About the Project

The United Nations is putting foreign troops and police into peacekeeping operations more than in the past. So are other organisations like the African Union. What works in peacebuilding? What are the kinds of interventions that create wars and make things worse for the people? How can international peacebuilding and international law contribute to justice and human development after armed conflict? These are the questions we seek to answer in the Peacebuilding Compared Project.

This research will analyse peacebuilding strategies from diverse contexts in search of keys to effectiveness. Restorative and responsive regulatory theory, useful in many other domains, will be tested on unique data on governance of peacebuilding. This ambitious project will cover up to 50 armed conflicts and is expected to span 20 years. Each case will stand alone as contextually rich accounts of successes and failures of peacebuilding in that nation as well as helping to develop an integrated theory of the governance of peacebuilding in societies suffering armed conflict.

We aspire to wider comparative breadth and synthesis than is available from existing research, while leaning on the greater depth and more intensive local engagement in the work of area experts. Breadth of ambition will be combined with an attitude of humility and appreciation for learning from the more nuanced work of those with stronger local language skills and deeper knowledge of single sites.

The first five years of the project will focus on Indonesia , the Pacific, and South-East Asian case studies, with funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme and a Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship held by Professor John Braithwaite for a period of five years.

Researchers: John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth, Valerie Braithwaite & Kate Macfarlane

Further information:
Draft discussion paper: Peacebuilding Compared Project