Measuring Peace

An essential and accessible guide to the assessment of the effectiveness of peace-building policies for all those working in, or studying, the area.

For academics, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship that has long sought to understand the impact that peacebuilding may or may not have on creating a stable peace. For practitioners, it will help them become more rigorous in finding definitions even when they appear elusive and provides valuable insight into which strategic assessment and measurement tools are working for leaders in the peacebuilding industry.

The book is well documented and includes an extensive bibliography...recommended.

In Measuring Peace, Richard Caplan sets out to answer an important question for those engaged in some or other way in contributing to bringing about peace, namely 'how can we know if the peace that has been established following a civil war is a stable peace?'. Caplan emphasizes at the outset that his book is about measuring peace consolidation, not about evaluating peacebuilding success. He argues that the two topics are closely related but distinct.

In Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices and Politics, Richard Caplan asks compellingly: 'how can we know if the peace that has been established following civil war is a stable peace?'...By seeking to examine what counts as stable peace in a more strategic and robust way, Caplan also opens a window of opportunity.

...[an] excellent study on measuring success in peacebuilding...

Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices and Politics, provides a useful discussion, demonstration and overview of international efforts to measure peace consolidation and would be of particular interest to scholars of international peacebuilding and development efforts, as well as practitioners striving to learn more about the international community's efforts at measuring peace.

Measuring Peace is a spectacular scholarly achievement and clearly shows where academia can have a policy impact. It can serve as a useful tool in the hands of peacebuilders facing the daunting task of measuring the quality of peace.

Caplan is a leading scholar in the effort to encourage the international community to take the measurement of peace more seriously.

Richard Caplan is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on international organizations and conflict management, specifically on post-conflict peace and state-building. He is the author of International Governance of War-Torn Territories (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the editor of Exit Strategies and State Building (OUP, 2012) and Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict (OUP, 1996). He has served as a Specialist-Advisor to the Select Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK House of Commons, a consultant to the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States.