GA«zim Visoka – författare

In addition to being a major area of research within International Relations, peacebuilding and statebuilding is a major policy area within the UN and other international and regional organizations. It is also a concern of international financial institutions, including the World Bank, and a significant factor in the foreign and security policies of many established and emerging democracies. Peacebuilding and statebuilding are among the main approaches for preventing, managing, and mitigating global insecurities; dealing with the humanitarian consequences of civil wars; and expanding democracy and neoliberal economic regimes. Peace formation is a relatively new concept, addressing how local actors work in parallel to international and national projects, and helps shape the legitimacy of peace processes and state reform. The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual and policy landscape. It offers a systematic overview of conceptual foundations, political implications, and tensions at the global, regional, and local levels, as well as key policies, practices, examples, and discourses underlining all segments of peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis. Approaching peacebuilding from disciplinary perspectives across the social sciences, the Handbook is organized around four major thematic sections. Section one explores how peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation is conceived by different disciplines and IR approaches, thus offering an overview of the conceptual bedrock of major theories and approaches. Section two situates these approaches among other major global issues, including globalization, civil society, terrorism, and technology to illustrate their global, regional, and local resonance. Section three looks at key themes in the field, including peace agreements, democratization, security reform, human rights, environment, and culture. Finally, section four looks at key features of everyday and civil society peace formation processes, both in theory and in practice.

During the 21st century, peace processes have been stagnating, collapsing, or reversed across diverse contexts. At the heart of this unravelling lies a complex and hitherto overlooked phenomenon: the systematic obstruction of peace itself. Counter-Peace: Tactical Blockages to Peace and Strategic Risks for the International System introduces the concept of counter-peace: a set of interconnected, multi-scalar processes that undermine, distort, or reverse peace processes without necessarily reverting to open warfare. Drawing on detailed case studies, this book reveals how counter-peace dynamics have become embedded in peace processes and why the resulting conflict escalation is a symptom of a changing international order. It interrogates the international peace architecture and argues that its failure to adapt to critical insights on justice, legitimacy, and emancipation has rendered it increasingly ine?ective. Rather than viewing peace failures as isolated or technical missteps, the authors examine how blockages to peace are anchored in power structures, neoliberal policies, and geopolitical rivalries. Actors exploit the structural flaws and unintended consequences of peacemaking to pursue revisionist goals with the support of rising actors in the multipolar order. In this sense, peace processes have become an ideological battlefield between the declining liberal and the rising authoritarian international order. Through this lens, peace and counter-peace appear as deeply entangled forces that shape and contest the future of the international order. Rich in empirical evidence and theoretical innovation, this book challenges the traditional explanations that sanitise or depoliticise the idea of peacemaking. It shifts the debate toward systemic analyses of failure, resistance, and legitimacy. Urgent, timely, and critical, Counter-Peace calls for a fundamental rethinking of how peace is conceptualised, built, and maintained. It provides scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with a new framework to understand why peace often fails and how the construction of peaceful social orders needs to be rethought.

During the 21st century, peace processes have been stagnating, collapsing, or reversed across diverse contexts. At the heart of this unravelling lies a complex and hitherto overlooked phenomenon: the systematic obstruction of peace itself. Counter-Peace: Tactical Blockages to Peace and Strategic Risks for the International System introduces the concept of counter-peace: a set of interconnected, multi-scalar processes that undermine, distort, or reverse peace processes without necessarily reverting to open warfare. Drawing on detailed case studies, this book reveals how counter-peace dynamics have become embedded in peace processes and why the resulting conflict escalation is a symptom of a changing international order. It interrogates the international peace architecture and argues that its failure to adapt to critical insights on justice, legitimacy, and emancipation has rendered it increasingly ine?ective. Rather than viewing peace failures as isolated or technical missteps, the authors examine how blockages to peace are anchored in power structures, neoliberal policies, and geopolitical rivalries. Actors exploit the structural flaws and unintended consequences of peacemaking to pursue revisionist goals with the support of rising actors in the multipolar order. In this sense, peace processes have become an ideological battlefield between the declining liberal and the rising authoritarian international order. Through this lens, peace and counter-peace appear as deeply entangled forces that shape and contest the future of the international order. Rich in empirical evidence and theoretical innovation, this book challenges the traditional explanations that sanitise or depoliticise the idea of peacemaking. It shifts the debate toward systemic analyses of failure, resistance, and legitimacy. Urgent, timely, and critical, Counter-Peace calls for a fundamental rethinking of how peace is conceptualised, built, and maintained. It provides scholars, practitioners, and policymakers with a new framework to understand why peace often fails and how the construction of peaceful social orders needs to be rethought.