taylor and Francis Group. Transitions bring forth new opportunities, and in this case we take pride in knowing we will engage with new actors and institutions, reach new audiences and, as a result, deepen and enrich our work. Yet arriving somewhere new means leaving somewhere behind. JPD bids farewell to our friends and colleagues at American University, and in particular the Center for Global Peace, our institutional home for the last decade. At USD we welcome a new Executive Editor to our team, Professor Necla Tschirgi, and in leaving AU we extend our heartfelt thanks to Professor Abdul Aziz Said and Betty Sitka, who worked so diligently over the years with us to create a journal.
This is an opportune time to take stock of our work, reflecting on where we have come from and where we want to go. Such a stock-taking is timely, as we see our field also in transition – critiquing its own assumptions, priorities and results, endeavouring to learn lessons and make progress on particularly messy problems, and grappling with new and old concepts and frameworks to strengthen the ways our work is articulated, understood and operationalised.
Looking Back
In 2002, JPD was launched in London, Washington, DC, and Harare. It aimed to respond to what we identified as a compelling need to breathe life into the classic statement of the United Nations Secretary General: ‘there can be no development without peace, and no peace without development’. It was widely recognised at the time that while these connections were paramount, the operationalisation of these relationships was weak: the communities of scholars and practitioners in each field were divided or simply not engaged, and the international architecture was not conducive to supporting integration. There were signs of hope, nonetheless, that we sought to build upon: some scholars and practitioners were beginning to promote cross-disciplinary engagement and institutions were beginning to show interest in developing and practising integrated forms of assessment and programming.
From these early days JPD was clear and forthright about its assumptions, biases and orientation. Practically put, we believe that peace cannot be achieved without steadfast attention to the development-related drivers of conflict and conditions and capacities for peace. Further, peace and inclusive, people-centred and sustainable development generally require transforming rather than simply reforming and rebuilding legal, political and economic institutions and relationships which have been part of the logic and practices that have fuelled violent conflict. We do not, however, focus only on post-conflict peacebuilding – the bias of international attention; we also create space in the wider terrain of fragile, conflict-affected and development settings, drawing attention to the infrastructure and institutional capacities needed to transform structural violence that often lays the foundation for violent conflict. Consistent with this orientation, JPD has also steered away from realpolitik approaches to peacemaking and social change, opting rather to give attention to nonviolent forms of struggle and socio-political change.
Always acutely cognisant of the asymmetric power relations between North and South that influence, shape and to some extent frame the discussion and discourse on peacebuilding and development, JPD has carved a space for alternative voices to counter dominant paradigms. Further, while the recognition that peacebuilding must be endogenous and nationally owned has grown over the last decade, JPD has since its inception operated from the assumption that peacebuilding scholarship, policy and practice must not only engage local peoples and the challenges they face, but also be driven by their knowledge, cultures and situational realities.
As the authors, readers and board members of JPD know, to realise this vision we pursue different approaches than most refereed journals. While we maintain the standards of a refereed journal with a double-blind editorial process, our mission to foster South-North and theory-practice dialogues requires a concerted commitment to bringing voices and views of Southern scholars, practitioners and policy-makers to the forefront of what we publish. Our intention to be critical – providing a forum for rigorously and routinely examining the issues – and constructive, with an eye towards providing alternative visions and policy choices, requires that we interrogate theories and link debates to powerful cases on the ground. JPD is not in existence simply for academics to talk to one another. Our aim to contribute to the integrated study and practice of peacebuilding and development means that we work closely with our authors to expand their potential to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship capable of supporting integrated policy choices and practices. Our innovative ways of working have given us the privilege of collaborating with a remarkable array of institutional partners around the world. They include the Institute for Peace, Leadership and Governance at Africa University, the Africa Programme of the United Nations-affiliated University for Peace, the Centre for Culture and Peace Studies at the University of Botswana, the International Peace Institute, the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office, the Institute for Developing Nations at Emory University, the Iraqi Peace Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the University of Ottawa, the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Argentina, Instituto de Ciencia Política Universidad Católica de Chile and especially our donor partner, the International Development Research Centre of Canada.
Looking back over six volumes (18 issues) of JPD, the bulk of our work can be encapsulated under two thematic umbrellas:
| • | How the peacebuilding and development enterprises intersect through different paradigmatic approaches, and the theories, interests and agendas driving them; | ||||
| • | The concepts and practices (diagnostic, planning, policy and programming) associated with these paradigms – how they operate and the results they produce in terms of achieving sustainable peace and inclusive, people-centred development. | ||||
Peacebuilding and development intersections
In our very first issue in 2002, JPD board member Peter Uvin published what would become an extensively cited typology of seven paradigmatic shifts in the relationship between the peacebuilding-development enterprises. At the time, Uvin pointed to a ‘firm anchoring’ of international attention in the third and fourth paradigms – the ‘do no harm’ approachFootnote1 and the ‘post-conflict agenda’.Footnote2 Over the last 10 years, JPD's content has correspondingly reflected a strong focus on these two paradigms, enriching their critical content and the debates underpinning them. We have also spent considerable time with the three other paradigms departing most from the status quo in Uvin's spectrumFootnote3 – conflict prevention, human security and global system reform – which stem from another operating assumption, namely that transformative change is likely to come from a combination of ‘reformist’ and ‘radical’ efforts.
