The book makes theoretical and empirical contributions to recent debates on hybrid forms of peace and ‘post-liberal’ peace. In applying concepts of power, hybridity and resistance, and providing different kinds of hybridity and resistance to explore post-conflict peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, the author makes an original contribution to existing literature by providing various ways in which power can be exercised not just between locals and internationals, but also among locals themselves and the nature of peace that is produced. This volume provides various ways in which hybridity and resistance can be manifested. A more rigorous development of these concepts not only offers a better understanding of the nature of these concepts, but also helps us to distinguish forms of hybridity and resistance that are emancipatory or transformatory from those that result in people accommodating themselves to their situation. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, International Relations and African Studies, and practitioners of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.

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

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.

The book makes theoretical and empirical contributions to recent debates on hybrid forms of peace and ‘post-liberal’ peace. In applying concepts of power, hybridity and resistance, and providing different kinds of hybridity and resistance to explore post-conflict peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, the author makes an original contribution to existing literature by providing various ways in which power can be exercised not just between locals and internationals, but also among locals themselves and the nature of peace that is produced. This volume provides various ways in which hybridity and resistance can be manifested. A more rigorous development of these concepts not only offers a better understanding of the nature of these concepts, but also helps us to distinguish forms of hybridity and resistance that are emancipatory or transformatory from those that result in people accommodating themselves to their situation. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, International Relations and African Studies, and practitioners of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.

Nowhere in the world is the demand for peace more prominent and challenging than in Africa. From state collapse and anarchy in Somalia to protracted wars and rampant corruption in the Congo; from bloody civil wars and extreme poverty in Sierra Leone to humanitarian crisis and authoritarianism in Sudan, the continent is the focus of growing political and media attention. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of conflict and peace across the continent. Bringing together a range of leading academics from Africa and beyond, Peace and Conflict in Africa is an ideal introduction to key themes of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, security and development. The book's stress on the importance of indigenous Africa approaches to creating peace makes it an innovative and exciting intervention in the field.

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.

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.