A Third Generation of Multidimensional Approaches to Ending Conflict

Abstract

This chapter examines the development of multidimensional approaches to ending conflict, including UN peace operations, and the roles of intragovernmental organizations and NGOs in addressing the local, regional and global issues that create and impinge upon ‘intractable’ conflicts in the post-cold war era of global dislocation. It assesses the potential for future developments (and back-sliding), particularly as it seems that such approaches are becoming increasingly interventionary in nature as a result of the legitimization of claims for human security. It also examines recent theoretical developments and addresses the problem of whether attempts to create multidimensional approaches may continue to recreate exclusionary structures in the international system, or provide a basis for the development and acceptance of alternative types of political community in which tools for making peace play a crucial role in the creation and recreation of sustainable orders.

... in its work at the field level, the United Nations has already started to embrace a new holistic sense of security. Its efforts to reduce poverty and promote development and democratization — including electoral assistance and civil education — have gradually become more comprehensive and more integrated. All of those efforts may be described as preventive peace-building, since they attack the root causes of conflict.¹