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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 peace’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...

This edited volume focuses on disentangling the interplay of local peacebuilding processes and international policy, via comparative theoretical and empirical work on the question of legitimacy and authority.

This book examines the transformation of the discourse and praxis of peace, from its early beginnings in the literature on war and power, to the development of intellectual and theoretical discourses of peace, contrasting this with the development of practical approaches to peace, and examining the intellectual and policy evolution regarding peace.

As Oliver Richmond explains, there is a level to peacemaking that operates in the realm of dialogue, declarations, symbols and rituals. But after all this pomp and circumstance is where the reality of security, development, politics, economics, identity, and culture figure in; conflict, cooperation, and reconciliation are at their most vivid at the local scale. Thus local peace operations are crucial to maintaining order on the ground even in the most violent contexts. However, as Richmond argues, such local capacity to build peace from the inside is generally left unrecognized, and it has been largely ignored in the policy and scholarly literature on peacebuilding. In Peace and Political Order, Richmond looks at peace processes as they scale up from local to transnational efforts to consider how to build a lasting and productive peace. He takes a comparative and expansive look at peace efforts in conflict situations in countries around the world to consider what local voices might suggest about the inadequacy of peace processes engineered at the international level. As well, he explores how local workers act to modify or resist peace processes headed by international NGOs, and to ...

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.

Hybrid Forms of Peace provides cutting edge research and debates from a range of leading experts and emerging voices in critical peace and conflict studies. Drawing on case studies from sixteen countries, it examines the role of everyday activities and hybridization in (re)shaping international peace-building on the ground. This book provides insights into the challenges 6 and opportunities 6 of building peace, and the role of localized forms of human agency in this. It is a must-read for scholars, students and practitioners of peace-building who wish to understand the 'on the ground' realities of peace-building in the contemporary era.

This study explores three generations of approaches to ending conflict and examines how, in the context of the failings of the Westphalian international system, their peacekeeping, mediation and negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding approaches as well as UN peace operations, and asks via an empirical and theoretical analysis, what role such approaches have played and are playing in replicating an international system prone to intractable forms of conflict.

This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in International Relations (IR) theory. The book examines the concept of peace and its usage in the main theoretical debates in IR, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory and post-structuralism, as well as in the more direct debates on peace and conflict studies. It explores themes relating to culture, development, agency and structure, not just in terms of representations of international relations, and of peace, but in terms of the discipline of IR itself. The work also specifically explores the recent mantras associated with liberal and neoliberal versions of peace, which appear to have become foundational for much of the mainstream literature in IR and for doctrines for peace and development in the policy world. Analysing war has often led to the dominance - and mitigation - of violence as a basic assumption in, and response to, the problems of international relations. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that IR offers a rich basis for the study of peace, which has advanced significantly over the last century or so. It also proposes...

A critical assessment of current liberal approaches to post-conflict statebuilding with constructive suggestions as to where improvements might be made. Newly available in paperback.

"As a consequence of the powerful critique aimed at the only successful international and state level peace architecture in modernity soon after its post-Cold War apogee, the liberal peace system, has been reshaped from above and below. This system had connected military intervention, human rights, democracy, and capitalism with security, peace and order, and both defined and enabled political emancipation in the modern world. Its 'contrapuntal' processes have married a loose alliance of international and local, formal and informal actors, engaged in what became known in policy and academic terms as peacebuilding. Indeed, more broadly the history of much of the international system is focused implicitly on the production of peace of varying qualities, even as war and competition remain endemic. As Hinsley, once pointed out (echoing many idealist, pacifist, and critical thinkers before him), the aim of planning a 'perpetual peace' is probably as old as war itself. Just war thinking, spanning Aristotle and Cicero to Augustine was an important step along the way, seeking ethical control over war, perhaps through international law. Dante sought a universal peace in his book,...

Western struggles—and failures—to create functioning states in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan have inspired questions about whether statebuilding projects are at all viable, or whether they make the lives of their intended beneficiaries better or worse. In this groundbreaking book, Oliver Richmond asks why statebuilding has been so hard to achieve, and argues that a large part of the problem has been Westerners’ failure to understand or engage with what local peoples actually want and need. He interrogates the liberal peacebuilding industry, asking what it assumes, what it is getting wrong, and how it could be more effective.

