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 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.

Introduction Part1: The Romanticisation of the Local1. Civil Society, Needs, Welfare2. The Culture of Liberal Peacebuilding3. Critical Perspectives of Liberal Peacebuilding: Cambodia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste 4.De-Romanticising the Local: Implications for Post-Liberal Peacebuilding Part2: Hybridity and The Infrapolitics of Peace5. Everyday Critical Agency and Resistance in Peacebuilding6. De-romanticising the Local, De-Mystifying the International: Aspects of the Local-Liberal Hybrid. Conclusion: The Birth of A Post-Liberal Peace