The quality of the peace arrived at via liberal peacebuilding approaches has been poor. The related statebuilding praxis has generally been unable to respond to its critics. What is at stake is a recognition of peacebuilding's everyday political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics. This indicates the emergence of a post-liberal form of peace.

In this handbook, a diverse range of leading scholars consider the social, cultural, economic, political, and developmental underpinnings of peace. This handbook is a much-needed response to the failures of contemporary peacebuilding missions and narrow disciplinary debates, both of which have outlined the need for more interdisciplinary work in International Relations and Peace and Conflict studies. Scholars, students, and policymakers are often disillusioned with universalist and northern-dominated approaches, and a better understanding of the variations of peace and its building blocks, across different regions, is required. Collectively, these chapters promote a more differentiated notion of peace, employing comparative analysis to explain how peace is debated and contested.

This book is concerned with the role that communication - understood as including both the factual and fictional mass media as well as the performative and visual arts - can play in post-civil war peacebuilding. It engages with questions of how a society can move from the civil war conditions of discursive dehumanisation to peaceful cooperation in post-civil war settings and how peacebuilders can help communities utilise the transformative capacity of communication to encourage the reimagining of and engagement with former enemies as co-citizens. Ultimately, civil and peaceful cooperation depends on the observance of discursive civility and the building of safe discursive spaces in which civil engagement between different groups of society (including former combatants and survivors) can safely take place. This book argues that understanding communicative peacebuilding in this way is fundamental to the achievement of self-sustainable everyday peace.

This book develops a theoretical and empirical argument about the disintegration of security communities, and the subsequent breakdown of stable peace among nations, through a process of norm degeneration. It draws together two key bodies of contemporary IR literature – norms and security communities – and brings their combined insights to bear on the empirical phenomenon of disintegration. The investigation of normative change in IR is becoming increasingly popular. Most studies, however, focus on its progressive connotation. The possibility of a weakening or even disappearance of an established peaceful normative order, by contrast, tends to be often either neglected or implicitly assumed. Normative Change and Security Community Disintegration: Undoing Peace advances the contemporary body of research on the important role of norms and ideas by analytically extending recent Constructivist arguments about international norm degeneration to the regional level and by applying them to a particular type of regional order – a security community.

This book uses in-depth interview data with victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka to offer a new, sociological conceptualization of everyday life peacebuilding. It argues that sociological ideas about the nature of everyday life complement and supplement the concept of everyday life peacebuilding recently theorized within International Relations Studies (IRS). It claims that IRS misunderstands the nature of everyday life by seeing it only as a particular space where mundane, routine and ordinary peacebuilding activities are accomplished. Sociology sees everyday life also as a mode of reasoning. By exploring victims’ ways of thinking and understanding, this book argues that we can better locate their accomplishment of peacebuilding as an ordinary activity. The book is based on six years of empirical research in three different conflict zones and reports on a wealth of interview data to support its theoretical arguments. This data serves to give voice to victims who are otherwise neglected and marginalized in peace processes.

This book provides an analytical framework for understanding how the concept of quality peace can be used to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding, using social science, statistics, and case studies. Including contributions from more than 20 researchers and practitioners, it argues that the quality of the peace in a post-conflict state relates to the extent to which peace accords are implemented, the agreed-upon mechanism for the non-violent resolution of the conflict, and the available social space for civil and political actors. To arrive at the concept of 'quality peace', the authors evaluate the existing literature and identify a lack of a satisfactory means of measuring outcomes, and consequently how these might be researched comparatively. The volume problematizes the 'quality peace' concept as a way to understand the origins of armed conflict as well as problems deriving from the conflict dynamics and the need for social, political, and economic changes in the post-conflict periods. The book emphasizes five dimensions as crucial for quality peace in a post-accord society. Negotiations and agreements not only aim at avoiding the return of war but also seek to: (1) promote reconciliation, (2) develop mechanisms for resolving future disputes, (3) provide for reliable security, (4) open economic opportunities for marginalized segments of the population, and (5) generate space for civil society. These five dimensions together provide for quality peace after war. They are studied in the context of internal armed conflicts in which multiple parties have signed a peace agreement. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, civil wars, global governance, security studies, and International Relations in general.

Peacebuilding is explained by combining interpretive frameworks (paradigms) that have evolved from the subfields of international relations and comparative politics.