No / The victory of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, in the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Authority, was greeted with dismay by the international community, which responded by cutting off aid. This article seeks to understand why Hamas was elected, as well as the international community's response, through an analysis of the liberal peace thesis. This thesis states that democracies do not go to war with one another, thus it was thought that building a democratic Palestinian state would buttress the peace process. The Palestinian people have, however, elected an organization that rejects the peace process. This has provided a wake-up call for the US to face up to the fact that promoting democratization may not always produce the results it desires. The US sees the election of Hamas as the cause of the current crisis and the main obstacle to peace. This article, however, argues that this is merely a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis. The Palestinian Authority's lack of sovereignty and its complete dependence on Israel put severe limitations on the building of a viable, democratic state. The article concludes that the US's uncompromising response to Hamas could well undermine democracy promotion in the region.

Post-conflict peacebuilding in Iraq started in 2003 following the military invasion by the Coalition of Willing forces. Since 2003, numerous actors have involved themselves in Iraq’s peacebuilding including governments, NGOs, the UN and the international financial institutions. Also, various activities and actions have been implemented in the humanitarian, political and economic domains. Today, all the indicators show that the country still faces the challenges of conflict, chaos as well as weak social and economic development. Many scholars attribute that to the deteriorating security conditions, which raises the questions of why does the country still face insecurity and why has peace not been consolidated? This research examines the impact of donors’ conditionality on post-conflict peacebuilding in Iraq. As the liberal peace is the basis of contemporary practice of peacebuilding, this research draws on the liberal peace theory as a point of departure. The Liberal peace is used as theoretical lenses in order to understand donors’ strategies and arguments in the context of Iraq, according to two main themes, political and economic transition. Overall, this research finds that the donors’ policy packages focused on how to build liberal democratic and a free market state. Donors, primarily the US, aimed at enhancing their control over the political process and formed the political structures according to their interests foremost and not according to the public will. The local community has not been adequately engaged or consulted. Also, transforming Iraq into a free-market economy by relying on the private sector to stimulate economic growth and restricting the role of the state while the country faces security problems has led to weak outcomes in all social and economic sectors.

This thesis focuses on liberal peace building in the DRC. The thesis takes a critical approach which emphasises local agencies and their engagements with liberal peace building. However, it seeks to bring this critique back to the institutions with which liberal peace building is preoccupied, by focusing on the hidden local that operates within these institutions. This approach seeks to give new meaning to processes of institution building without rendering institutions irrelevant as a top-down approach. Focusing on the first legislature of the Congolese Third Republic (2006-2011) this thesis provides a case study of how local agencies consume liberal democracy within the National Assembly, and make it their own. It discusses current liberal peace building practices as a process of mutual disengagement, in which both the local and liberal intervention seek to disengage from each other. Although this results in a lack of legitimacy of the peace building project both locally as well as with liberal interventions, it also creates hybrid space in which local agencies consume liberal democracy. The thesis conceptualises these local agencies as being convivial, in other words, they are enabled by people's relations. The thesis therefore focuses on MPs relations with their electorate, as well as with the executive and other MPs in their party or ruling coalition. In through these interactions local agencies consume liberal democracy – it is accepted, rejected, diverted, substituted, etc. The thesis concludes that through these practices of consumption local agencies negotiate liberal democracy. The liberal democratic framework is kept intact, but it is not enabled to function as foreseen, because local agencies are responsive to a moral matrix of the father-family. However, the liberal democratic framework itself provides new tools through which local agencies also renegotiate the unwritten rules of the moral matrix of the father-family.

The main purpose of this research was to understand the civil war in Sierra Leone and its antecedents, and to analyse the package of reconstruction reforms which came along in the post-war era and their relevance for and impact on the local challenges for longer term peace. Continued corruption among the political class, the persistent disenfranchisement of important social groups, and emerging tensions along political party lines suggested that, ten years on from the Lomé Peace Accord, there may have been a malaise in the peacebuilding plan. To investigate the complex issues, and to support the hypothesis that the model for reconstruction was not best suited to local conditions and local priorities, the work first made a deep interrogation of the historic political, cultural and economic factors which led to the violent conflict. This scrutiny of the local experience allowed the conceptualisation of a germane 'framework for peace' which represented the most pressing priorities of the local community and the central challenges for peace. The framework reflected the main concerns of the local populace and was used as an analytical tool to better understand the relevance of the model for reconstruction vis-à-vis the local context. Through a critical analysis of the post-war reforms and their impact on the social dimensions of recovery, in particular macro-economic reforms and the promotion of democracy, conclusions were drawn about the appropriateness and efficacy of the model of reconstruction experienced in Sierra Leone and how it supported local priorities for peace. The enquiry found that, in general, the model for reconstruction was not best suited to the local context because of its inflexibility to support the local peacebuilding and its many challenges. In some ways the model for reconstruction heightened residual tensions from the conflict because it failed to address key issues for reform such as governance and social justice.

