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

The 1990s saw a constant increase in international peace missions, predominantly led by the United Nations, whose mandates were more and more extended to implement societal and political transformations in post-conflict societies. However, in many cases these missions did not meet the high expectations and did not acquire a sufficient legitimacy on the local level. Written by leading experts in the field, this edited volume brings together ‘liberal’ and ‘post-liberal’ approaches to peacebuilding. Besides challenging dominant peacebuilding paradigms, the book scrutinizes how far key concepts of post-liberal peacebuilding offer sound categories and new perspectives to reframe peacebuilding research. It thus moves beyond the ‘liberal’–‘post-liberal’ divide and systematically integrates further perspectives, paving the way for a new era in peacebuilding research which is theory-guided, but also substantiated in the empirical analysis of peacebuilding practices. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate students and scholar-practitioners working in the field of peacebuilding. By embedding the subject area into different research perspectives, the book will also be relevant for scholars who come from related backgrounds, such as democracy promotion, transitional justice, statebuilding, conflict and development research and international relations in general.

Peacebuilding Paradigms focuses on how seven paradigms from the Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Policy Analysis subfields - Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Cosmopolitanism, Critical Theories, Locality, and Policy - analyze peacebuilding. The contributors explore the arguments of each paradigm, and then compare and contrast them. This book suggests that a hybrid approach that incorporates useful insights from each of these paradigms best explains how and why peacebuilding projects and policies succeed in some cases, fail in others, and provide lessons learned. Rather than merely using a theoretical approach, the authors use case studies to demonstrate why a focus on just one paradigm alone as an explanatory model is insufficient. This collection directly at how peacebuilding theory affects peacebuilding policies, and provides recommendations for best practices for future peacebuilding missions.

The 1990s saw a constant increase in international peace missions, predominantly led by the United Nations, whose mandates were more and more extended to implement societal and political transformations in post-conflict societies. However, in many cases these missions did not meet the high expectations and did not acquire a sufficient legitimacy on the local level. Written by leading experts in the field, this edited volume brings together ‘liberal’ and ‘post-liberal’ approaches to peacebuilding. Besides challenging dominant peacebuilding paradigms, the book scrutinizes how far key concepts of post-liberal peacebuilding offer sound categories and new perspectives to reframe peacebuilding research. It thus moves beyond the ‘liberal’–‘post-liberal’ divide and systematically integrates further perspectives, paving the way for a new era in peacebuilding research which is theory-guided, but also substantiated in the empirical analysis of peacebuilding practices. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate students and scholar-practitioners working in the field of peacebuilding. By embedding the subject area into different research perspectives, the book will also be relevant for scholars who come from related backgrounds, such as democracy promotion, transitional justice, statebuilding, conflict and development research and international relations in general.

This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding. In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the ‘local turn’. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peacebuilding first. However, it is also crucial to understanding the recent local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses in Kosovo is fundamentally tied to the critiques of extensive international missions, and the associated resistance and marginalisation of local agency. The book examines the implications of the framing of ‘everyday’ agency in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. It argues that despite its critical and radical intentions, the local turn retains certain foundational modernist and positivist qualities that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, security studies and International Relations in general.

Classical political theorists such as Thucydides, Kant, Rousseau, Smith, Hegel, Grotius, Mill, Locke and Clausewitz are often employed to explain and justify contemporary international politics and are seen to constitute the different schools of thought in the discipline. However, traditional interpretations frequently ignore the intellectual and historical context in which these thinkers were writing as well as the lineages through which they came to be appropriated in International Relations. This collection of essays provides alternative interpretations sensitive to these political and intellectual contexts and to the trajectory of their appropriation. The political, sociological, anthropological, legal, economic, philosophical and normative dimensions are shown to be constitutive, not just of classical theories, but of international thought and practice in the contemporary world. Moreover, they challenge traditional accounts of timeless debates and schools of thought and provide new conceptions of core issues such as sovereignty, morality, law, property, imperialism and agency.

This new Routledge Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the meanings and uses of the term 'peacebuilding', and presents cutting-edge debates on the practices conducted in the name of peacebuilding. The term 'peacebuilding' has had remarkable staying power. Other terms, such as 'conflict resolution' have waned in popularity, while the acceptance and use of the term 'peacebuilding' has grown to the extent that it is the hegemonic and over-arching term for many forms of mediation, reconciliation and strategies to induce peace. Despite this, however, it is rarely defined and often used to mean different things to different audiences. Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding aims to be a one-stop comprehensive resource on the literature and practices of contemporary peacebuilding. The book is organised into six key sections: Section 1: Reading peacebuilding Section 2: Approaches and cross-cutting themes Section 3: Disciplinary approaches to peacebuilding Section 4: Violence and security Section 5: Everyday living and peacebuilding Section 6: The infrastructure of peacebuilding This new Handbook will be essential reading for students of peacebuilding, mediation and post-conflict reconstruction, and of great interest to students of statebuilding, intervention, civil wars, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies and IR in general.