THE National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) mandate is provided for in section 253 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No 20) Act of 2013 and the NPRC Act Chapter 10:32 of 2018. It was as a result of the realisation of the social and political will and aspirations of Zimbabweans to copy their past as they transit into a harmonious future. Its full meaning cannot be well understood in isolation, but rather it should be examined within the broader context of the evolution of peace and security on the international arena that is at the United Nations (UN) and subsequent regional groups of the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (Sadc). As far as history has been recorded, the majority of ethnic groupings and modern States have evolved out of conflicts over political, economic, social and cultural or territorial differences. This has remained the greatest threat to international peace and security throughout the world. As a result of globalisation and colonisation, Western approaches to conflict resolutions continued to dominate on the international scene with the vast influence emanating from the Nuremberg war trials and conventional courts which tended to favour retributive justice as a mechanism to resolve conflicts. These mechanisms tended to favour punitive measures on perpetrators with little regard to conflict management and ignoring the welfare of the victims and survivors. As the need for governments from a violent past and repression to societal stability grew louder and louder there was a realisation of the need to strike a balance between retributive justice and restorative justice, the need to punish the offender and the need to rehabilitate his/her society for the purposes of fostering reconciliation and integration. The UN began to bear the brunt of oversubscribed costs associated with peacekeeping missions as conflicts continued to recur. It was out of this predicament that the UN Security Council requested its secretary-general to make an analysis and recommendation to strengthen peacekeeping and peace-making. In 1992, then UN secretary-general Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s response to the request was a document entitled An Agenda for Peace wherein he outlined four key essential elements (four Ps) to deal with conflict: (1) Preventive diplomacy/conflict prevention — early warning systems’ mechanisms to prevent conflicts, (2) Peace-making/conflict resolution — failure to prevent then engage in peace-making, (3) Peacekeeping/conflict management — monitoring and implementation of agreed framework, (4) Peacebuilding/conflict transformation — addresses root causes of the conflict to rebuild and promote reconciliation. The four UN essential elements which later cascaded down to regional groupings and individual member States was adopted as international best practice mechanisms to resolve conflicts. As a result of the end of the Cold War era, there was a spectacular rise in the number of conflicts hence increased demand for UN intervention, the additional burden on th