Peacebuilding
Defining peacebuilding: The definition of peacebuilding varies depending on the actor, with some definitions specifying what activities fall within the scope of peacebuilding or restricting peacebuilding to post-conflict interventions. Even if peacebuilding has remained a largely amorphous concept without clear guidelines or goals, common to all definitions is the agreement that improving human security is the central task of peacebuilding. In this sense, peacebuilding includes a wide range of efforts by diverse actors in government and civil society at the community, national, and international levels to address the root causes of violence and ensure civilians have freedom from fear (negative peace), freedom from want (positive peace) and freedom from humiliation before, during, and after violent conflict.
Although many of peacebuilding's aims overlap with those of peacemaking, peacekeeping and conflict resolution, it is a distinct idea. Peacemaking involves stopping an ongoing conflict, whereas peacebuilding happens before a conflict starts or once it ends. Peacekeeping prevents the resumption of fighting following a conflict; it does not address the underlying causes of violence or work to create societal change, as peacebuilding does. Peacekeeping also differs from peacebuilding in that it only occurs after conflict ends, not before it begins. Conflict resolution does not include some components of peacebuilding, such as state building and socioeconomic development.
While some use the term to refer to only post-conflict or post-war contexts, most use the term more broadly to refer to any stage of conflict. Before conflict becomes violent, preventive peacebuilding efforts, such as diplomatic, economic development, social, educational, health, legal and security sector reform programs, address potential sources of instability and violence. This is also termed conflict prevention. Peacebuilding efforts aim to manage, mitigate, resolve and transform central aspects of the conflict through official diplomacy; as well as through civil society peace processes and informal dialogue, negotiation, and mediation. Peacebuilding addresses economic, social and political root causes of violence and fosters reconciliation to prevent the return of structural and direct violence. Peacebuilding efforts aim to change beliefs, attitudes and behaviors to transform the short and long term dynamics between individuals and groups toward a more stable, peaceful coexistence. Peacebuilding is an approach to an entire set of interrelated efforts that support peace.
Peace-building is a term of more recent origin that, as used in the report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (2000), defines "activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war. "
In 2007, the UN Secretary-General's Policy Committee defined peacebuilding as follows: "Peacebuilding involves a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and sustainable development. Peacebuilding strategies must be coherent and tailored to specific needs of the country concerned, based on national ownership, and should comprise a carefully prioritized, sequenced, and therefore relatively narrow set of activities aimed at achieving the above objectives."
Peacebuilding can apply knowledge and theories from peace and conflict studies.

History of peacebuilding: As World War II ended in the mid-1940s, international initiatives such as the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions and The Marshall Plan consisted of long-term postconflict intervention programs in Europe with which the United States and its allies aimed to rebuild the continent following the destruction of World War II. The focus of these initiatives revolved around a narrative of peacekeeping and peacemaking.
Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term "peacebuilding" in 1975, arguing that "peace has a structure different from, perhaps over and above, peacekeeping and ad hoc peacemaking... The mechanisms that peace is based on should be built into the structure and be present as a reservoir for the system itself to draw up. ... More specifically, structures must be found that remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur." Galtung's work emphasized a bottom-up approach that decentralized social and economic structures, amounting to a call for a societal shift from structures of coercion and violence to a culture of peace.
Then, as the Cold War and the various phenomena of its fizzling came to a close (e.g. civil wars between Third World countries, Reagonomics, "Bringing the State Back In"), American sociologist John Paul Lederach further refined the concept of peacebuilding through several 1990s publications that focus on engaging grassroots, local, NGO, international and other actors to create a sustainable peace process, especially with respect to cases of intractable deadly conflict where he was actively mediating between warring parties. From a political-institutional perspective, he does not advocate the same degree of structural change as Galtung. However, Lederach's influence in the conceptual evolution of peacebuilding still reflects Galtung's original vision for "positive peace" by detailing, categorizing, & expanding upon the sociocultural processes through which we address both direct and structural elements of violent conflict.
Peacebuilding has since expanded to include many different dimensions, such as disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and rebuilding governmental, economic and civil society institutions. The concept was popularized in the international community through UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 report An Agenda for Peace. The report defined post-conflict peacebuilding as an "action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict". At the 2005 World Summit, the United Nations began creating a peacebuilding architecture based on Kofi Annan's proposals. The proposal called for three organizations: the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which was founded in 2005; the UN Peacebuilding Fund, founded in 2006; and the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, which was created in 2005. These three organizations enable the Secretary-General to coordinate the UN's peacebuilding efforts. National governments' interest in the topic has also increased due to fears that failed states serve as breeding grounds for conflict and extremism and thus threaten international security. Some states have begun to view peacebuilding as a way to demonstrate their relevance. However, peacebuilding activities continue to account for small percentages of states' budgets.

Categorizing approaches to peacebuilding: In a very broad sense, there are three primary approaches to peacebuilding, which each correspond to three primary types of peace: (1) negative peace vs. (2) positive peace (Galtung) vs. (3) justpeace (Lederach, sometimes spelled "just peace"). In turn, these three types of peace correspond respectively to three primary types of violence: (1) direct violence vs. (2) structural violence vs. (3) cultural violence.

Negative peace: direct violence: Negative peace refers to the absence of direct, or "hot" violence, which refers to acts that impose immediate harm on a given subject or group. In this sense, negative peacebuilding (aimed at negative peace) intentionally focuses on addressing the direct factors driving harmful conflict. When applying the term "peacebuilding" to this work, there is an explicit attempt by those designing and planning a peacebuilding effort to reduce direct violence.

Positive peace: structural violence: Positive peace refers to the absence of both direct violence as well as structural violence. Structural violence refers to the ways that systems & institutions in society cause, reinforce, or perpetuate direct violence. In this sense, positive peacebuilding (aimed at positive peace) intentionally focuses on address the indirect factors driving or mitigating harmful conflict, with an emphasis on engaging institutions, policies, and political-economic conditions as they relate to exploitation and repression.

Justpeace: cultural violence: Justpeace (or "just peace") refers to the absence of all three types of violence enumerated above: direct, structural, & cultural. Cultural violence refers to aspects of culture that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence—the ways in which direct or structural violence look or feel "right" according to the moral fabric of society. In this sense, just peacebuilding (aimed at justpeace) intentionally combines the methods of "positive peacebuilding" (as described above) with a special focus on building and transforming sustainable relationships among conflicting sectors & cultures in such a way that promotes more alignment between each culture's mores (standards of "right" behavior or conditions) and the extent to which those mores are built/equipped to prevent, resolve, and heal patterns of direct and structural violence.
When Lederach first proposed the term in the late 1990s, he wrote:

Inspired by colleagues from the Justapaz Centre in Bogota, Colombia, I propose that by the year 2050 the word justpeace be accepted in everyday common language and appear as an entry in the Webster's Dictionary. It will read:Justpeace \ jest pés \ n, vi, (justpeace-building) 1: an adaptive process-structure of human relationships characterized by high justice and low violence 2: an infrastructure of organization or governance that responds to human conflict through nonviolent means as first and last resorts 3: a view of systems as responsive to the permanency and interdependence of relationships and change.

Institutionalising peacebuilding: Following periods of protracted violence, peacebuilding often takes shape in the form of constitutional agreements, laying out a path for co-operation and tolerance between former warring factions. A common method that has been applied in a variety of states is consociationalism. Initially set forth by political scientist Arend Lijphart, consociationalism calls for a power-sharing form of democracy.