In this chapter we evaluate not only how different paradigms approach the topic of peacebuilding but also how they compare and contrast with one another. This essay suggests that despite some clear incompatibilities, realism, liberalism, constructivism, cosmopolitanism, critical theory, public policy, and localism share some common ideas about how to pragmatically resolve conflicts, including focusing on the participants of these conflicts, developing locally grounded solutions, maintaining long-term commitments, and focusing on comprehensive approaches to peace. The main divide, we suggest, is between understandings of power in practice, with the more monist approaches positing that local actions come from structures that are not easily perceived. This critique, however, is minimized by the reality that all of the paradigms agree that peace cannot be sustained without both tempering the prerogatives of power with ideas of equality and consulting local actors. We conclude this chapter with comments about the benefits a cross-paradigmatic approach to peacebuilding has from methodological and theoretical standpoints.

This chapter explains the cosmopolitan nature of the law of peacebuilding per se and, second, identifies laws and international developments that have indirect effects on peacebuilding and peace law by creating a process of building peace. The practices of states and other actors and their expectations of appropriate conduct create a dialectic that makes legal obligations a cost that states must calculate in their decisions to comply with hard and soft law requirements, obligations, and contested or denied responsibilities. We compare international lawas cosmopolitanism to the other major paradigms used to explain peacebuilding success and failures -- realism, liberalism, constructivism -- demonstrating the ways in which our approach complements and diverges from these approaches. We next discuss the concept of a human right to peace and then address peace as an outcome of international law. We conclude this chapter with some thoughts about the importance of the development of peace law.

The debate internationally on the conditions for peace and for sustaining peacebuilding has been characterized by a considerable degree of conceptual confusion and theoretical disagreements. There is a great need for clarification – or even a need to find common ground to avoid gratuitous or rhetorical differences and to search for more broadly perceived practical recommendations. Although policy makers and practitioners may not ordinarily benefit from theoretical debates among academics, especially if conceptualization is quite abstract, the assumptions and conclusions of these debates can and often do affect public discourses. The current volumeattempts to bridge what appear to be six or seven paradigmatic differences founded on different assumptions, questions, and conclusions about what is significant about the peacebuilding efforts that developed since then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace in 1992