ABSTRACT
In his report In Larger Freedom Secretary General Kofi Annan prefaced his
proposal for the creation of a UN Peacebuilding Commission with the alarming
estimate that ‘[r]oughly half of all countries that emerge from war lapse back
into violence within five years’ (Annan 2005, chap. 3, para. 114). He identified
‘a gaping hole in the UN institutional machinery: no part of the UN system
effectively addresses the challenges of helping countries with the transition
from war to lasting peace’ (chap. 3, para. 114). This telling failure suggests that
for peace to be sustainable it cannot simply be made through security and/or
justice interventions; it must, instead, be built through multi-pronged and
integrated strategies. This insight underlies the logic of the UN Peacebuilding
GENDER JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL AND GLOBAL
Commission’s focus on coordination and integration of these activities in order to
achieve lasting results. The Peacebuilding Commission’s approach to this issue has, however, been
primarily operational. The mandate of the Commission is to assist, enable and
empower post-conflict states to develop and bring to fruition their own vision for
peace and the path to achieving it. This approach clearly reflects a commitment
to contextualized strategies that recognize and respond to the particularities
of the society in question. The Commission’s means of achieving this work has
been to bring together the actors and agencies responsible for these activities
and interventions and encourage them to share information with one another
and coordinate their efforts largely through meetings and a common reporting
structure. But five years after its advent, the mandated review of the
Commission concluded that these efforts have been disappointing at best (United
Nations 2010, Executive Summary).
