Exploring Varieties of Peace: Advancing the Agenda

Abstract

Within peace and conflict research, the study of peace has received far less scholarly attention than the study of war and violence (Gleditsch et al., 2014). Moreover, among the studies that pay particular attention to peace, a negative peace conception, which equates peace with the absence of direct violence between formerly warring parties, has generally dominated. Consequently, peace itself is underconceptualised. Existing conceptions of peace do not provide analytical tools that can systematically describe, compare, and explain how peace varies across contexts. By way of illustration, the peace in Sri Lanka is evidently different from the peace in South Africa or the peace in Cambodia, and peace in all of these contexts has also evolved in different ways over time. Postwar processes of peacebuilding and development are complex and messy, and the outcomes are both unpredictable and highly diverse. This situation has prompted recent calls for the development of new theoretical frameworks, analytical tools, and methodologies that can enable nuanced empirical analyses and assessments of peace across empirical cases (e.g., Davenport et al., 2018; Diehl, 2016; Höglund & Söderberg Kovac, 2010; Jarstad et al., 2019).