Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding – serie

This book interrogates the common perception that liberal peace is in crisis and explores the question: can the local turn save liberal peacebuilding? Presenting a case for a liberal renaissance in peacebuilding, the work interrogates the assumptions behind the popular perception that liberal peace is in crisis. It re-examines three of the cases igniting the debate – Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste – and evaluates how these transitional administrations implemented their liberal mandates and how local involvement affected the conduct of their activities. In so doing, it reveals that these cases were neither liberal nor peacebuilding. It also demonstrates that while local involvement is imperative to peacebuilding, illiberal local involvement restores an elite-centred status quo and reinforces or creates new forms of conflict and violence. Using both liberal and critical lenses, the author ultimately argues that the conceptual and operational departure from the holistic and comprehensive origins of liberal peacebuilding in fact paved the way for the liberal peace crisis itself.Drawing on analysis from in-depth field research and interviews, this book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, statebuilding, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book provides a critical understanding of Europeanization and statebuilding in the Western Balkans, using the notion of everyday practices.This volume argues that it is everyday and mundane events that provide the entry points to showcase a broader set of practices of Europeanization in countries outside the EU. It does this by tracing notions of Europeanization in the everyday statebuilding of Kosovo, Europe Day celebrations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, urban politics in Tirana, and space and place making in Skopje. In doing so, the book shows that everyday events tell us that as much as it is about changing structures, institutions, and economic models, Europeanization is also about changing behaviours and ideas in populations at large. At the same time, the work shows that countries outside the EU use everyday events to perform their belonging to Europe. This book will be of much interest to students of European Studies, Balkan politics, statebuilding, and International Relations generally.

This book examines the effects of media interventions in the global South, and argues for a more adaptive and context-sensitive media development.The work investigates media development as part of statebuilding and the effects that Western-led media has in, and on, a newly built state. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including interviews, observations and social surveys, it analyses the effect media interventions has on global South countries, from the population’s point of view. The findings show that in practice media development can be alien to the societies in which a free press is implemented, which can lead to unintended and negative consequences for social relations in a country. While the book uses South Sudan as a case study, it also presents different perspectives and shows that local views on the media are different from those of Western experts and policymakers. Therefore, the book advocates taking local views seriously and an adaptive media development that is sensitive to the context in which it is set up.This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, media studies, development studies and international relations in general.

This book presents an analytical framework which assesses how 'land-for-peace' agreements can be achieved in the context of territorial conflicts between de facto states and their respective parent states.The volume examines geographic solutions to resolving ongoing conflicts that stand between the principle of self-determination (prompted by de facto states) and the principle of territorial integrity (prompted by parent states). The authors investigate the conditions under which territorial adjustments can bring about a possibility for peace between de facto states and their parent states. It does so by interrogating the possibility of land-for-peace agreements in four de facto state–parent state pairs, namely Kosovo–Serbia, Nagorno–Karabakh–Azerbaijan, Northern Cyprus–Republic of Cyprus, and Abkhazia–Georgia. The book suggests that the value that parties put on land to be exchanged and peace to be achieved stand at odds for land-for-peace agreements to materialise. The book brings theoretical and empirical insights that open several avenues for discussions on the conservative stance that the international community has held on territorial changes in the post-1945 international order.This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, state formation, secessionism, political geography, and international relations.

This book analyses efforts to achieve justice in Kosovo for victims of crimes committed during the conflict in the 1990s, relating this to broader debates on transitional justice. The war in Kosovo has come under the jurisdiction of a number of mechanisms which fit within the broader framework of transitional justice. These include international tribunals (the ICTY), international organisations with judicial mandates within Kosovo (UNMIK and EULEX), ad-hoc hybrid tribunals (the Kosovo Specialist Chambers) and truth-seeking mechanisms (RECOM and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). Collectively, these developments make Kosovo a profoundly important case study on the contemporary efficacy of transitional justice. This volume analyses the nature and impact of the various mechanisms employed to date in Kosovo to determine their effects within the country, and their broader international significance. Various critical issues are examined through an exploration of the institutional mechanisms employed in each case, their coherence with existing theories on "best practice" principles, and the broader implications of their efficacy in Kosovo.This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, statebuilding, Balkan politics, and International Relations in general.

