Download or read book Deferring Peace in International Statebuilding written by Pol Bargués-Pedreny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding Statebuilding and Peace Formation written by Oliver P. Richmond and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book States of Disorder Ecosystems of Governance written by Adam Day and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international interventions. States of Disorder addresses the question, 'Why has UN state-building so consistently failed to meet its objectives?'. It proposes an explanation based on the application of complexity theory to UN interventions in South Sudan and DRC, where the UN has been tasked to implement massive stabilization and state-building missions. Far from being ''ungoverned spaces," these settings present complex, dynamical systems of governance with emergent properties that allow them to adapt and resist attempts to change them. UN interventions, based upon assumptions that gradual increases in institutional capacity will lead to improved governance, fail to reflect how change occurs in these systems and may in fact contribute to underlying patterns of exclusion and violence. Based on more than a decade of the author's work in peacekeeping, this book offers a systemic mapping of how governance systems work, and indeed work against, UN interventions. Pursuing a complexity-driven approach instead helps to avoid unintentional consequences, identifies meaningful points of leverage, and opens the possibility of transforming societies from within.

Download or read book Handbook on Intervention and Statebuilding written by Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative Handbook offers a new perspective on the cutting-edge conceptual advances that have shaped – and continue to shape – the field of intervention and statebuilding.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Civil War and UN Peace Operations written by Mats Berdal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the operational and political challenges facing UN peace operations deployed in countries where civil war and protracted violence have given rise to the complex and distinctive political economies of conflict. The volume explores the nature and impact of such political economies – informal systems of power and influence formed by the interaction of local, national, and region-wide war economies with the political agendas of conflict actors – on the course of UN peace operations. It focuses in detail on the UN’s long-running peace operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Mali, and Somalia. The book is centrally concerned with the interaction of UN missions with the power structures and local conflict dynamics that shape individual mission settings, and the challenges these pose for mediation, protection of civilians, and other tasks. It also offers a critical assessment of the various ways in which the UN ‘system’, from its headquarters in New York to the field, has confronted the policy challenges posed by political economies of conflict-affected states, societies, and regions. It advances a pragmatic set of policy recommendations aimed at improving the UN’s ability to confront predatory and exploitative war economies. At the same time, the volume makes it clear that political and institutional obstacles to more effective UN action are certain to remain profound and are unlikely ever to be fully overcome let alone eradicated. Despite making some progress since the 1990s to better understand the political economy of civil wars, the UN has struggled with how to tackle informal networks of power and their consequences for efforts to end wars. The book will be of special interest to students of war and conflict studies, statebuilding, political economy of conflict, UN interventionism and peacebuilding, and IR/Security in general.

Download or read book International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement written by Dahlia Simangan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Peace in Political Unsettlement written by Jan Pospisil and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International peacebuilding has reached an impasse. Its lofty ambitions have resulted in at best middling success, punctuated by moments of outright failure. The discrediting of the term ‘liberal peacebuilding’ has seen it evolve to respond to the numerous critiques. Notions such as ‘inclusive peace’ merge the liberal paradigm with critical notions of context, and the need to refine practices to take account of ‘the local’ or ‘complexity’. However, how this would translate into clear guidance for the practice of peacebuilding is unclear. Paradoxically, contemporary peacebuilding policy has reached an unprecedented level of vagueness. Peace in political unsettlement provides an alternative response rooted in a new discourse, which aims to speak both to the experience of working in peace process settings. It maps a new understanding of peace processes as institutionalising formalised political unsettlement and points out new ways of engaging with it. The book points to the ways in which peace processes institutionalise forms of disagreement, creating ongoing processes to manage it, rather than resolve it. It suggests a modest approach of providing ‘hooks’ to future processes, maximising the use of creative non-solutions, and practices of disrelation, are discussed as pathways for pragmatic post-war transitions. It is only by understanding the nature and techniques of formalised political unsettlement that new constructive ways of engaging with it can be found.

Download or read book Europeanization and Statebuilding as Everyday Practices written by Vjosa Musliu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Contesting Peace in the Postwar City written by Ivan Gusic and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Contesting Peace in the Postwar City is key reading for urban and peace and conflict scholars. In this impressive and meticulously researched book, Gusic reflects on the ways in which divisions are routinised in the everyday landscape of divided cities and skilfully investigates how change and continuity are governed in postwar urban spaces. The book provides rich empirical material from the cities of Mostar, Mitrovica and Belfast, drawing on nuanced fieldwork insights.” —Stefanie Kappler, Durham University, UK “Ivan Gusic sets out a powerful, theoretically critical and empirically rich account of the trajectories of cities after war. The strength of the work is that it brings an understanding of the urban condition into relation with ethno-national conflict and the survival of violence. Gusic unsettles dominant narratives in peace studies by offering a grounded evaluation of three cities coming out of violence and points to the importance of place in peacebuilding processes.” —Brendan Murtagh, Queen’s University Belfast, UK “Detailed case studies of Belfast, Mitrovica and Mostar show how cities are often engines of what Ivan Gusic calls ‘war in peace’. This on-trend study combines the latest research from critical urban studies with peace and conflict studies to produce a very accessible and internationally relevant book. It is highly recommended.” —Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University, UK This book explores why the postwar city reinforces rather than transcends its continuities of war in peace. It theorises war-to-peace transitions as conflicts over how to socio-politically order society and then analyses different urban conflicts over peace(s) in postwar Belfast (Northern Ireland), Mitrovica (Kosovo) and Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Focusing on themes such as educational segregation, clientelism, fear, paramilitaries, and infrastructure, it shows how conflict lines from war are perpetuated in and by the postwar city. Yet it also discovers instances where antagonisms are bridged by utilising the postwar city’s transcending potential. While written in the nexus between peace research and urban studies, this book also speaks to political geography, international relations, anthropology, and planning.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans written by Roberto Belloni and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the evolution of liberal peacebuilding in the Balkans since the mid-1990s. After more than two decades of peacebuilding intervention, widespread popular disappointment by local communities is increasingly visible. Since the early 2010s, difficult conditions have spurred a wave of protest throughout the region. Citizens have variously denounced the political system, political elites, corruption and mismanagement. Rather than re-evaluating their strategy in light of mounting local discontent, international peacebuilding officials have increasingly adopted cynical calculations about stability. This book explains this evolution from the optimism of the mid-1990s to the current state through the analysis of three main phases, moving from the initial ‘rise’, to a later condition of ‘stalemate’ and then ‘fall’ of peacebuilding.

