Between Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, Between Social Engineering and Post-Colonialism
Taken together, these two volumes represent variations on the mainstream of peace and conflict research in international relations, normatively based on liberal assumptions, and focused on the key areas of peacebuilding and statebuilding. They equate sustainable peace with a state framework for market democracy and civil society, and will no doubt be widely read and appreciated for some good reason. In the case of the Paris and Sisk volume, this will be so especially in North America where the language and methodology employed is perhaps most resonant. The work of many of the authors included in these two books has been influential. Chapters summarise the range of issues in mainstream debates well, bringing together an interesting range of papers. Yet, to my mind the dilemma that they represent for scholars and practitioners involved in international intervention, whether conflict management, resolution or transformation, mediation and negotiation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding or statebuilding, is an old one which these two volumes, able and scholarly though they are, ultimately skirt around. Somewhere between peacebuilding as an activity focused on a ‘sustainable peace’ often understood as grass-roots, locally owned and resonant, and statebuilding as an institutional activity backed by the mainly western international community for its own interests and to consolidate its security and normative systems, a very unsatisfactory form of peace has emerged, which has had a minimal impact on its many recipients, and appears alien, distant, heavy handed or uncaring. Echoes of colonialism and of local everyday resistance, hidden and obvious, have arisen within the span of these agendas. It is the set of problems that emerge from these tensions, which these two volumes address in timely fashion. These tensions are between ‘liberal’ and ‘local’, between distant ‘governmentality’ and local political, social, economic systems, often influenced by custom or class and dynamics that fall outside of the liberal canon. These are often assumed to be without agency or capacity, but liberal experiences of statebuilding and peacebuilding have shown this not to be the case, in my view. These hidden tensions have caused a post-colonial critique of these ‘peace projects’ to become very