This book analyses efforts to achieve justice in Kosovo for victims of crimes committed during the conflict in the 1990s, relating this to broader debates on transitional justice. The war in Kosovo has come under the jurisdiction of a number of mechanisms which fit within the broader framework of transitional justice. These include international tribunals (the ICTY), international organisations with judicial mandates within Kosovo (UNMIK and EULEX), ad-hoc hybrid tribunals (the Kosovo Specialist Chambers) and truth-seeking mechanisms (RECOM and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). Collectively, these developments make Kosovo a profoundly important case study on the contemporary efficacy of transitional justice. This volume analyses the nature and impact of the various mechanisms employed to date in Kosovo to determine their effects within the country, and their broader international significance. Various critical issues are examined through an exploration of the institutional mechanisms employed in each case, their coherence with existing theories on "best practice" principles, and the broader implications of their efficacy in Kosovo.This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, statebuilding, Balkan politics, and International Relations in general.

This book examines the regime changes in Iraq and Libya to unravel the complexity of statebuilding in countries emerging from authoritarianism and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Framed in a comparative study of post-2003 Iraq and post-2011 Libya, the book examines changes in key state dimensions – representation and political authority, security, and wealth creation and distribution – in a continuous dialogue with past trajectories in these two countries. To grasp the nature and degree of these changes, the mechanisms of state formation are explored in light of a statebuilding agenda that, in its application from Iraq to Libya, has adapted to different political prerogatives. The analysis of Iraq and Libya serves the book’s ultimate goal to address the debate on statebuilding from a regional (MENA) perspective and to lay the ground for the study of other contemporary cases undergoing radical and violent process of changes, such as in Syria and Yemen. The book grapples with problems associated with the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism through conflict and towards peace by focusing on the state, its structure and function. The work is informed by a large quantity of materials collected over the past five years, including secondary literature, policy papers and reports, and semi-structured interviews with key informants on Iraq and Libya. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Middle Eastern studies, peace and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.

This book offers a systematic critique of recent interventionist just war theories, which have made the recourse to force easier to justify.The work argues that these theories, including neo-traditionalist prerogatives to national leaders and a cosmopolitan human rights paradigm, offer criteria for war that are insufficient in principle and dangerous in practice. Drawing on a plurality of moral considerations, the book recommends a modified legalist national defense paradigm, which includes an atrocity threshold for humanitarian intervention and a legitimate authorization requirement. The plausibility of this restrictive framework is applied to case studies, including the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing targeted killing, and possible interventions in Syria and elsewhere. Various arguments which seek to loosen the criteria for war are also systematically analyzed and criticized.This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, military history, ethics, political philosophy, and international relations.

This book offers a systematic critique of recent interventionist just war theories, which have made the recourse to force easier to justify.The work argues that these theories, including neo-traditionalist prerogatives to national leaders and a cosmopolitan human rights paradigm, offer criteria for war that are insufficient in principle and dangerous in practice. Drawing on a plurality of moral considerations, the book recommends a modified legalist national defense paradigm, which includes an atrocity threshold for humanitarian intervention and a legitimate authorization requirement. The plausibility of this restrictive framework is applied to case studies, including the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing targeted killing, and possible interventions in Syria and elsewhere. Various arguments which seek to loosen the criteria for war are also systematically analyzed and criticized.This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, military history, ethics, political philosophy, and international relations.

This book explores the last 25 years of international peacebuilding and recasts them as a growing crisis of confidence in universal ideas of peacebuilding and self-government.Since current peacebuilding interventions are abandoning domineering, top-down and linear methodologies, and experimenting with context-sensitive, self-reflexive and locally driven strategies, the book makes two suggestions. The first is that international policymakers are embracing some of the critiques of liberal peace. For more than a decade, scholarly critiques have pointed out the need to focus on everyday dynamics and local initiatives and resistances to liberal peace in order to enable hybrid and long-term practice-based strategies of peacebuilding. Now, the distance between the policy discourse and critical frameworks has narrowed. The second suggestion is that in stepping away from liberal peace, a transvaluation of peacebuilding values is occurring. Critiques are beginning to accept and valorise that international interventions will continuously fail to produce sensitive results. The earlier frustrations with unexpected setbacks, errors or contingencies are ebbing away. Instead, critiques normalise the failure to promote stability and peace.This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, international intervention, conflict resolution, international organisations and security studies in general.