This book explores hybrid peacebuilding in Asia, focusing on local intermediaries bridging the gaps between incumbent governments and insurgents, national leadership and the grassroots constituency, and local stakeholders and international intervenors. The contributors shed light on the functions of rebel gatekeepers in Bangsamoro, the Philippines, and Buddhist Peace monks in Cambodia to illustrate the mechanism of dialogue platforms through which gaps are filled and the nature of hybrid peace is negotiated. The book also discusses the dangers of hybrid peacebuilding by examining the cases of India and Indonesia where national level illiberal peace was achieved at the expense of welfare of minority groups. They suggest a possible role of outsiders in hybrid peacebuilding and mutually beneficial partnership between them and local intermediaries.

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.

A critical assessment of current liberal approaches to post-conflict statebuilding with constructive suggestions as to where improvements might be made.

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.

This study explores three generations of approaches to ending conflict and examines how, in the context of the failings of the Westphalian international system, their peacekeeping, mediation and negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding approaches as well as UN peace operations, and asks via an empirical and theoretical analysis, what role such approaches have played and are playing in replicating an international system prone to intractable forms of conflict.

Many ceasefires and peace agreements in civil conflict are initially unsuccessful. Whilst some give way to renewed and often escalating violence, others have become interminably protracted leading to lengthy negotiations in which concessions are rare. Given the huge material and human costs of a failed peace process, the international community has a strong interest in helping these processes succeed and addressing threats to their implementation. This publication focuses on the groups and tactics (referred to as 'spoilers') that actively seek to obstruct or undermine conflict settlement through a variety of means, including terrorism and violence, drawing upon experience from Northern Ireland, the Basque region, Bosnia, Colombia, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, the Caucasus and Kashmir. It explores the concept of 'spoiling' and spoiling behaviours from a broad range of interests involved (including rebel groups and insurgents, diasporas and governments), considers how this can be addressed, and demonstrates how ill-conceived or imposed peace processes can themselves contribute to the problem.

This book examines how gendered agency emerges in peacebuilding contexts. It develops a feminist critique of the international peacebuilding interventions, through a study of transitional justice policies and practices implemented in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and local activists’ responses to official discourses surrounding them. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the book also advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognising women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes, are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialise before, during, and after conflict. This study establishes a new avenue of analysis for understanding responses and resistances to international peacebuilding, by offering a sustained engagement with feminist social and political theory.

Introduction: thinking anew about peace operation / Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams. The next stage in peace operations theory? / Alex J. Bellamy. Peacekeeping and critical theory / Michael Pugh. The responsibility to protect? Imposing the liberal peace / David Chandler. UN peacebuilding operations and the dilemma of the peacebuilding consensus / Oliver P. Richmond. Peace operations and the international financial institutions: insights from Rwanda and Sierra Leone / Paul Williams. Gender and UN peace operations: the confines of modernity / Tarja Väyrynen. Alternatives to peacekeeping in Korea: the role of non-state actors and face-to-face encounters / Roland Bleiker. Critical security studies and the United Nations preventive deployment in Macedonia / Eli Stamnes. Conclusion: what future for peace operations? Brahimi and beyond / Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams.

Young People and Everyday Peace is grounded in the stories of young people who live in Los Altos de Cazucá, an informal peri-urban community in Soacha, to the south of Colombia’s capital Bogotá. The occupants of this community have fled the armed conflict and exist in a state of marginalisation and social exclusion amongst ongoing violences conducted by armed gangs and government forces. Young people negotiate these complexities and offer pointed critiques of national politics as well as grounded aspirations for the future. Colombia’s protracted conflict and its effects on the population raise many questions about how we think about peacebuilding in and with communities of conflict-affected people. Building on contemporary debates in International Relations about post-liberal, everyday peace, Helen Berents draws on feminist International Relations and embodiment theory to pay meaningful attention to those on the margins. She conceptualises a notion of embodied-everyday-peace-amidst-violence to recognise the presence and voice of young people as stakeholders in everyday efforts to respond to violence and insecurity. In doing so, Berents argues for and engages a more complex...

