Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 8/5/2007
Ending Wars and Building Peace
2007 March
Abstract
Ending armed conflict has long been a concern of practitioners and scholars of international relations. Recent years have seen new attention to questions of “building peace” beyond the immediate termination of war, primarily driven by the experience of civil wars in the 1990s and the very mixed record of international involvement—from relative successes like Namibia, Mozambique, and El Salvador through partial successes like Cambodia, Bosnia, and East Timor to abysmal failures like Angola and Rwanda.
The costs of failing to build peace are stark and manifold. By most accounts, a significant number of armed conflicts relapse to war, and many “new” wars occur in countries that have failed to consolidate peace. When peacebuilding fails, parties to conflict often unleash greater violence than in the prior war, as was grimly attested to by the nearly 2 million dead after peace unraveled in Angola in 1991 and Rwanda in 1993-94.War also erases the gains of development in a process that some have called “reverse development,” in turn contributing to further warfare, violence, and impoverishment.1 War-torn societies, characterized by high rates of displacement, damaged infrastructure, and weak or absent institutions, are also more vulnerable to disease. They are further susceptible to other “pathogens” like arms trafficking, illicit commodity flow, transnational crime, and terrorist networks, which can foster broader ills.2