These paradigms remain a steady focus of attention for actors working on peacebuilding and development globally. At the same time, two new agendas – the political economy of conflict and peace, and statebuilding – have come to the forefront over the decade, attracting the attention of policy, practice and scholarly enterprises involved in peacebuilding and development. JPD's authors and editors have critically engaged in these discourses and their related practices and helped to shape them. While much scholarship and practice have explored the conflict side of the equation, JPD's consistent attention to the political economy of peacebuilding is evident in every issue we have produced. We were early contributors, for example, to examining the relationship of natural resources and peacebuilding when much international attention was on natural resources and conflict. In Volume 3 No. 1 (2006), we argued for transformational approaches that require inter-institutional collaboration, which recognises the political, sociological, ethnological and economic dimensions of the issues at all levels, rather than short-term technological fixes, or top-down approaches targeting elites. Similarly, before the UN Secretary General released his report on mediation in 2009,Footnote4 arguing that peace processes and political settlements should address the root causes of conflict, including economic factors, JPD was producing rich case study analysis that consistently revealed how lack of attention to the economic roots of violent conflict remains a serious obstacle for peace consolidation. The work of our authors has steadily built the case for why minimalist or negative conceptions of peace are not enough. Simultaneously, the journal has drawn attention to and helped to build an intellectual foundation for the study of the political economy of peacebuilding – how actors, relationships and institutions interact with and impact conflict drivers as well as the resources and capacities for peace in any given setting, and the role of power and the dynamics of change through transition. The political economy of peacebuilding takes both a critical and constructive orientation, focusing as much on the capacities, institutions and incentives needed to drive peace as those that drive destructive forces of violent conflict.
The (re-)emergence of statebuilding over the last decade has provided an important counter-balance to the increasing critiques of peacebuilding that targeted the liberal bias in the operationalisation of international peacebuilding. JPD has an established record of attention to issues at the heart of statebuilding as it is being reshaped to focus on state-society relationships underpinning the social contract, rather than being guided by a minimalist conceptualisation focused on institution building. Having sought to give Southern authors and qualitative methods pride of place, JPD has created space for an in-depth examination, informed by local actors, of what is working and what is not. The key themes informing the statebuilding discourse – the importance of state-society relationships in creating a viable social contract, national ownership, legitimacy of the state and its institutions, and the notion of hybridity in both national contexts and international responses – are persistent themes we have covered for a decade. Issue after issue we have critically examined what national ownership of peace and development should look like, and how it can be built to ensure that political actors, policies and institutions are serving the people. As Adedeji Ebo aptly stated in ‘Security for the People: The Role of SSR in Sustaining Peace’ (Volume 3 No. 2), ‘the state of security and therefore the prospects for sustainable peace and development are a direct function of the level of accountability, transparency and popular participation within society’. Across our issues, JPD's authors have unpacked and deconstructed both the state and society, examining the roles of civil society organisations and government actors from all angles and through different epistemological perspectives. Throughout, we have engaged deeply in critical debates from local and transnational cultural perspectives, worldviews and practices, as illustrated by special issues on African culture in peacebuilding and development (Volume 4 No. 3) and Islam, peacebuilding and development (Volume 6 No. 1).
Operationalising key concepts and practices
The second umbrella theme covers a vast terrain and is integrally linked to the first, and this is where a good portion of JPD's scholarship lies. The empirical, case study-based focus of JPD has led to a strong emphasis on understanding the strategies and practices that foster peacebuilding and development, as well as the outcomes that are produced. We have built up a corpus of case study material that goes beyond the ‘do no harm’ approach, examining the peace and conflict outcomes and impacts of work within and between the varied sectors that comprise the peacebuilding and development enterprises.
