Is social capital the key to peacebuidling?

Is social capital the key to successful peacebuilding? Popularized by Coleman and Putnam during the 1970s and 1980s, this concept has since been mostly framed around Western societies, the level of their associational life, and their political and economic institutional performance. While the World Bank has attempted to use social capital as the missing link to poverty reduction strategies in Less Developed Countries in the 1990s, very little has been written on the forces at work between social capital, violent conflicts, and peacebuilding. Indeed, there is a growing consensus in the peacebuilding literature calling for post-conflict efforts to go beyond the settling for negative peace and to move towards a more encompassing and positive peace, which involves aspects of social reconciliation. Considering that one of the main objectives of the international community's interventions in violent conflicts consists in rebuilding viable heterogeneous societies, I suggest an investigation of the dynamics between of social trust, cohesion, and networks and other manifestations of social capital and collective action and efficacy in post-conflict societies. Can measuring levels of social capital give us an indication of the probability of successful peacebuilding? I will argue that the prevailing peacebuilding literature as much to gain from the work on social capital.The paper will intend to analyze and define the key concepts in both literatures and to conceptualize the main variables in order to produce a pre-fieldwork exploratory framework incorporating social capital and positive peacebuilding success. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]