Peacebuilding
The study of peace and conflict is integral to the discipline of International Relations (IR). The post-Cold War proliferation of United Nations-led interventions in conflict-affected and post-conflict societies and the publication of the Brahimi Report on Peacekeeping Reform in 2000 helped advance constructive debates and alternative approaches to peacebuilding. The Review of International Studies (RIS) has published seminal works on this theme. Some articles probed the effectiveness and legitimacy of liberal peacebuilding, while others called for re-assessing the theoretical foundations of such critiques. For example, Paris's 2002 article characterises international peacebuilding as a type of globalisation for state formation and behaviour, questioning the underlying ideological assumptions behind peace operations. Richmond's 2009 article emphasises local and everyday contexts where care, empathy and welfare are the basis of post-conflict peacebuilding. Mitchell's 2011 article advances the notion of everyday, highlighting the plurality of power struggles and control strategies often expected from external and local actors. The peacebuilding discourse has taken several turns—local, hybrid, everyday—reflecting the evolution of global politics. The articles in this Special Collection directed these turns through their critical perspectives, including Nadarajah and Rampton's article on the limits of hybridity as a conceptual tool for peacebuilding. They also contribute to research-informed policy discourse, such as Chandler's article, which shifts the critique of liberal peace to policy practices and narratives that promulgate the view that Western intervention is too "liberal," thereby excusing peacebuilding failures. Going beyond the analysis of success and failure and breaking away from the binary conceptualisation of international and local, Lemay-Hébert and Kappler's article helps us articulate several configurations emerging from the implementation and ownership of peacebuilding processes. This Special Collection has informed my own research; it represents the dynamic scholarship on peacebuilding that RIS has featured and will continue to do so amid new global challenges to peace and security.
The articles below are free to read until the end of April 2024.
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