Download or read book Statebuilding Missions and Media Development written by Kerstin Tomiak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Entangled Peace written by Ignasi Torrent and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unfolds an exploratory journey intended to scrutinise the suitability of entanglements and relations as a mode of thinking and seeing peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the UN’s limited results in the endeavour towards securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, Torrent critically engages with three relevant debates in contemporary peacebuilding literature, including the inclusion of ‘the locals’, the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence and the increasingly questioned agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Inattentive to the relational vulnerability of involved stakeholders, it is suggested that the UN seeks to secure a totalising modern distory, defined in the book as a story that undoes other stories. Whilst affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, Entangled Peace also delves into a cautionary argument about what the author refers to as entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative, deterministic and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Entangled Peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, in which events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.

Download or read book Handbook on Climate Change and International Security written by Maria J. Trombetta and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This topical Handbook explores the emergence of climate change as an international security issue, the threats it poses, and the political and academic debates it has prompted. Framing climate change as a security issue, it explores the ways relevant actors, states and international organizations have conceptualized climate security and its associated threats.

Download or read book Emotional Practices and Listening in Peacebuilding Partnerships written by Pernilla Johansson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the everyday emotions of international peacebuilding practitioners as practices that hinder – and potentially help – them to listen more receptively to their local partners. It develops ‘‘emotional practices’’ as an analytical concept by integrating critical feminist perspectives insights into practice approaches. Effective peacebuilding requires international actors to listen to local partners. This sounds simple enough but often fails in practice. Examining how everyday emotions help or hinder internationals’ receptivity to local perspectives, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that emotions do not matter – at least not those of internationals who are the privileged party in peacebuilding partnerships. The book is based on interviews with peacebuilding practitioners, donors and researchers working in the Balkans and East Africa, as well as in the UK, the US and Sweden, and gives a detailed and no-nonsense description of daily dilemmas regarding listening and partnerships. Johansson provides concrete recommendations of how internationals can practice personally, organizationally, and geopolitically to build emotional capacity that will help them listen better to local actors. Drawing on the author’s expertise in political science and peace and conflict research, this volume speaks to scholars in international relations, political theory, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, critical theory, and anthropology.

Download or read book The Forever Crisis written by Adam Day and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction to complex systems thinking at the global governance level. It offers concepts, tools, and ways of thinking about how systems change that can be applied to the most wicked problems facing the world today. More than an abstract argument for complexity theory, the book offers a targeted critique of today’s highest-profile proposals for improving the governance of our environment, security, finance, health, and digital space. It suggests that we should spend less effort and resources on upgrading existing institutions, and more on understanding how they (and we) relate to each other. The volume will be essential reading for public policymakers, NGOs and think tanks, foreign policy experts, government officials, and global decision-makers.

Download or read book Unravelling Liberal Interventionism written by Gëzim Visoka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite calls for the decolonisation of knowledge, scholars who come from conflict-affected societies remained marginalised, excluded from the examination of the politics and impacts of liberal interventionism. This edited volume gives local scholars a platform from which they critically examine different aspects of liberal interventionism and statebuilding in Kosovo. Drawing on situational epistemologies and grounded approaches, the chapters in this book interrogate a wide range of themes, including: the politics of local resistance; the uneven relationship between international statebuilders and local subjects; faking of local ownership of security sector reform and the rule of law; heuristic and practical limits of interventionism, as well as the subjugated voices in statebuilding process, such as minorities and women. The book finds that the local is not antidote to the liberal, and that local perspectives are not monolithic. Yet, local critiques of statebuilding do not seek to generate replicable knowledge; rather they prefer generating situational and context-specific knowledge be that to resolve problems or uncover the unresolved problems. The book seeks to contribute to critical peace and conflict studies by (re)turning the local turn to local scholars who come from conflict-affected societies and who have themselves experienced the transition from war to peace. This book, voted one of the top 10 books of 2020 by International Affairs, is essential reading for students and scholars of peace- and state-building, conflict studies and international relations.

Download or read book Kosovo and Transitional Justice written by Aidan Hehir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.