Is sustainable peace an illusion in a world where foreign military interventions are replacing peace negotiations as starting points for postwar reconstruction? What would it take to achieve durable peace? This book presents six provocative case studies authored by respected peacebuilding practitioners in their own societies. The studies address two cases of relative success (Guatemala and Mozambique), three cases of renewed but deeply fraught efforts (Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Palestinian Territories), and the case of Sri Lanka, where peacebuilding was aborted but where the outlines of a new peace process can be discerned.

In Peace and Rural Development in Colombia Andrés García Trujillo investigates whether peace agreements geared toward terminating internal armed conflicts trigger rural distributive changes. Combining academic rigor with an insider’s perspective, García Trujillo shows that the peace agreement in Colombia opened an exceptional window for addressing rural inequality. Yet, despite some progress, he argues that the agreement’s leverage to stir change was severely constrained by opposing actors within and outside the government. García Trujillo later applies the framework developed for the Colombian case to explain key dynamics of other post-conflict societies that have dealt with agrarian issues under a transitional context, like El Salvador or South Africa. The original theoretical framework and empirically rich analysis make Peace and Rural Development in Colombia an indispensable read for scholars and practitioners who wish to gain an understanding on the political economy of peacemaking, policy change, and rural development in Colombia and beyond.