A particular focus of our work has been the roles of international actors in international peacebuilding. JPD authors and editors have steadily documented practices that contribute to undermining peacebuilding. These include:
| • | A lack of basic understanding of the local cultural and contextual practices in a specific conflict area, leading to context-insensitive programme design; | ||||
| • | Minimal systematic planning within a peacebuilding and/or transitional strategy; | ||||
| • | Disproportionate and/or conflict-insensitive distribution of aid resources; | ||||
| • | Lack of coordination among international actors, resulting in duplicated or counter-productive efforts; | ||||
| • | Exclusion or marginalisation of youth, women and other vulnerable sectors from development and socio-political programmes, thereby failing to capitalise on their potential contributions; | ||||
| • | A propensity to work within the parameters of the conflict context in a way that reifies traditional methods and processes and obstructs transformative approaches; | ||||
| • | Partisan political decisions motivated by domestic and international geopolitical interests that shape the agenda and design of peace and development programmes in conflict areas. | ||||
From This Point Forward
This issue of JPD highlights our continuing attention to many of the above themes through a mix of in-depth investigation of practices occurring on the ground in conflict zones, comparative and reflective analysis of the tools being used to drive transformative change and hard-hitting policy analysis around critical issues of concern across the diverse fields feeding into peacebuilding and development. They collectively suggest the need for more holistic approaches in addressing peacebuilding, development and humanitarian relief, the need to identify appropriate intervention tools and approaches that address the root causes of conflict, and ongoing commitment to designing interventions with local actors at the centre.
JPD continues to emphasise the need for more localised and systematic approaches of intervention to enhance our capacity to respond to humanitarian disasters, such as the unprecedented floods in Pakistan in July and August 2010, which affected some 20 million people. In his article, Tatsushi Arai points to the complex web of factors that affect the success of post-disaster recovery. As Arai states, ‘The key to success in these activities is the realisation that post-disaster recovery and development in Pakistan is quintessentially a national security issue.’ Thus it depends on the international and local actors' realisation of the need to proactively adopt conflict-sensitive measures to restore social cohesion.
Lisa Freeman and Ronald Fisher add to the body of analysis and reflection on methods – common in JPD – that is needed to drive greater effectiveness in peacebuilding and development. The authors compare the methods used by scholars and practitioners in the fields of development and conflict resolution to to analyse conflicts and their contexts. They identify different emphases – context assessment and systematic analysis found in ‘conflict assessment’ tools used widely in the development field, and the value of process, understanding relationships and dynamics in ‘problem-solving workshops’ used in the conflict resolution field – and argue that the two fields can no longer afford to work in isolation. Greater cross-fertilisation of methods, they assert, will ‘constructively enlarge the discussion and improve practice in both fields’.
Ian Pool's article is another illustration of JPD's recent thematic emphasis on political economy of peacebuilding and development, which is essential for understanding the recent popular uprisings in the Arab region and concurrent shifts in regional and global power. The focus on demographic changes, with particular attention to Arab youth, is a powerful lens through which to examine current and future trends in the Arab region. Pool's recommendation is to establish preventive policies that respond to the structural economic systems as root causes that will continue to generate conflicts and tension if not addressed by the new regimes. His analysis of the ‘demographic dividends’ approach offers a new perspective that can harness the capacities of youth in development.
‘Heeding Women's Voices’ by Emiko Noma, Dee Aker and Jennifer Freeman , based on the decade-long Women PeaceMakers Programme at the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, reflects the cross-pollination between practice and scholarship that is central to JPD's mission. The article and its accompanying case studies from Guatemala, the Philippines and South Africa examine the diverse contributions of women to peacebuilding in the light of the broader scholarly and policy debates on women, peace and security. This article suggests why the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, with its strong scholar-practitioner profile, is an ideal home for the journal in its next phase of development.
JPD will continue to deepen its engagement with the compelling issues discussed above as we endeavour to advance issues and debates at the forefront of our field. Our forthcoming issues this year cover ‘Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development’ (Volume 7 No. 2) and ‘Infrastructures for Peace’ (Volume 7 No. 3), both of which promise to examine innovative thinking and practice on these topics. We will widen our focus on the statebuilding paradigm, with an emphasis on how development intersects with this nexus as the new peacebuilding and statebuilding goals come into contact with Millennium Development Goals at a pivotal moment in time, when security, political and development actors are debating how to conceptualise a post-2015 development agenda. Specifically we intend to provide a space for policy dialogue around both of these issues given the importance that they have for local actors in countries affected by conflict and fragility. We expect these policy dialogues to forge new thinking about state-society and international relationships that affect and underpin the political compacts, institutions and processes that ultimately will drive socially owned peace. It is worth underscoring that we will not uncritically adopt the latest intellectual or policy trend, whatever its origins and drivers. Rather, we will continue to explore the sources and drivers of violent conflict and fragility and the strategies for building resilient and peaceful societies in ways that reflect local realities and that are genuinely people-centred.
In closing, it must be said that JPD is a collective product and process, produced with and through our active and cherished community of authors, readers, editorial board and the wider circle of peacebuilding and development stakeholders.
Notes
1 Minimising the negative impact of all humanitarian and development assistance in conditions of conflict.
2 Emphasising reconciliation and transitional justice, demobilisation and reintegration, and democratic policing.
3 On the other hand, we have spent very little time engaging with the two paradigms reflecting the status quo – ‘development axiomatically reduces conflict’ and ‘conditionality’.
4 ‘Secretary-General's report on Enhancing Mediation and Its Support Activities’, S/2009/189, United Nations, New York, 8 April 2009.