Hal Culbertson
Associate Director

"All peace processes are played out to a ubiquitous soundtrack of violence,” observes John Darby in the recently published volume, Violence and Reconstruction (Notre Dame Press, 2006). The continuation — or escalation — of violence after peace accords can lead to disillusionment and undermine support for the peace process. It can also confound attempts to assess the effectiveness of peace initiatives.

Is the continued violence a sign that peace efforts failed, or a reaction to their success by parties that benefit from conflict? How can peacebuilders demonstrate that advances have really been made, when a seemingly small incident can quickly escalate, undermining years of effort? These questions loom over peace agreements, but also peacebuilding initiatives taken by non-governmental organizations and civil society groups.

Kroc Institute faculty members are increasingly being called upon to wrestle with issues such as these. Sometimes, organizations with which we have longstanding relationships request our help in assessing their peacebuilding efforts. For example, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) recently asked Larissa Fast to document Catholic peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts in Rwanda since the 1994 genocide. Her reflections on this undertaking are presented on page 18.
   
Requests also come from the policy community. With support from the Japanese government and the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations, George Lopez and David Cortright developed standards and a methodology for evaluating compliance with recommendations of the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee and the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate.

With funding from the United States Institute of Peace, the Kroc Institute and the CRS Southeast Asia Regional Office are developing a toolkit containing resources that organizations can use to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own peacebuilding activities. The toolkit project team is led by John Paul Lederach, John Darby, and myself from the Kroc Institute, and Reina Neufeldt and Myla Leguro of CRS. Over the past several months, the team facilitated workshops on the toolkit in Cambodia and at the annual Kroc-CRS Summer Institute for Peacebuilding at Notre Dame. We will feature more on the toolkit in the upcoming issue of Peace Colloquy.

The evaluation tools being developed will be particularly beneficial to our graduate students. In 2005–06, the first year that Kroc students completed field internships, several students were asked to evaluate peacebuilding efforts as part of their internships with organizations around the world.

Looking for signs of improvement in conflicts that often seem intractable is a daunting endeavor. It requires a deep understanding of both complex local realities and scholarly methods of inquiry. Given the institute’s commitment to integrating scholarship and practice, this is a task we are uniquely suited to pursue.