This book interrogates the common perception that liberal peace is in crisis and explores the question: can the local turn save liberal peacebuilding? Presenting a case for a liberal renaissance in peacebuilding, the work interrogates the assumptions behind the popular perception that liberal peace is in crisis. It re-examines three of the cases igniting the debate – Cambodia, Kosovo, and Timor-Leste – and evaluates how these transitional administrations implemented their liberal mandates and how local involvement affected the conduct of their activities. In so doing, it reveals that these cases were neither liberal nor peacebuilding. It also demonstrates that while local involvement is imperative to peacebuilding, illiberal local involvement restores an elite-centred status quo and reinforces or creates new forms of conflict and violence. Using both liberal and critical lenses, the author ultimately argues that the conceptual and operational departure from the holistic and comprehensive origins of liberal peacebuilding in fact paved the way for the liberal peace crisis itself.Drawing on analysis from in-depth field research and interviews, this book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, statebuilding, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding. In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the ‘liberal peacebuilding’ paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the ‘local turn’. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peacebuilding first. However, it is also crucial to understanding the recent local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses in Kosovo is fundamentally tied to the critiques of extensive international missions, and the associated resistance and marginalisation of local agency. The book examines the implications of the framing of ‘everyday’ agency in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. It argues that despite its critical and radical intentions, the local turn retains certain foundational modernist and positivist qualities that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend.This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peace and conflict studies, security studies and International Relations in general.

This edited book sets out and engages with some of the key policies, practices and paradigms of external intervention in the case of state support and reconstruction. Many assumptions about statebuilding have been reconsidered in the wake of Iraq, and ongoing problems in other states such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Rather than being a regional survey or a policy-orientated ‘lessons learned’ book, this collection explores the broader framing of policy goals, statebuilding practices and the consensus on the need for Western states and international institutions to be engaged in this policy area. The volume is divided into three parts: the first engages with some of the key policy frameworks and conceptual issues raised by recent statebuilding interventions; the second considers core statebuilding practices; and the third reconsiders statebuilding paradigms more broadly. The essays open up debate and critical discussion in the field at a time when many advocates of extending statebuilding intervention suggest that the complex nature of the problems of non-Western states and societies mean that it will inevitably be contradictory and limited in its results.

This book looks at the political reintegration of armed groups after civil wars and the challenges of transforming ‘rebel’, ‘insurgent’ or other non-state armed groups into viable political entities. Drawing on eight case studies, the definition of ‘armed groups’ here ranges from militias, paramilitary forces, police units of various kinds to intelligence outfits. Likewise, the definition of ‘political integration’ or ‘re-integration’ has not been restricted to the formation of political parties, but is understood broadly as active participation in politics, policy-making or public debate through parties, newspapers, social organisations, think-tanks, NGOs or public service.The book seeks to locate or contextualise individual cases within their distinctive social, cultural and historical settings. As such it differs from much of the donor-driven literature that has tended to abstract the challenge of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) from their political and historical context, focusing instead on technical or bureaucratic issues raised by the DDR process. Among the issues covered by the volume as a whole, three stand out: first, the role of political settlements in creating legitimate opportunities for erstwhile leaders of armed factions; second, the ability of reintegration programmes to create genuine socio-economic opportunities that can absorb former fighters as functional members of their communities; and third, the processes involved in transforming an entire rebel movement into a viable political party, movement or, more generally, allowing it to participate in political life. This book will be of great interest to students of security and development, peace and conflict studies, and IR in general, as well as practitioners and policymakers. Mats Berdal is Professor of Security and Development in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From 2000 to 2003 he was Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Mats Berdal is a Visiting Professor at the National Defence and Command College, Oslo. David Ucko is the Programme Coordinator & Research Fellow for the Conflict, Security & Development Research Group, King's College London.

This book provides theoretical clarity about the concepts of failed and fragile states, which have emerged strongly since the 9/11 attacks. Recent contributions often see the fragile state as either a problem of development or of security. This volume argues that that neither perspective on its own is a sufficient basis for good policy. In a wide-ranging treatment, drawing on large samples as well as case studies, the authors create an alternative model of the fragile state emphasizing the multidimensional, multifaceted nature of the "fragile state problematique". On the basis of their model and empirical evidence, they then derive a number of policy-relevant insights regarding the need for contextualized and ongoing country analysis, the perils and pitfalls of unstructured development assistance, and the need to move whole-of-government approaches from the realm of rhetoric to reality. In offering both a synthesis of existing research and an innovative approach to understanding the fragile state, this volume will be of great interest to students of war and conflict studies, risk, conflict management, and international relations in general. It will also be of use to practitioners in policy circles and to NGOs.