Recognizing the vital importance of concepts in shaping our understanding of international relations, this ground-breaking new book puts concepts front and centre, systematically unpacking them in a clear, critical and engaging way. With contributions from some of the foremost authorities in the field, Concepts in World Politics explores 17 core concepts, from democracy to globalization, sovereignty to revolution, and covers: The multiple meanings of a concept, where these meanings come from, and how they are employed theoretically and practically The consequences of using concepts to frame the world in one way or another The method of concept analysis A challenging and stimulating read, Concepts in World Politics is an indispensable guide for all students of international relations looking to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of world politics.

The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750 examines the varied and multifaceted scholarship surrounding the topic of peace and engages in a fruitful dialogue about the global history of peace since 1750. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book includes contributions from authors working in fields as diverse as history, philosophy, literature, art, sociology, and Peace Studies. The book crosses the divide between historical inquiry and Peace Studies scholarship, with traditional aspects of peace promotion sitting alongside expansive analyses of peace through other lenses, including specific regional investigations of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Divided thematically into six parts that are loosely chronological in structure, the book offers a broad overview of peace issues such as peacebuilding, state building, and/or conflict resolution in individual countries or regions, and indicates the unique challenges of achieving peace from a range of perspectives. Global in scope and supported by regional and temporal case studies, the volume is an essential resource for educators, activists, and policymakers involved in promoting peace and...

This book examines how local agencies in Cambodia and Mindanao (the Philippines) have developed their own models of peacebuilding under the strong influence and advocacy of external intervention. It identifies four distinct patterns in the development of local peacebuilders’ ownership: ownership inheritance from external advocates, management of external reliance, friction-avoiding approaches, and utilisation of religious/traditional leadership. This book then analyses each pattern, focusing on its operational features, its significance and limitations as a local peacebuilding model. This study makes theoretical contributions to the academic debates on the ‘local turn’, local ownership, hybrid peace and everyday peace. Particularly, it engages in and further develops four specific lines of discussion: norm diffusions into local communities, patterns of local-external interaction, concepts of ownership, dual structure of power, and multiplicity in the identities of local.

There has long been considerable debate about the nature of non-Western IR theory. Most attempts to understand such a phenomenon begin by taking a top-down approach on a country by country basis. Instead, this book takes a bottom-up approach, involving specialists from a range of Thai universities, revealing the contours of the Thai IR community. It examines the state of various sub-fields under the IR rubric in Thailand such as foreign policy analysis, security studies, international political economy and area studies, and how Thai thinkers in these fields have contributed to IR as a discipline and IR theory development in Thailand. In doing so, it identifies factors unique to Thai academia which have hindered the development of an indigenous-sourced theory as well as exploring the similarities shared with other non-Western contexts that have posed an obstacle to the creation of a more general non-Western IR theory. Providing both an in-depth insight into the specific phenomena of Thai IR theory, and a broader perspective on the challenges of formulating non-Western IR theory, this book aims to push the debate on non-Western IR theory forward. It will be of particular interest to ...

Peace as Government: The Will to Normalize Timor-Leste brings a problematization of post-conflict reconstruction processes by bridging two theoretical approaches that are often placed in diametrical opposite epistemic poles – the analytical tools developed by Michel Foucault and the English School. The author argues that peace operations have a very precise function in the international scenario – the fostering and the maintenance of a (neo)liberal order in the international society. He evinces that this particular function of peace operations is developed through the will to normalize post-conflict states and their populations. In order to advance his argument, the author analyses the United Nations’ (UN) engagement with Timor-Leste, since no other country had the large number of peace operations, the wide range of spheres of engagement or the depth of involvement that the UN had in Timor-Leste. The author evinces that this will to normalize Timor-Leste is rendered operational though the mechanism of government, the conduct of conducts in a Foucauldian sense, functioning in two levels. At the international level, the government operates through discipline, rewarding and...

