The Just Peacemaking Framework: What It Actually Looks Like on the Ground
Most people hear "just peacemaking" and picture well-meaning NGO workers shaking hands with warlords. The reality is a lot more procedural, and honestly, a lot less photogenic. The framework was developed in the mid-1990s around the Just Peacemaking Project at Princeton Theological Seminary. It pulled together ten practical tasks designed to prevent violence before it starts, rather than responding after bodies are already in the ground. That full phrase tends to show up in policy documents and grant proposals. It's not a slogan someone came up with for a poster. It's the working title for how practitioners actually describe the ten-task framework when they're writing program objectives or applying for funding from organizations like the United Nations or USAID. If you're reading it in academic literature, you'll usually see it shortened to just "the just peacemaking approach" or "the ten tasks." Here's how the ten tasks break down in practice, not just on paper:
First, avoid the assertion, development, or use of weapons of mass destruction. That one's straightforward and largely addressed through treaties like the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Second, address the root causes of conflict. This is where most programs stall out because "root causes" is a category that swallows every possible grievance without prioritizing any of them. Third, use cooperative conflict resolution. Fourth, acknowledge the guilt of past injustices. Fifth, support democratic participation and grassroots peace groups. Sixth, promote fair trade and development. Seventh, protect religious and cultural freedoms. Eighth, advance women's rights and participation. Ninth, strengthen international law and institutions. Tenth, work toward a just and sustainable peace. Anyone who's actually worked in conflict zones will tell you that these tasks don't happen in sequence. They overlap, contradict each other, and sometimes directly undermine one another depending on who's funding the initiative. I spent about four years working on mediation support in a region where ethnic tensions had been simmering for decades. One specific problem came up that no textbook really prepares you for. We were trying to implement task number three, cooperative conflict resolution, by bringing together community leaders from both sides of a territorial dispute. The standard approach is to create a neutral facilitation space with trained mediators. What actually happened was that the first meeting dissolved because one faction refused to sit at the same table as the other, claiming that mere physical proximity in a neutral venue constituted recognition of the other side's legitimacy over disputed land. No amount of facilitation technique could untangle that. The workaround was brutal and simple: we stopped insisting on joint sessions and switched to shuttle diplomacy, where our team moved between the two groups separately for three months before anything resembling direct dialogue was possible. It took longer, cost more in travel and personnel, and produced fewer visible "success moments" for donor reports. But it was the only way to get anything across the finish line.
The counter-intuitive thing about just peacemaking that beginners miss is that the framework assumes a level of institutional trust that rarely exists in the environments where it's most needed. The tenth task, working toward a just and sustainable peace, implicitly requires that all parties believe the institutions mediating the process have some baseline credibility. In places where those institutions are seen as instruments of colonialism, corruption, or foreign interference, the entire framework hits a wall before it gets started. You can't facilitate cooperative conflict resolution if one side views the facilitator as an occupying force by association. Another nuance that doesn't get enough attention is how task six, promoting fair trade and development, interacts with the others. Economic development initiatives often require infrastructure projects that physically alter disputed territories. Building a road through contested land to "promote development" can reignite exactly the kind of conflict the framework is trying to prevent. I've seen this happen twice in as many years. The development team and the peacebuilding team were operating on completely different timelines and different assumptions about what constituted progress. The road project was approved and broke ground before the mediation process had even identified which communities needed to be consulted. By the time the peacebuilders raised the alarm, demolishing an already-constructed road was politically impossible, so they tried to mitigate damage through compensation agreements that neither side found satisfactory. There are also scenarios where the framework simply doesn't apply. It assumes the conflict is between parties who want to resolve something, or at least parties who recognize some shared interest in avoiding mutual destruction. When you're dealing with actors whose strategy depends on perpetual instability, or where one side views peace itself as surrender, the ten tasks become abstract exercises. I worked on a project where local warlords used participation in our mediation process as a legitimacy exercise, showing up to meetings to demonstrate to their own constituencies that they were engaged in politics rather than violence, then returning to armed activity the same week. The framework gave us no mechanism for handling bad-faith participation because it was designed for conflicts where all sides, at minimum, privately wanted out.
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The honest assessment is that just peacemaking works best as a diagnostic and organizational tool rather than a playbook. It helps you categorize what's going wrong and ensures you're addressing more than just the surface symptoms. But applying it requires a lot of context-specific judgment that no framework can provide. The ten tasks are necessary conditions for sustainable peace, but they're not sufficient. You need to understand local power structures, historical grievances, economic incentives, and the specific dynamics of each conflict before any of those tasks matter. For anyone looking to engage with this seriously, the primary source material comes from the Just Peacemaking Project at Princeton. The foundational texts were published in the late nineties and early two thousandths. There are also updated volumes and commentary from scholars like John Paul Heil and Ronald Sider who have refined the approach. Practical applications show up in reports from faith-based organizations like Church World Service and secular bodies like the United States Institute of Peace. If you're evaluating whether this framework fits a particular situation, the most useful thing you can do is map the ten tasks against the specific conflict and identify which ones are actually addressable given the current power dynamics and which ones are theoretical luxuries you can't afford to pursue right now. The framework isn't a silver bullet. It won't replace diplomacy, intelligence, or the difficult conversations that happen behind closed doors. But it does provide one of the more comprehensive checklists available for making sure you're not accidentally solving one problem while creating three others. That's worth something, even if it feels inadequate when you're standing in a room watching people who don't want to talk refuse to talk.
