The Liberal Peace And Post War Reconstruction

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.

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 interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, peace and conflict studies, international organisations and IR/Security Studies.

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.

Local and Global Dynamics of Peacebuilding examines the complex contributing factors which led to war and state collapse in Sierra Leone, and the international peacebuilding and statebuilding operations which followed the cessation of the violence. This book presents nuanced and contextually specific knowledge of Sierra Leone’s political and war histories, and the outcomes of the implementation of programmes of post-conflict reforms. It embodies an analysis of the complex challenges involved in aligning international norms and values to local expectations and local priorities, and examines the role of local and global actors and structures in attempts to build a strong state and lasting peace. Using a theoretical framework informed by ‘liberal peace’ philosophy, as well as detailed and nuanced empirical evidence from the field, the book constructs a critical analysis of the contemporary global paradigm for building longer-term peace in war-torn, fractured and fragile societies. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, development studies, African politics, 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.

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

This book examines the nature of 'liberal peace': the common aim of the international community's approach to post-conflict statebuilding. Adopting a particularly critical stance on this one-size-fits-all paradigm, it explores the process by breaking down liberal peace theory into its constituent parts: democratisation, free market reform and development, human rights, civil society, and the rule of law.Readers are provided with critically and theoretically informed empirical access to the 'technology' of the liberal peacebuilding process, particularly in regard to Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and the Middle East.Key Features*critically interrogates the theory, experience, and current outcomes of liberal peacebuilding*includes five empirically-informed case studies: Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and the Middle East*focuses on the key institutional aspects of liberal peacebuilding and key international actors*assesses the local outcomes of liberal peacebuilding