Abstract

Post-conflict reconstruction first appeared on the agenda of the United Nations and multilateral development agencies in the early and mid-1990s. With the end of the Cold War, many proxy wars in developing countries came to an end and other conflicts in weak and failing states escalated, so that new strategies were needed to create the conditions for self-sustaining peace in post-conflict settings. In this context, the United Nations and other global and regional agencies exploited their new scope of action to devise reconstruction strategies und build up respective capacities. Over the years, commonly accepted principles and a ‘standard operating procedure’ (Ramsbotham 2000) developed that guided efforts at stabilising peace processes in the aftermath of armed conflict or war.