I ended up reading a lot of academic articles while studying peace and conflict at summer programs and for my master's degree. Some had a bigger impact on my approach than others and those are the ones I want to share.
These aren't the only things people should read. In fact, many of them are already more than a few decades old. But they give a good understanding of the peacebuilding field as a whole. They outline the assumptions the field based on and the approaches that became standardized, as well as how these have evolved and been challenged in the period up to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The invasion, as well as a) social conflicts across the Global North connected to polarization, the pandemic and populism and b) challenges to the liberal world order, have created new challenges to peacebuilding as a whole that, at the time of this writing (early 2025), are still being grappled with. How peacebuilders respond and adapt to these challenges will only be reflected in academic literature that will be published in the coming years. It's slow, but that's how this system works.
These articles, and the education I received, has a bias. The literature leans progressive, with distinct leftist (critical of oppressive structures, anti-capitalist) and liberal (human rights, rule of law, market economies, primacy of recognized states) streams. It focuses less on realist (great power politics, game theory) or security-based approaches than on schools of thought informed by Johan Galtung and conflict transformation strategies, with some important exceptions (Lewis, Boulding, etc). If you come from a different school of thought (or even if you're inclinded to agree with the authors here), take this as a conversation starter than a statement of what's right and wrong in the field. There's so much we still don't know.