This volume examines and evaluates the impact of international statebuilding interventions on the political economy of post-conflict countries over the past 20 years. While statebuilding today is typically discussed in the context of ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘stabilisation’ operations, the current phase of interest in external interventions to (re)build and strengthen governmental institutions can be traced back to the ‘good governance’ policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in the early 1990s. These sought political changes and improvements in the quality of governance in countries that were subject to, or were seeking support under, IFI-designed structural adjustment programmes.The focus of this book is specifically on state-building efforts in conflict-affected countries: countries that are emerging, or have recently emerged, from periods of war and violent conflict. The interventions covered in the present volume fall into three broad and overlapping categories: International administrations and transformative occupations (East Timor, Iraq, and Kosovo); Complex peace operations (Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, and Sudan); Governance and state-building programmes conducted in the context of economic assistance (Georgia and Macedonia).This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, post-conflict reconstruction, political economy, international organisations and IR/Security Studies in general.

This book explores how and why police reform became an international phenomenon in the era of statebuilding that followed the end of the Cold War.Police reform has become an indispensible element in the spread of liberal democracy. Policing is distinguished by its ability to combine reasonable and forcible methods to preserve and spread liberal values. The book examines the reason police reform was introduced as a method of building consensus in Latin America and the Balkans and documents the development of its use in Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus region. It illustrates how police power binds the liberal value of freedom to the security needs of post-conflict regions and discusses its force as a strategy to bring law and order to a global security domain. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, the book delves deeply into policing as a method to bring coherence to global security. It traces the presence of coherent police strategies in contemporary international relations through studies of the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. By contrasting police reform with security sector reform, the book explores how liberal peace is imagined by the international NGO sector, state aid agencies and international organizations.This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, post-conflict reconstruction, critical security studies, development studies and IR in general.

This book examines international engagement with Kosovo since NATO’s intervention in 1999, and looks at the three distinct phases of Kosovo’s development; intervention, statebuilding and independence.Kosovo remains a case study of central importance in international relations, illustrative of key political trends in the post-Cold War era. During each phase, international policy towards Kosovo has challenged prevailing international norms and pushed the boundaries of conventional wisdom. In each of the three phases 'Kosovo' has been cited as constituting a precedent, and this book explores the impact and the often troubling consequences and implications of these precedents. This book explicitly engages with this debate, which transcends Kosovo itself, and provides a critical analysis of the catalysts and consequences of contemporary international engagement with this seminal case study.Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the international engagement with Kosovo and situates events there in an international context, highlighting the extent to which international policy towards Kosovo has challenged existing norms and practices. Kosovo has been cited in certain texts as a positive template to be emulated, but the contributors to this book also identify the often controversial and contentious nature of these new norms. This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention and statebuilding, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general. Aidan Hehir is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster.

This book compares post-civil war societies to look at the presence or absence of organized violence, analysing why some ex-combatants return to organised violence and others do not.Even though former fighters have been identified as a major source of insecurity, there have been few efforts to systematically examine why some ex-combatants re-engage in organized violence, while others do not. This book compares the presence or absence of organized violence in different ex-combatant communities – former fighters that used to belong to the same armed faction and who share a common, horizontal identity based on shared war-and peacetime experiences – in the Republic of Congo (ex-Cobras, Cocoyes and Ninjas) and Sierra Leone (ex-Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, Civil Defense Force and Revolutionary United Front). The main determinants of ex-combatant violence are whether former fighters have access to elites and to second-tier individuals – such as former mid-level commanders – who can act as intermediaries between the two. By utilizing relationships based on selective incentives and social networks, these two kinds of remobilizers are able to generate the needed enticements and feelings of affinity, trust or fear to convince ex-combatants to resort to arms. These findings demonstrate that the outbreak of ex-combatant violence can only be understood by more clearly incorporating an actor perspective, focusing on three levels of analysis: the elite, midlevel and grass-root.This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, civil wars, post-conflict reconstruction, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

This edited volume critically examines the widely supported doctrine of the 'Responsibility to Protect', and investigates the claim that it embodies progressive values in international politics. Since the United Nations World Summit of 2005, a remarkable consensus has emerged in support of the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) – the idea that states and the international community bear a joint duty to protect peoples around the world from mass atrocities. While there has been plenty of discussion over how this doctrine can best be implemented, there has been no systematic criticism of the principles underlying R2P. This volume is the first critically to interrogate both the theoretical principles and the policy consequences of this doctrine. The authors in this collection argue that the doctrine of R2P does not in fact embody progressive values, and they explore the possibility that the R2P may undermine political accountability within states and international peace between them. This volume not only advances a novel set of arguments, but will also spur debate by offering views that are seldom heard in discussions of R2P. The aim of the volume is to bring a range of criticisms to bear from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including international law, political science, IR theory and security studies.This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, human security, critical security studies and IR in general.

