Angola: Landmine Clearance & Land Rights: Outcome of Non-Integrated Peacebuilding (2012)

Introduction

With the lessons learned from peacebuilding experiences now becoming widely known, efforts need to progress beyond the pursuit of individual peacebuilding priorities as separate endeavors after wars, toward greater integration of these. Such a need comes with the recent realization that, 1) success in one priority of peacebuilding can detract from another, 2) there can be unexpected and often volatile repercussions due to specific interactions between parts of separate peacebuilding priorities, and 3) peacebuilding priorities and their projects and policies, while derived and implemented separately and on their own merits, do in fact interact robustly with each other on the ground in a largely unplanned and unexamined manner. With the international community’s understanding of peacebuilding having progressed significantly in recent years, there emerges the opportunity to examine certain problematic interactions between specific priority areas of peacebuilding in order to find ways to mitigate acutely negative outcomes at a minimum, and enhance the prospects for complementarity so that such interaction contributes to, instead of detracts from durable peace.