This volume provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of the scholarship on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. Looking far beyond the traditional parameters of the field, the contributors engage deeply with the legacies of colonialism, missionary activism, secularism, orientalism, and liberalism as they relate to the discussion of religion, violence, and nonviolent transformation and resistance. Featuring numerous case studies from various contexts and traditions, the volume is organized thematically into five different parts. It begins with an up-to-date mapping of scholarship on religion and violence, and religion and peace. The second part explores the challenges related to developing secularist theories on peace and nationalism, broadening the discussion of violence to include an analysis of cultural and structural forms. In the third section, the chapters explore controversial topics such as religion and development, religious militancy, and the freedom of religion as a keystone of peacebuilding. The fourth part locates notions of peacebuilding in spiritual practice by focusing on constructive resources within various traditions, the transformative role of...

Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding engages with one of the central debates in Peace and Conflict Studies and International Relations. The book's innovation lies in the introduction and application of 'practice theory' to develop a critical methodology for mapping the everyday practices of post-liberal hybridity in Liberia.

This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union.

“Conceptually and empirically, this is the most thoughtful analysis of the role of EU’s peace missions I have read so far. It starts with the ‘action for the sake of action’ logic of CSDP development and offers a new interpretation of what CSDP could be, if just peace was part of its political agenda. A rare gem in European studies.”— Xymena Kurowska, Associate Professor of International Relations at Central European University, Hungary “This impressive research monograph provides a critical account of EUs peace missions by asking what these missions offer, how peace is built, and whom these missions serve. To address these important questions, Birgit Poopuu develops and employs an original and sophisticated discursive framework of telling and acting to conduct an in-depth investigation of EU peace missions Artemis in the DRC, EUFOR Althea in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and EULEX in Kosovo. This book’s ground-breaking exploration advances the study of the EU as a peacebuilder.”— Annika Björkdahl, Professor of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden, and Editor in Chief of Cooperation and Conflict This book critically explores the European Union’s brand of...

This book presents a critical analysis of the liberal peace project and offers possible alternatives and models.

This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions. It aims to highlight how the exercise of ‘exceptional’ forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies – Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which sovereignty is structured. At the same time, it reveals how intervention reproduces the imposed conditions of international state-making, thus permanently internalising external regulatory mechanisms. International intervention, in other words, becomes the constitutive element of governance in the newly created state. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, war and conflict studies, global governance, security studies and IR.

This book addresses the challenges of international intervention in violent conflicts and its impact on groups in conflict. When the international community intervenes in a violent internal conflict, intervening powers may harden divisions, constructing walls between groups, or they may foster transformation, soften barriers and build bridges between conflicting groups. This book examines the different types of external processes and their respective contributions to softening or hardening divisions between conflicting groups. It also analyses the types of conflict resolution strategies, including integration, accommodation and partitioning, and investigates the conditions under which the international community decides to pursue a particular strategy, and how the different strategies contribute to solidification or transformation of group identities. The author uses three case studies, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine, to reveal how different types of external interventions impact on the identities of conflicting groups. The volume seeks to address how states and international organizations ought to intervene in order to stimulate the building...

This book analyzes UN intervention discourses and practices in Iraq and develops a deconstructive approach to international interventions. Hitherto, most analyses of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 have established the UN’s role as path-dependent on the foreign policy of the US and the UK, and largely portrayed it as a mediator and fervent opponent of international intervention. Analyzing the UN Security Council and the later UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) from 2000 to 2010, this book undoes this path-dependency and puts the UN’s relationship with Iraq center-stage. It develops a deconstructive, critical approach that identifies subject construction and reflexivity as central processes of intervention practices and concludes that (non-)intervention is deeply connected to the stabilization of political identities and representations. Using extensive primary data, the book contributes a new perspective on international interventions. This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, intervention and statebuilding, Middle Eastern studies and International Relations.

This volume examines conceptualisations of the field of 'global order' and the way in which this is imagined and evaluated.

This special issue focuses on how International Relations communicates with the world.

This book presents one of the first systematic assessments of aesthetic insights into world politics. It examines the nature of aesthetic approaches and outlines how they differ from traditional analysis of politics. The book explores the potential and limits of aesthetics through a series of case studies on language and poetics.