Using the case studies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland this book dissects internationally-supported peace interventions. Looking at issues of security, statebuilding, civil society and economic and constitutional reform, it proposes using the concept of hybridity to understand the dynamics of societies in transition.

Using the case studies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland this book dissects internationally-supported peace interventions. Looking at issues of security, statebuilding, civil society and economic and constitutional reform, it proposes using the concept of hybridity to understand the dynamics of societies in transition.

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.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Everyday resistance, peacebuilding and state-making addresses debates on the liberal peace and the policies of peacebuilding through a theoretical and empirical study of resistance in peacebuilding contexts. Examining the case of 'Africa's World War' in the DRC, it locates resistance in the experiences of war, peacebuilding and state-making by exploring discourses, violence and everyday forms of survival as quotidian acts that attempt to challenge or mitigate such experiences. The analysis of resistance offers a possibility to bring the historical and sociological aspects of both peacebuilding and the case of the DRC, providing new nuanced understanding on these processes and the particular case. The book also makes a significant contribution to the theorisation of resistance in International Relations.

This book interrogates the common perception that liberal peace is in crisis and explores the question: can the local turn save liberal peacebuilding? Presenting a case for a liberal renaissance in peacebuilding, the work interrogates the assumptions behind the popular perception that liberal peace is in crisis. It re-examines three of the cases igniting the debate – Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste – and evaluates how these transitional administrations implemented their liberal mandates and how local involvement affected the conduct of their activities. In so doing, it reveals that these cases were neither liberal nor peacebuilding. It also demonstrates that while local involvement is imperative to peacebuilding, illiberal local involvement restores an elite-centred status quo and reinforces or creates new forms of conflict and violence. Using both liberal and critical lenses, the author ultimately argues that the conceptual and operational departure from the holistic and comprehensive origins of liberal peacebuilding in fact paved the way for the liberal peace crisis itself. Drawing on analysis from in-depth field research and interviews, this book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, statebuilding, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book analyses the role of legitimacy in explaining local actors’ compliance with international peacebuilding operations. The book provides a comparative, micro-level study of local actors’ reasons for compliance with or resistance to international peacebuilding. Specifically, it analyses three pathways to compliance –legitimacy, coercion, and reward-seeking – to explore local police officers’ compliance with the reforms stipulated by the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The work constructs a holistic framework of the mechanisms connecting each pathway to compliance and measures legitimacy using micro-level indicators. This study not only shines light on the question why local actors comply, a crucial factor in mission effectiveness, but it also illuminates exactly how compliance works. The book contributes nuanced evidence about the often-heralded importance of legitimacy in peacebuilding, showing exactly in which situations local legitimacy matters and in which it does not. It is also highly relevant for policy-makers as it unpacks and explains the mechanisms behind local legitimacy, assisting in understanding this usually nebulous concept. This book demonstrates the need for micro-level analysis by revealing the relevant processes of legitimation usually hidden behind commonly perceived social fault lines, such as the Serb-Albanian divide in Kosovo. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, Balkans politics, security studies and International Relations.

The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of field research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo's unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003-2006). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding culture shaped the intervention strategy in a way that precluded action on local conflicts, ultimately dooming the international efforts to end the deadliest conflict since World War II. Most international actors interpreted continued fighting as the consequence of national and regional tensions alone. UN staff and diplomats viewed intervention at the macro levels as their only legitimate responsibility. The dominant culture constructed local peacebuilding as such an unimportant, unfamiliar, and unmanageable task that neither shocking events nor resistance from select individuals could convince international actors to reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention.