Focus on. Security and governance in post-conflict peacebuilding

Peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding are undergoing a shifting paradigm and focus in the international arena. Whilst the international community, via the medium of the universal body of the United Nations, has intervened in numerous and varied war ravaged countries and regions of the world since its inception after World War Two, keeping and then building the peace has been more complicated and protracted than originally envisaged. As the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan lamented, half of those countries that emerge from war succumb back to violence within five years, emphasising the depressing fact that it is easier to make the peace than it is to keep it. History has shown us that the transition from internal conflict to a sustainable peace is a fraught one.