ABSTRACT
The term peacebuilding is generally agreed to have become part of diplomatic discourse in 1992 when it appeared in UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s Agenda for Peace. Initially defined by Boutros Ghali as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict,” post-conflict peacebuilding was conceived as a key conflict management tool, along with preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, for use by the UN in its efforts to promote peace (UN 1992, para 21). On the face of it, peacebuilding is but one component of a multidimensional approach to fostering peace. In practice, as part of the activist international agenda that was adopted in the post-Cold War era, post-conflict peacebuilding has entailed the “re-engineering” of societies emerging from civil war along liberal lines in an effort to prevent their return to conflict (Tschirgi 2004, 4).
