Peacemaking

Abstract

Unlike intuitively related areas such as dispute settlement, the use of force, the law of armed conflict, human rights and international criminal law, ‘peacemaking’ is not a recognised subfield of international law. It was not recognised as such in the beginning of the period under review in this volume (1989), nor by the end of it (2021). However, after the term ‘peacemaking’ rose to prominence in the 1990s as a concept and objective of global governance, legal scholars sought to capture the proliferation of peacemaking practices in legal language, coining or invoking concepts such as lex pacificatoria, ‘legal tools for peacemaking’ and jus post bellum. By the end of the period under review, none of these projects had managed to establish their version of a ‘law of peacemaking’ as a generally recognised subfield of international law. Lawyers had come relatively late to the practice of peacemaking, and when they did, the terrain – both in terms of political thought and practices – had already begun to shift. But while falling short of establishing a recognised subfield of international law, attempts to let law speak to peacemaking continue, albeit in less universalist terms.