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This collection of essays offers a critical discussion of and broad agenda for contemporary debates about peacebuilding

The quality of the peace arrived at via liberal peacebuilding approaches has been poor. The related statebuilding praxis has generally been unable to respond to its critics. What is at stake is a recognition of peacebuilding´s everyday political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics. This indicates the emergence of a post-liberal form of peace.

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Critical thinking has prospered in the interdisciplinary study of peacebuilding over the last decade or so, despite (and perhaps because of) the certainties and systems offered by the comfortable, liberal-realist mainstream praxis. As the liberal state system, and the assumptions of the ´international community´ and its capacity to control and govern appears now to have begun to unravel, so too the vibrancy of the debate in these areas has gathered pace. Critical agendas for peacebuilding offer an analysis of the deep complexity of rights and needs, and at one end of the scale a certainty in basic human sameness and goodness, while at the other, a more pluralist interest in difference and hybridity. They debate how sensitized and how ´local´ such processes may be and ultimately, they seek to reduce the programmatic reliance on hard security, basic rights, dominant a priori institutions, markets, territoriality, and cultural normative systems.

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A Genealogy of Peace and Conflict Theory; O.Richmond PART I: CRITICAL AGENDAS: THEORIES, CONCEPTS, AND METHODS War, Government, Politics: A Critical Response to the Hegemony of the Liberal Peace; V.Jabri Reconstruction: The Missing Historical Link; A.Williams Method: Theory and Ethnography in Peace and Conflict Studies; J.Victorova Challenging Statebuilding as Peacebuilding: Working with Hybrid Political Orders to Build Peace; V.Beoge, A.Brown, K.Clements& A.Nolan Human Security and the Legitimization of Peacebuilding; S.Tadjbakhsh Gender and Peacebuilding; T.Varynen Liberal Peace, Liberal Imperialism: A Gramscian Critique; I.Taylor The Ideology of Peace: Peacebuilding and the War in Iraq; M.V.Rasmussen PART II: KEY AGENDAS: INSTITUTIONS, ISSUES AND THEMES The Institutionalization of Peacebuilding: What Role for the UN Peacebuilding Commission?; A.Bellamy Democratization and Development: A Difficult Relationship; D.Kotse NGO Dilemmas in Peacebuilding; H.Carey Welfare in War-Torn Societies: Nemesis of the Liberal Peace?; M.Pugh Resolving Conflicts and Pursuing Accountability: Beyond ´Justice vs. Peace´; C.Sriram Reconciliation (Reflections from Northern Ireland and South Africa); J.Darby Training Goldfish (in a Desert): Transforming Political Economies of Conflict Using Voluntarism, Regulation and Supervision; N.Cooper PART III: DEVELOPING AGENDAS Culture: Challenges and Possibilities; M.Brigg Gilding the Lily? International Support for Indigenous and Traditional Peacebuilding; R.MacGinty Kindered Peacebuilding: Liberalism and Beyond; A.Watson Art and Peacebuilding: How Theatre Transforms Conflict in Sri Lanka; N.Premaratna& R.Bleiker Peacebuilding and Environmental Challenges; F.Rotberg The State vs. the Terrorists vs. the People vs. the State and the Terrorists: Peace and Conflict in the Basque Country; I.Tellidis

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Oliver Richmond is Research Professor at University of Manchester, UK. His work on Peace is widely published. He is one of the editors of the Review of International Studies, and editor of the Palgrave book series, Rethinking Conflict Studies.

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