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Canada and Missions for Peace resulted from a convergence of several strands of academic research, policy development, and institutional collaboration around the new peacebuilding agenda. This book is also an expression of a new approach to international affairs that explores the complex interface between foreign policy, international security, and international development.

Canada and Missions for Peace, originally conceived as a follow-up to an earlier book edited by Robert Miller, Aid as Peacemaker: Canadian Development Assistance and Third World Conflict, was intended to be an examination of Canada’s engagement in international efforts to bring peace to three countries caught in the ravages of violent conflict: Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Somalia. However, the book’s evolution coincided with, and was influenced by, a critical assessment within Canada and the international community of the new peacebuilding agenda.

Peacebuilding is a fairly new concept and an even newer field of study. It has been only in the last 2 years, for example, that Canada established peacebuilding programs or units in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). During the same period, a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and academic programs with a special focus on the practice or study of peacebuilding also emerged. Yet, only a decade ago, peacebuilding was a concept barely used within either research or policy circles. Moreover, NGOs that practiced peacebuilding rarely identified their work in those terms.

Students of international affairs agree that it was the dismantling of the Berlin Wall — a symbol of a dangerously divided world — that gave the international community the opportunity to view peace not simply as the preservation of the precarious balance of power among competing blocs, but as an ongoing concern for human security in a rapidly changing global system. But it was former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali who gave political currency to the concept of peacebuilding when he submitted his report An Agenda for Peace to the 47th Session of the UN on 17 June 1992.

The expectations and hopes for a new world order that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall and underlaid the Secretary-General’s report were quickly put to the test with the violent thrust of local and regional conflicts into the international arena in the early 1990s. The international community responded to these crises with a variety of instruments and varying degrees of success. The elaborate architecture of international security that had evolved since 1945 and rested on state-centric concepts of security in a system of sovereign states proved inadequate for dealing with the violent threats to peace and security that emerged after the Cold War. The result has been a much-needed, critical rethinking among scholars, as well as among policymakers, of the nature and dynamics of peace and conflict in the final years of the

20th century. It is still too early to tell whether such rethinking will ultimately lead to the construction of a new peacebuilding architecture that combines a concern for international security at the systemic level with a concern for human security at the societal level.

Canada and Missions for Peace is part of a growing wave of research and scholarship critically examining the imperatives of peace-building in the post-Cold War era. However, in several ways, this book takes a unique approach. First and foremost, it focuses on the motivations, dynamics, and impacts of Canada’s involvement in international peacebuilding efforts. Second, going beyond conventional analyses of Canadian foreign policy, it situates Canada’s peacebuilding efforts in the complex domestic and international conditions that obtained in three very different contexts: Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Somalia. Finally, drawing on Canada’s early experiences with peacebuilding, it provides sobering insights and useful recommendations to guide future policy and programing in peacebuilding.

Although this special collection focuses primarily on Canada’s engagement in three distinct international missions for peace, it sheds light on the multiple interests and policy imperatives that underlie all peacebuilding efforts at local, national, and international levels. Thus, it is intended to make a contribution to the broader international discourse on peacebuilding.

Canada and Missions for Peace also represents a new form of collaboration among academics and policy-research institutes. Drawing on the work of researchers from three different Canadian academic institutions, the project was made possible through a productive partnership between IDRC and the Parliamentary Centre — two institutions that recently expanded their programs to address the challenges faced by countries undergoing political transition after violent conflict.

This volume is a contribution to the programing objectives of IDRC’s new Peacebuilding and Reconstruction Program Initiative, which supports research on concrete experiences in peacebuilding and reconstruction in order to generate a knowledge base to guide policy and action at the local, national, and international levels. In many ways, the Parliamentary Centre is a natural ally in this task, as it was one of the first Canadian actors to begin wrestling with the conceptual and practical challenge of fitting together the political, economic, and social pieces of the peacebuilding puzzle. The type of research contained in Canada and Missions for Peace can play a catalytic role in facilitating dialogue, consensus building, coalition building, and policy development in both the North and the South.

The approach adopted in this volume also supports the multilevel programing framework of the Peacebuilding and Reconstruction Program Initiative. Through its detailed case studies, Canada and Missions for Peace generates country-specific insights and understanding. Yet, its broader examination of the idea of a mission for peace pushes us to consider the larger, generalizable features of these cases that could inform future decisions by development actors in conflict-prone regions. The book’s twofold focus on the specific experiences of the cases and the broader set of operational and policy issues they raise presents a well-grounded and analytical argument that, it is hoped, will be a useful contribution to ongoing discussion of the challenge of peace-building and postconflict reconstruction.

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