Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices, and Politics

How can we know if the peace that has been established following a civil war is a stable peace? More than half of all countries that experienced civil war since World War II have suffered a relapse into violent conflict, in some cases more than once. Meanwhile the international community expends billions of dollars and deploys tens of thousands of personnel each year in support of efforts to build peace in countries emerging from violent conflict.

In this talk, Professor Richard Caplan (University of Oxford) introduces his new book – ‘Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices, and Politics’ - which argues that efforts to build peace are hampered by the lack of effective means of assessing progress towards the achievement of a consolidated peace. Rarely, if ever, do peacebuilding organizations and governments seek to ascertain the quality of the peace that they are helping to build and the contribution that their engagement is making (or not) to the consolidation of peace. More rigorous assessments of the robustness of peace are needed. These assessments require clarity about the characteristics of, and the requirements for, a stable peace. This in turn requires knowledge of the local culture, local history, and the specific conflict dynamics at work in a given conflict situation. Better assessment can inform peacebuilding actors in the reconfiguration and reprioritization of their operations in cases where conditions on the ground have deteriorated or improved. To build a stable peace, Caplan argues, it is important to take the measure of peace.

Richard Caplan is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on international organizations and conflict management, specifically on post-conflict peace- and state-building. He is the author of International Governance of War-Torn Territories (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the editor of Exit Strategies and State Building (OUP, 2012) and Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict (OUP, 1996). He has served as a Specialist-Advisor to the Select Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK House of Commons, a consultant to the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States.