Post-Conflict Peace Building

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Post-Conflict Peace Building: A New Perspective The Hans Singer Memorial Lecture at the University of Sussex featured the viewpoint of ISS member Jan Pronk regarding post-conflict peace building. Jan was the Minister for Development Cooperation in the Netherlands in the 1970’s and again in the 1990’s. He held senior positions in UNCTAD, was Assistant Secretary General of the UN and the UN Special Envoy on Sustainable Development.(Pronk 2012) Post-conflict peace building can be defined as “strategies designed to promote a secure and stable lasting peace in which the basic human needs of the population are met and violent conflicts do not recur” (Lambourne 2004) In Jan’s speech he disagrees, stressing that the term “post-conflict” should be purged as there is always conflict in change, and development is change; instead one must worry about containing conflict through the cumulative idea of peace making, peace keeping and peace building. This aspect of his speech was most memorable and broadened a common perspective of peace building. Jan’s Idea of post-conflict peace building introduces many values which must be balanced: human development, sustainable development, and the principle of precaution. This implies that peace building has to take place in close relation to development. After all, he believes the aim “in the largest sense, is to address the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice, and political oppression” when regarding development. So, post-conflict peace building could take the form of concrete projects contributing to mutually beneficial social and economic development. (E.g. the field of agriculture, transportation, water and energy resources.) However as stressed in the lecture, when doing so, one should not use the term “post-conflict peace building”. Peace building is not a post-conflict operation. As Jan states, “it is

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