Introduction

The ‘building’, or ‘rebuilding’ – ‘(re-)building’ – of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of the needs, goals and norms of local actors (see Richmond and Mitchell 2011: 326). One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security, and even when these benchmarks conform to notions of ‘liberal peace’ they often remain at odds with local logic (see Tom 2015).

A decade ago, the statistics on successful state-, peace- and nation building could not be viewed with much optimism. Despite the huge amounts of financial and human capital spent on ‘building’ enterprises it was reported that almost half of all countries receiving assistance returned to conflict within five years, and that 72 per cent of peace-building operations conclude with an authoritarian regime in place (Bassu 2005: 13; Barnett et al. 2007: 35). Despite a massive upsurge on the part of the international community towards supporting countries out of conflict-created insecurity and fragility, contemporary ‘building’ enterprises continue to ‘incline towards pessimism’ (Haken 2014) and continue to be called to account in terms of demonstrable, long-term impact.

This chapter will draw on case studies including the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), Burundi and Afghanistan, to establish that the busy future of peace operations – defined here as any attempt to ‘rebuild’ or ‘build’ from scratch a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence – must seek to engage with a revitalised and dynamic understanding and application of human security and that the blueprints for such must strive to be resilient to externally imposed notions of failure or success.