A wide number of contributions to the peacebuilding literature have decried the limitations and constraints of liberal peacebuilding, to such an extent that the very term has begun to assume vaguely pejorative overtones. Concerns for the health and well-being of liberal peacebuilding have accumulated to the extent that Roland Paris has issued a plaintive call for liberal peacebuilding to be ‘saved’ (2010). In this thesis, I critically engage with the comprehensive approach, one of the central mechanisms that has enabled liberal peacebuilding to redefine and rearticulate its terms of reference. I begin from the assumption that the comprehensive approach does not anticipate the post-liberal peace that has been heralded by some observers (see Richmond, 2011); quite the contrary, it instead provides the basis for reformulation or adaptation within the terms that have been established by liberal peacebuilding. In continuing to hold out this tantalising possibility, the comprehensive approach continues, more than 20 years after its first articulation, to cast a seductive spell over its adherents. In this thesis, I critically assess how the comprehensive approach framework has been engaged and developed by one of its leading proponents (the British Government). I break the approach down into three dimensions of comprehensiveness (deepening, contextuality and complementarity), with a view to illustrating how the textual reproduction of each dimension has been accompanied by a set of contradictions and tensions. In doing so, I propose to explore how discursive ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ has been accompanied by a range of contradictions and tensions. In unravelling these contradictions, I then draw upon Foucauldian concepts and themes to argue that each and every advancement of freedom (whether through the form of empowerment, participation or contextual engagement) has been considerably more ambiguous than the standard narrative of the comprehensive approach – which reproduces the impression of an incremental progression – would have us believe. In questioning and probing the proposition that the comprehensive approach overcomes or reconciles the contradictions and tensions of liberal peacebuilding, I instead suggest a disconcerting reversion to prior points of reference.

Critics of the liberal peace point out that the imposition of liberal democratic structures of governance through United Nations Peacekeeping Operations has not led to a sustainable peace being built. In reply, supporters of the liberal peace argue that even though the liberal peace is imperfect, there are no better alternatives. The objective of this thesis is to examine the Chinese approach to peacebuilding and explore the possibility that it may be a potential alternative to the liberal peace. The thesis examines the Chinese understanding of the causes of insecurity in Africa, what the Chinese position is with regards to United Nations peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions in Africa; and what role China see itself playing vis-à-vis United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in Africa. The Chinese approach to peacebuilding recognises poverty alleviation as the foundation upon which sustainable peace can be built in post-conflict countries. Beijing does not believe the external imposition of a political ruling superstructure can succeed, and sees the liberal peace as neo-colonialism and liberal hubris. However, there is no set Chinese model of peacebuilding which can replace the liberal peace, or which African countries might follow. This is because the Chinese developmental model respects the local context, is based on pragmatism, and relies on trial and error to find the way forward. The Chinese have been keeping a low profile in the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and have focused on providing transportation and logistical support to UNMIL. The Chinese focus on infrastructure rehabilitation is appreciated by Liberians and is making a positive contribution to the life of ordinary people. On the deep societal divide that lies at the heart of the Liberian civil war and continues to cause instability, both the Chinese approach to peacebuilding and the liberal peace remain silent.

The question of what agenda drives NGO peacebuilding in post-conflict setting has been raised in a number of literatures which make generalized conclusions that NGOs tend to respond to the liberal peace agenda, and in the process co-opt local peacebuilding initiatives. Liberal peace agenda refers to the post-conflict peacebuilding approach based on the promotion of democracy, economic liberalization, human rights and the rule of law. As such, NGOs are seen as privatizing peacebuilding, marginalizing local initiatives and applying unsustainable approaches to peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts. Provoked by these assertions, I conducted field research in northern Uganda, which up to 2006 had experienced 22 years of conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and Government of Uganda (GOU). I contend in my findings that while to some extent the generalized observations made by liberal peace critics are true, they fail to fully engage with the micro aspects of post-conflict peacebuilding. The macro-analytic assertions of the liberal peace critics ignore the plurality of the NGO peacebuilding practice, the diverse internal organizational culture, and the complexities and diversities of the contextual dynamics of post-conflict settings. My research was based on a micro level analysis and demonstrated that the peacebuilding process in northern Uganda was interactive, and, as such, engendered diverse encounters of sense-making, relationship building and co-construction of peacebuilding discourse and practice between NGOs, donors and local community. The study shows that peacebuilding was essentially relational and developed through a process of relational constructionism, which denotes social processes of reality construction based on relational encounters.

