As of 1 January 2016, the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development (JPD) has found a new institutional home at Kennesaw State University’s PhD Program in International Conflict Management. JPD was carefully nurtured and strengthened over the past four years under the stewardship of the University of San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies. We extend our heartfelt appreciation for the time, energy, and resources provided by our friends and colleagues at USD, including Professor Necla Tschirgi, who served as Executive Editor, Professors Ami Carpenter and Topher McDougal, who served as Associate Editors, and Martha Garcia, who served as Managing Editor. At JPD’s new KSU home, we welcome Professors Brandon Lundy and Charity Butcher as Associate Editors and Nicole Connelly as Managing Editor. We at KSU are grateful for all those at USD who facilitated a transformation of the journal over the past four years; we inherit a journal that has matured in its publishing arrangement with the Taylor and Francis Group, and now has a streamlined submission system through ScholarOne.
Reflecting on the Past
As we move forward into a new era, we maintain a commitment to JPD’s established tradition of ongoing critical examination of peacebuilding and development issues. Since its founding in 2002, JPD has provided a unique space for alternative, constructive discourse located at the nexus of peacebuilding and development, theory and practice, and with careful attention to asymmetric North–South power relations. In Volume 7: 1 (2012, p. 2), co-founding editors Erin McCandless and Mohammed Abu-Nimer outlined the evolution of JPD and identified two thematic umbrellas that encapsulate JPD’s first six volumes:
| • | How the peacebuilding and development fields intersect through different paradigmatic approaches, and the theories, interests and agendas driving them; and | ||||
| • | 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. | ||||
JPD has continued to address these themes, while engaging in topical ‘policy dialogues’ featuring key issues that are mapping global engagement around the peacebuilding and development nexus at the policy level: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda, and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding/New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States. Written mostly by practitioners and policy-makers engaged in these processes, often from the Global South, these contributions provide cutting-edge, first-hand accounts that have tracked these critical issues and promote continued reflection and dialogue from a range of perspectives.
In the past four years, JPD has cultivated a leading edge by promoting critical discussion on issues that lie at the heart of our field, publishing articles dealing with peacebuilding and development issues across the globe. These have included women and gender (Vol. 7: 1), hybridity (Vol. 7: 2), infrastructures for peace (Vol. 7: 3), evaluation in divided societies (Vol. 8: 2), the role of social services in peacebuilding (Vol. 8: 3), peace and conflict impact assessment (Vol. 9: 1), and vertical integration in peacebuilding (Vol. 10: 1). Ongoing attention has also been given to other key issues that intersect with our field, such as natural resource management, the arts and cultural resources, the role of technology and social media, and resilience. Each of our special issues and the ongoing engagement with these themes has delved substantively across sectors and disciplines, drawing on a range of methodologies and case studies to provide empirically-based analysis of political, social, ethical, economic and cultural concerns.
Anticipating the Future
Looking ahead, JPD will continue to engage with major challenges facing the global community from our unique position, transcending traditional North–South, academic–practitioner, peacebuilding–development and disciplinary divides. As such, JPD remains deeply committed to supporting scholarship from the Global South and North, at the intersection of discourse, policy and practice.
Here, in Volume 11: 1, we question the extent to which peacebuilding is donor-driven (see Cheryl Duckworth’s editorial to follow), and in Volume 11: 3 we will devote a special issue to the topic of contemporary migrant and refugee challenges. This will explore not only the policies and practices that support peace and inclusive development in host communities, but also those that prevent such crises in the first place. At 60 million refugees worldwide, the world has not seen such disturbing numbers since World War II, resulting from prolonged conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia as well as conditions of endemic poverty and food insecurity.
