Liberal Peace Transitions Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding
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Biographical note
Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute & Department of Politics, University of Manchester. His recent publications include Peace in IR (Routledge, 2008), Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers During Conflict Resolution (co-edited with Edward Newman) (UNU Press, 2006), and The Transformation of Peace (Palgrave, 2005). Jason Franks has been a Research Fellow in the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is author of Rethinking the Roots of Terrorism (Palgrave, 2006).sThis book provides a set of illuminating insights (both empirical and theoretical) from the study of a series of post-Cold War 'liberal peace' interventions.
- David Chandler, University of Westminster, International Affairs
This critique of liberal peacebuilding strategies, based on fieldwork in five war-torn societies, reveals variations of approach that are nevertheless commonly based on statebuilding rather than affording justice and livelihoods to populations. Richmond and Franks have identified the dysfunctionalism of these virtual states and the local resistances that give rise to hybrid and diffuse forms of social contract. It is an interrogation of the enlightenment project that leads to revisionist thinking about peacebuilding and causes us to wonder just how emancipatory liberalism really is.
- Michael Pugh, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford,