Critical peace assessment

Abstract

The problems and opportunities presented by stalled and unfulfilled peace require specialist diagnosis so that peace-supporting interventions and initiatives may be better targeted. To that end, this chapter proposes that conflict assessments, the diagnostic tool used by intervening NGOs, international organisations and development-minded third party governments to analyse conflicts, are modified and extended to post-peace accord scenarios. To a certain extent this is already happening, with some organisations involved in peace interventions conducting Peace and Conflict Impact Assessments (PCIA) to gauge the extent to which their activities excite or temper conflict.1 This chapter advocates a more specialist and fundamentally critical approach. ‘Critical peace assessments’ have the potential to play a major role in the analysis of postpeace accord societies, allowing internal and external actors in a peace process to identify those factors restraining and facilitating the fulfilment of peace. Information gleaned via a critical peace assessment exercise should allow intervening agencies and local actors to prioritise issues and sectors deserving of attention and encourage the strategic coordination of peace-support activities. Crucially, a critical peace assessment is an opportunity for a critical analysis of a peace process or accord and should help identify the inadequacies of a peace accord as.