The United Nations is putting foreign troops and police into peacekeeping operations more than in the past. So are other organizations 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 being answered in the project Peacebuilding Compared.

This ambitious project will cover up to 48 country cases. The 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. Each case will also stand alone as a contextually rich account of successes and failures of peacebuilding in that nation.

The next stage of the project will focus on 20 Asian and African case studies, with funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme.