Peacekeeping, Peace Culture and Conflict Resolution

This article presents an overview of the relationships between peacekeeping, peacebuilding and conflict resolution with an emphasis on the way in which culture and cultural analysis might be used to develop more effective and sustainable peacekeeping interventions. The article comments on the conceptualization of the role of culture in conflict resolution theory and how this has been used in attempts to address cultural barriers to effective peacekeeping in so-called first-, second- and third-generation missions. While culture has generally been defined as important in theory and practice in terms of understanding differences between actors in conflict environments, the main new argument advanced in the article is that culture, redefined specifically as peace culture, can have a more proactive role in terms of mobilizing energies for sustainable peacebuilding at different stages of the conflict spectrum. More speculatively, the article explores the idea of culture as a contributory factor in the emergence of new forms of cosmopolitan peacekeeping.