USIP launches "Peace Terms" Glossary

What exactly is a “conflict entrepreneur”? What does the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) mean by a “resource curse”? And perhaps most importantly, what is the difference between peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding?

To help practitioners, scholars, and students answer these questions, USIP has developed „Peace Terms: A Glossary of Terms for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding“. This extensive glossary provides short definitions of a wide range of complex and often confusing terms used in the field of conflict resolution.

Peace Terms grew out of the development of courses for the Institute’s new Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, the education and training arm of the Institute.

USIP’s Academy offers practitioner-oriented courses at the Institute’s headquarters in Washington and elsewhere; conducts conflict management workshops and training in conflict zones abroad; and makes many of its courses and other resources available online to professionals, teachers, and students around the world.

In developing this glossary, USIP realized that it needed to reach broad agreement on terminology, especially given the cross-disciplinary nature of the field, and the fact that many of the terms are contested in some way.

A wide range of online and print sources, as well as the senior staff at USIP, were consulted in the process of producing the glossary. Still, Peace Terms is by no means the last word, and the web site includes a comment function that solicits feedback from users, enabling us to start a conversation with our audience as we refine this compendium.

The editor of the glossary, Dan Snodderly, served as USIP’s director of publications from 1993 to 2004, and previously worked as an editor and writer at Cornell University Press and Encyclopaedia Britannica.
To access the online version of the glossary click here.