ABSTRACT

This book critically explores the practices of peacebuilding, and the politics of the communities experiencing intervention.

The contributions to this volume have a dual focus. First, they analyse the practices of western intervention and peacebuilding, and the prejudices and politics that drive them. Second, they explore how communities experience and deal with this intervention, as well as an understanding of how their political and economic priorities can often diverge markedly from those of the intervener. This is achieved through theoretical and thematic chapters, and an extensive number of in-depth empirical case studies.

Utilising a variety of conceptual frameworks and disciplines, the book seeks to understand why something so normatively desirable – the pursuit of, and building of, peace – has turned out so badly. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Mali, interventions in the pursuit of peace have not achieved the results desired by the interveners. But, rather, they have created further instability and violence. The contributors to this book explore why.

This book will be of much interest to students, academics and practitioners of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international intervention, statebuilding, security studies and IR in general.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

The tyranny of peace and the politics of international intervention

part |96 pages

Exploring peace

chapter |18 pages

International peace practice

Ambiguity, contradictions and perpetual violence

chapter |20 pages

Geographies of reconstruction

Re-thinking post-war spaces

chapter |18 pages

Still the spectre at the feast

Comparisons between peacekeeping and imperialism in peacekeeping studies today

chapter |21 pages

A double-edged sword of peace?

Reflections on the tension between representation and protection in gendering liberal peacebuilding

part |157 pages

Imposing peace

chapter |24 pages

Securing and stabilising

Peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the occupied Palestinian territory

chapter |18 pages

War and peace in Côte d'Ivoire

Violence, agency and the local/international line

chapter |11 pages

Libya in the shadow of Iraq

The ‘Old Guard' versus the thuwwar in the battle for stability

chapter |22 pages

Defending neoliberal Mali

French military intervention and the management of contested political narratives