JPD is also poised for Volume 12: 2 to engage with the contentious debates surrounding violent extremism and counter-terrorism efforts from a peacebuilding and development perspective. The issue will seek to understand the contexts that give rise to and host violent extremism, the psychologies and ideologies at play, as authors unpack different strategic approaches aimed at transforming violent extremism. These upcoming issues, including our Volume 11: 2 open issue, align with the first World Humanitarian Summit, to be held in May 2016, which aims to build a more inclusive and diverse humanitarian system by looking at themes including dignity, safety resilience, partnerships, and finance; all themes that have been and will continue to be at the fore for JPD. We offer JPD as a space for scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers — in concert with local stakeholders — to engage in these issues with deep reflecting, documenting and creating historical memory on the issues that can continue to support the building of a resilient global system.
Ongoing climate discussions, and the recent 2015 Paris climate agreement, have once again brought to the fore climate-related and broader environmental challenges facing the global community at many levels across the planet. Issues of climate justice and equity, as well as threats of climate-induced violence are major concerns that manifest in myriad environmental, social, cultural and economic ways. These manifest between OECD states and developing countries, as well as within countries and between socio-political groups where the impacts are expected to be most destabilising. While environmental concerns have long been a matter of concern to JPD (for example, Alleson, Levin, Brenner and Al Hmaidi in Vol. 8: 1, Djernaes, Jorgensen and Koch-Ya’ari in Vol. 10: 2), we intend to devote a special issue to this topic in the near future.
We expect the relevance and impacts of conflict transformation and peacebuilding interventions to increasingly come under scrutiny with the immense global challenges afoot, with parallel questions and new expectations about our approaches to development, and what needs to change to ensure they realise their transformative and preventive potential. Building on the JPD special issues on Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA) and Evaluation in Divided Societies, as well as debates within the broader area of conflict sensitivity, we expect the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding evaluation to continue to expand in the coming years. The approaches, methodologies, practices and politics of such evaluations will increasingly be the subject of much discursive exchange and attention. Technology and social media will likewise increasingly be present and scrutinised in peacebuilding and development initiatives. Recent JPD articles, including Martin-Shields and Stones (Vol. 9: 2) and Spillane (Vol. 10: 3), identify ways in which smartphones and information and communication technology can further peacebuilding and development initiatives.
Likewise, the concepts of conflict prevention and peace sustainability have circled around again and a new surge of thinking on these topics has emerged in the United Nations and broader policy communities. The three recent high level United Nations reports on peace operations, the peacebuilding architecture, and the global study on SCR 1325 on women in peacemaking and peacebuilding, for example, all centrally reorient the understanding of peacebuilding towards these issues of sustainability and prevention. All recognise the importance of greater inclusion in building nationally owned and sustainable peace. These issues also lie at the core of forging and renegotiating robust social contracts between states, societies and also vis-à-vis the international community — the essence of which JPD has long been engaged with, and will elevate as a priority topic for our journal moving forward.
As we look ahead, we are pleased that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its associated SDGs include peace as both a cross-cutting issue across the new framework, as well as a separate, dedicated goal: Goal 16, ‘Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’. This explicit commitment to infusing clear considerations of peace as a central component of development is the result of sustained effort by committed member states, the United Nations and other international organisations, and civil society around the world, as well as engaged scholars and practitioners focused on peacebuilding (see our numerous policy briefings on this issue over the last couple of years, e.g. Pires in Vol. 10: 3 and Tomlinson in Vol. 10: 1). The questions surrounding how national actors can lead peacebuilding and development efforts, and the ways in which international actors can accompany and support them in ways that develop capacity and support sustained national ownership of these processes continue to be key themes of JPD’s work.
In closing, we note with appreciation the Secretary-General's emphasis of ‘the interlinkages between sustainable development, peace, governance, human rights and the rule of law’ (S/2015/730, p. 3/16) of the post-2015 development agenda. JPD has diligently been documenting and exploring these connections for over a decade.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Maia Carter Hallward
MAIA CARTER HALLWARD is Associate Professor of Middle East Politics and International Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University
Erin Mccandless
ERIN MCCANDLESS is Academic Director of Peacebuilding at The New School and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. For more on her work see: www.erinmccandless.net
Eric Abitbol
ERIC ABITBOL is Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at the American University, School of International Service, and the Director of Peacemedia-paixmédia