Peacebuilding and Responsive Governance Project

Information for Participants

The United Nations is putting foreign troops and police into peacekeeping operations more than in the past. So are other organizations like the African Union. What works in peacekeeping? What are the kinds of interventions that create wars and make things worse for the people? How can international peacebuilding and international law contribute to justice and human development after armed conflict? These are the questions we seek to answer in the Peacebuilding and Responsive Governance Project.

We will search for those answers by talking to people in 48 countries that have experienced armed conflict and foreign peacekeepers. We plan to talk to the peacekeepers themselves, the leaders of the country, their judges, journalists, diplomats, police, humanitarian workers, bankers, public officials and ordinary people who have suffered from war. You are one of those people. We want to learn from your experience and your insights. We undertake to tell the story from all sides of the suffering fairly and well in a book many will read.

What you say when we talk to you will be confidential unless you tell us you want to be identified as the source of that information. Then we promise to send you a copy of your quote so you can correct it if we get anything wrong.

We are not interested in finding out anything of current political or military strategic significance. If you tell us anything like that we would not write it down. We are simply interested in learning lessons from the past, the lessons your personal experience can teach the world.

When we have a draft of what we have written about the successes and failures of peacebuilding in each country, we will put it up on our website. We would like to hear from you with any comments or criticisms you have. We promise to take your views into account in revising the draft.

Please visit the website at http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au/ and learn a lot more about the methods we are following in the project, the ideas we are exploring, the countries involved, and about our backgrounds. Thank-you for your help.

Leah Dunn

If you have concerns about the way we have done our research, please inform:

The Secretary, Human Research Ethics Committee Australian National University ACT 0200 Tel: +61 2 6125 7945 Fax: +61 2 6125 4807 Email: Human.Ethics.Officer@anu.edu.au

John.Braithwaite RegNet, Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University Canberra 0200, Australia Email: John.Braithwaite@anu.edu.au