From the mid-1990s, the amalgamation of security, development, and humanitarian imperatives under the single umbrella of ‘state-building’ has provided a compelling justification for increasingly intrusive interventions into the political, economic, and social affairs of subject countries. Guided by the assumptions of liberal peace theory, state-building initiatives engage directly with states, seeking to achieve a reformulation of structures of government as a first step towards the implementation of wider socio-economic reforms. The state-building project is geared towards the construction of a particular form of statehood in subject states; state institutions are to be reconstructed in accordance with a liberal template, and tasked with establishing the necessary institutional environment for market-led development and the liberal peace. Contemporary discourses of state-building and development are fundamentally interlinked, representing a unified process of neo-liberal replication in subject states, whereby fundamental transformations of social, political, and economic structures are to be implemented and sustained through the construction of liberal state institutions. Pressure to court international approval due to conditions of aid dependence curtails the potential for meaningful democracy in subject countries. Key questions of social and economic policy are subsumed as technical matters of good governance and removed from domestic democratic contestation, facilitating a transfer of formerly domestic considerations into the international sphere. These interlocking processes of state-building and neo-liberal discipline have contributed to an inversion of sovereign statehood, whereby the state serves to channel inward an externally driven agenda, rather than acting as a sovereign expression of domestic interests. This reality raises important questions regarding the nature of democracy in post-conflict environments, and in particular the impact of state-building activities on the prospects for broadly inclusive democracy in subject states. This study will examine the evolution of state-building as a critical components of peace-building missions, its central assumptions and goals, and its implementation in practice in Timor-Leste. The state-building process in Timor-Leste has contributed to the formation of an insulated state with little basis in Timorese society. The democratic experience in Timor-Leste has been profoundly disempowering; conditions of aid dependence have constrained elected governments in key areas of social and economic policy, resulting in a loss of popular legitimacy and mounting public disenchantment. Closer examination of food and agricultural policy and management of Timorese oil reserves reveals the extent to which government policy remains constrained by international preferences. In these areas, the government’s inability to act in the interests of the Timorese public has compounded social hardships and popular discontent, contributing to the build-up of anti-government sentiment that manifested itself in the 2006 crisis.

Liberal Statebuilding in post-conflict societies is a very complex, intricate and dynamic task that is often based on liberal assumptions. Critiques argue that local contributions to define democracy and its norms, such as accountability, tend to be limited since local experiences are often perceived by the aid and statebuilding community to predate liberal requirements. Democratic norms are consequently often based on external international legitimacy and intentions rather than on domestic acceptance. In order to explore this further, this thesis critically examines the development of one democratic norm, accountability, in Afghanistan by using field data and applying Sikkink and Finnemore’s Norm Life Cycle to three accountability characteristics. These map out the norm’s legitimacy, its methods and relationship between Afghan citizens and government in order to understand the manifestation of accountability. The objective of the thesis is to assess whether accountability in Afghanistan was developed as intended by liberal statebuilding between 2001 and 2013. Empirical findings show that accountability did not manifest per the liberal democratic definition since the social and political realities that heavily impact norm development were not incorporated in the statebuilding approach. Combining theoretical and conceptual analysis, the research contributes to the Critical Peace Studies and Good Enough Governance literature and concludes that the liberal statebuilding methodology introduced accountability in a de-contextualised way that deprived it from norm contestation and local legitimacy. The thesis argues that this had both positive and negative effects. Accountability was introduced to a context that could benefit from its existence, but its introduction was done in an inconsistent manner that weakened its domestic conceptualisation by ignoring the link between social action and political power. Moreover the international community’s role in promoting accountability in Afghanistan both advanced and hampered the development of the liberal norm. Donors were able to raise accountability’s profile in the democratisation process but did so from an inaccessible and unaccountable political space that further removed Afghan citizens from policymaking and politics. The thesis’ application of a norm development lens to statebuilding provides a more in-depth and nuanced analysis to democratisation and one that, I hope, is original. It uses this alternative methodology to engage both with academic debate, and with policy development and implementation. The suggested approach allows for a better insight into the mergence between liberal concepts and local contexts as it not only confirms the existence of hybridity or mergence, but it also elaborates on its quality and consequences. It further proposes a more emancipatory statebuilding process that moves beyond a top-down vs. bottom-up perspective to a more enfranchised and integrated approach.

Building peace and preventing the emergence of new and existing conflicts is one of the fundamental objectives of the United Nations, seen as deep down as in the charter of the organization. As the United Nations has existed for some time their peacebuilding framework has changed on several occasions, with the most recent change taking place in 2016. This paper is concerned with how this new United Nations approach to peace from 2016 has changed the way in which the United Nations understands peacebuilding. As this paper is focused on peacebuilding, this study applies the theoretical lenses of Liberal peace theory, critical peacebuilding and Scandinavian peace theory to critically examine the current United Nations approach as well as the previous approach to peacebuilding. The use of the ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach allows for the identification of how the peace frameworks of the United Nations problematizes peacebuilding, the underlying assumptions as well as the effects. From this, it is determined that the new/current United Nations approach to peacebuilding has not significantly changed. Both frameworks are characterized by state-centricity with a focus on the necessity of liberal-democratic values being in place in order for sustainable peace to be achieved. The findings did show that the new approach emphasizes more interaction with local actors in the peace process however this emphasis was underpinned with a focus on peace through the state and not through the local.