This book looks at the political reintegration of armed groups after civil wars and the challenges of transforming ‘rebel’, ‘insurgent’ or other non-state armed groups into viable political entities. Drawing on eight case studies, the definition of ‘armed groups’ here ranges from militias, paramilitary forces, police units of various kinds to intelligence outfits. Likewise, the definition of ‘political integration’ or ‘re-integration’ has not been restricted to the formation of political parties, but is understood broadly as active participation in politics, policy-making or public debate through parties, newspapers, social organisations, think-tanks, NGOs or public service.The book seeks to locate or contextualise individual cases within their distinctive social, cultural and historical settings. As such it differs from much of the donor-driven literature that has tended to abstract the challenge of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) from their political and historical context, focusing instead on technical or bureaucratic issues raised by the DDR process. Among the issues covered by the volume as a whole, three stand out: first, the role of political settlements in creating legitimate opportunities for erstwhile leaders of armed factions; second, the ability of reintegration programmes to create genuine socio-economic opportunities that can absorb former fighters as functional members of their communities; and third, the processes involved in transforming an entire rebel movement into a viable political party, movement or, more generally, allowing it to participate in political life. This book will be of great interest to students of security and development, peace and conflict studies, and IR in general, as well as practitioners and policymakers. Mats Berdal is Professor of Security and Development in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From 2000 to 2003 he was Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Mats Berdal is a Visiting Professor at the National Defence and Command College, Oslo. David Ucko is the Programme Coordinator & Research Fellow for the Conflict, Security & Development Research Group, King's College London.

This volume examines and evaluates the impact of international statebuilding interventions on the political economy of conflict-affected countries over the past 20 years. It focuses on countries that are emerging, or have recently emerged, from periods of war and protracted conflict. The interventions covered fall into three broad categories: international administrations and transformative occupations (East Timor, Iraq, and Kosovo); complex peace operations (Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, and Sudan); governance and statebuilding programmes conducted in the context of economic assistance (Georgia and Macedonia).This book will be of interest to students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, post-conflict reconstruction, political economy, international organisations and IR/Security Studies in general.

This edited volume empirically maps and theorises NATO-ISAF’s contribution to peacebuilding and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The book provides a contextual framework of the NATO participation in Afghanistan; it offers an outline of the security situation in Afghanistan and discusses geopolitical, historical, and military factors that are related to it. It argues that a general underlying factor is that although the stated goals of the Afghanistan mission may be similarly formulated across the ISAF coalition, that are a great number of differences in the nature of coalition members’ political calculations, and share of the burden, and that this induces a dynamic of alliance politics that state actors attempt to either mitigate, navigate, or exploit - depending on their interests and views. The book asks why there are differences in countries’ share of the burden; how they manifest in different approaches; and how the actual performance of different members of the coalition ought to be assessed. It argues that understanding this offers clues as to what does not work in current state-building efforts, beyond individual countries’ experiences and the more general critique of statebuilding philosophy and practice.This book answers key questions through a series of case studies which together form a comparative study of national contributions to the multilateral mission in Afghanistan. In so doing, it provides a uniquely sensitive analysis that can help explain coalition contributions from various countries. It will be of great interest to students of Afghanistan, Asian politics, peacebuilding, statebuilding, war and conflict studies, IR and Security Studies generally.

This book examines international engagement with Kosovo since NATO’s intervention in 1999, and looks at the three distinct phases of Kosovo’s development; intervention, statebuilding and independence.Kosovo remains a case study of central importance in international relations, illustrative of key political trends in the post-Cold War era. During each phase, international policy towards Kosovo has challenged prevailing international norms and pushed the boundaries of conventional wisdom. In each of the three phases 'Kosovo' has been cited as constituting a precedent, and this book explores the impact and the often troubling consequences and implications of these precedents. This book explicitly engages with this debate, which transcends Kosovo itself, and provides a critical analysis of the catalysts and consequences of contemporary international engagement with this seminal case study.Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the international engagement with Kosovo and situates events there in an international context, highlighting the extent to which international policy towards Kosovo has challenged existing norms and practices. Kosovo has been cited in certain texts as a positive template to be emulated, but the contributors to this book also identify the often controversial and contentious nature of these new norms. This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention and statebuilding, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general. Aidan Hehir is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster.

This book offers a state-of-the-art examination of peacemaking, looking at its theoretical assumptions, empirical applications and its consequences. Despite the wealth of research on external interventions and practices of Western peacebuilding, many scholars tend to rely on findings in the so-called 'post-agreement' phase of interventions. As a result, most mainstream peacebuilding literature pays limited or no attention to the linkages that exist between mediation practices in the negotiation phase and processes in the post-peace agreement phase of intervention. By linking the motives and practices of interveners during negotiation and implementation phases into a more integrated theoretical framework, this book makes a unique contribution to the on-going debate on the so-called Western ‘liberal’ models of peacebuilding. Drawing upon in-depth case-studies from various different regions of the world including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Sierra Leone, this innovative volume examines a variety of political motives behind third party interventions, thus challenging the very founding concept of mediation literature. This book will of much interest to students of peacebuilding, statebuilding, peacemaking, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

This volume connects the study of statebuilding to broader aspects of social theory and the historical study of the state, bringing forth new questions and starting-points, both academically and practically, for the field. Building states has become a highly prioritized issue in international politics. Since the 1990s, mainly Western countries and international institutions have invested large sums of money, vast amounts of manpower, and considerable political capital in ventures of this kind all across the globe. Most of the focus in current literature is on the acute cases, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to states that seem to fit the label ‘failed states’ such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia. This book brings together a diverse group of scholars who introduce new theoretical approaches from the broader social sciences. The chapters revisit historical cases of statebuilding, and provide thought-provoking, new strategic perspectives on the field. The result is a volume that broadens and deepens our understanding of statebuilding by highlighting the importance of hybridity, contingency and history in a broad range of case-studies.This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

This book provides theoretical clarity about the concepts of failed and fragile states, which have emerged strongly since the 9/11 attacks. Recent contributions often see the fragile state as either a problem of development or of security. This volume argues that that neither perspective on its own is a sufficient basis for good policy. In a wide-ranging treatment, drawing on large samples as well as case studies, the authors create an alternative model of the fragile state emphasizing the multidimensional, multifaceted nature of the "fragile state problematique". On the basis of their model and empirical evidence, they then derive a number of policy-relevant insights regarding the need for contextualized and ongoing country analysis, the perils and pitfalls of unstructured development assistance, and the need to move whole-of-government approaches from the realm of rhetoric to reality. In offering both a synthesis of existing research and an innovative approach to understanding the fragile state, this volume will be of great interest to students of war and conflict studies, risk, conflict management, and international relations in general. It will also be of use to practitioners in policy circles and to NGOs.

This book examines the ways in which long-term processes of state-formation limit the possibilities for short-term political projects of statebuilding.Using process-oriented approaches, the contributing authors explore what happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding ‘meet’ social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. In order to explain their findings, they also analyse the temporally and spatially broader structures of world society which shape the possibilities of statebuilding.Statebuilding and State-Formation includes a variety of case studies from post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the headquarters and branch offices of international agencies. Drawing on various theoretical approaches from sociology and anthropology, the contributors discuss external interventions as well as self-led statebuilding projects. This edited volume is divided into three parts: Part I: State-Formation, Violence and Political Economy Part II: Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation Part III: The International Self – Statebuilders’ Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and SubjectivitiesThe book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

This book brings together policymakers and academics to analyse the international community’s performance in post-war statebuilding projects. In the past twenty years, statebuilding has emerged as a centerpiece of international efforts to stabilize violent conflicts. From the Balkans, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, it has become widely accepted that statebuilding—defined as the development of transparent and accountable political institutions, stable and sustainable economic structures, professional public administrations, and civilian-controlled security services—is essential to the long-term stability of post-conflict settlements.The International Community and Statebuilding brings together senior-level policymakers and academics in order to analyse the international community’s performance in post-war statebuilding projects. Filling an important gap in the existing body of work on this topic, the contributors explore how international state builders have attempted to negotiate the intersections of multilateralism, competing strategic priorities and agendas, organizational complexity, and domestic politics. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.