This book examines how the liberal peace experiment of the post-Cold War environment has failed to connect with its target populations, which have instead set about transforming it according to their own local requirements. Liberal peacebuilding has caused a range of unintended consequences. These emerge from the liberal peaceâe(tm)s internal contradictions, from its claim to offer a universal normative and epistemological basis for peace, and to offer a technology and process which can be applied to achieve it. When viewed from a range of contextual and local perspectives, these top-down and distant processes often appear to represent power rather than humanitarianism or emancipation. Yet, the liberal peace also offers a civil peace and emancipation. These tensions enable a range of hitherto little understood local and contextual peacebuilding agencies to emerge, which renegotiate both the local context and the liberal peace framework, leading to a local-liberal hybrid form of peace. This might be called a post-liberal peace. Such processes are examined in this book in a range of different cases of peacebuilding and statebuilding since the end of the Cold War. This book will be of interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peace and conflict studies, international organisations and IR/Security Studies.

Moving beyond the binary argument between those who buy into the aims of creating liberal democratic states grounded in free markets and rule of law, and those who critique and oppose them, this timely and much-needed critical volume takes a fresh look at the liberal peace debate. In doing so, it examines the validity of this critique in contemporary peacebuilding and statebuilding practice through a multitude of case studies - from Afghanistan to Somalia, Sri Lanka to Kosovo. Going further, it investigates the underlying theoretical assumptions of liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as providing new theoretical propositions for understanding current interventions. Written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, alongside several new scholars making cutting edge contributions, this is an essential contribution to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of study.

This book examines the role of everyday action in accepting, resisting and reshaping interventions, and the unique forms of peace that emerge from the interactions between local and international actors. Building on critiques of liberal peace-building, it redefines critical peace and conflict studies, based on new research from 16 countries.

Africa; Sierra Leone; Afghanistan; Bosnia-Herzegovina; Timor-Leste; Sri Lanka; Palestine; Israel; United Nations; Lebanon; Cambodia; Central America.

Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be 'failed by design'? This study explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. And it looks at how far can local 'peace formation' dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, Oliver Richmond and Sandra Pogodda find answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.

This critical and comparative book is comprised of arguments for and against the dominant western style of peace interventions and post-war reconstruction that has been applied around the world. It examines and assesses the nature of the peace that these have achieved or offer for the future.

Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, ‘the local’ is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence ‘everyday peace’ is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, ‘the local’, and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the ‘local turn’ of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.