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This thesis analyses how dominant policy approaches to peacebuilding have moved away from a single and universalised understanding of peace to be achieved through a top-down strategy of democratisation and economic liberalisation, prevalent at the beginning of 1990s. Instead, throughout the 2000s, peacebuilders have increasingly adopted a commitment to cultivating a bottom-up and hybrid peacebuilding process that is context-sensitive and intended to be more respectful of the needs and values of post-war societies. The projects of statebuilding in Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, in Bosnia are examined to illustrate the shift. By capturing this shift, I seek to argue that contemporary practitioners of peace are sharing the sensibility of the theoretical critics of liberalism. These critics have long contended that post-war societies cannot be governed from ‘above’ and have advocated the adoption of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding. Now, both peace practitioners and their critics share the tendency to embrace difference in peacebuilding operations, but this shift has failed to address meaningfully the problems and concerns of post-conflict societies. The conclusion of this research is that, drawing on the assumption that these societies are not capable of undertaking sovereign acts because of their problematic inter-subjective frames, the discourses of peacebuilding (in policy-making and academic critique) have increasingly legitimised an open-ended role of interference by external agencies, which now operate from ‘below’. Peacebuilding has turned into a long-term process, in which international and local actors engage relationally in the search for ever-more emancipatory hybrid outcomes, but in which self-government and self-determination are constantly deferred. Processes of emphasising difference have thus denied the political autonomy of post-war societies and have continuously questioned the political and human equality of these populations in a hierarchically divided world.

This thesis assesses the rationale behind the shifts, ruptures and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peace-building. In particular, the thesis is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered the manner in which the foundational elements of thinking about peace-building have changed beyond the ‘liberal peace-building’ paradigm. To do so, the thesis engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peace-building that culminate with the ‘local turn’. The thesis begins by tracing an initial shift towards more invasive forms of peace-building in the late 1990s-early 2000s, before engaging with the emergence of the local turn. The research focuses on the case of Kosovo in order to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peace-building, which can be understood less as a deep reconceptualisation of the manner of conducting peace-building operations and more as a refinement of methods of socio-political engineering from the outside. Furthermore, the case of Kosovo is also central to the local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses is fundamentally tied to the critiques of the extensive international mission in the territory, and of its by-products, particularly resistance and marginalisation of local agency. Along with an assessment of the theoretical underpinnings of the shift towards post-liberal, relational and non-linear approaches to bottom-up peace-building, the thesis examines the implications of the framing of the ‘everyday’ in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. By looking at its normative project of change, the thesis argues that despite its critical and radical intentions the local turn retains certain foundational epistemological and ontological elements of modernist and positivist approaches that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend.

Gender theory in general, and patriarchal theory in particular, have been explored in this research to describe the procedures, processes, norms, values and, most importantly, structures that define the subject. Patriarchal theory mostly perceives men as the abusers and women as the abused. However, the nuances and particularities of these oppressive structures have not been explored in detail. In this research, the reader is introduced to the various manifestations of how being privileged and underprivileged is constructed. This research focuses on processes and structures and it mostly explores alternative approaches towards political sociology and its intersection with gender theory. The thesis adopts a multi-level analysis that involves the different manifestations of the ruler-subject binary at the societal and interpersonal levels of analysis. The so-called private and public spheres with their fluid identities have been analyzed after descriptions of internal mechanisms reproducing the social construction of oppression are understood. Similarities between analysis concerned with the household and the public sphere reflects on how binaries such as the masculine and feminine, and the ruler and the subject, reproduce, mirror and reinforce one another. This research, therefore, focuses on structural and systematic ways of reproducing patriarchy as a system that affects the society in an inclusive way. This required and understanding of norms and values that have been analyzed as a reflection of processes that accommodate oppression. The intersection of these processes has led the author to argue that ‘women are to men, what the citizen is for the state, in the context of Turkey’. The feminization of the male political subject has been argued after presenting three chapters that represent my original contribution to knowledge. Through utilizing interviews conducted by other scholars, I initially analyzed male and female statements on domestic violence in Turkey. Second, I analyzed written texts, including official documents, which inform the reader of state officials’ views on gender inequality. Third, I have analyzed the relationship between the state and the citizen through the research I conducted, on police violence during the Gezi Park protests and other interviews include the research conducted with feminist and human rights laywers. The similarities between the manner, processes and values between the male and female (as well as the ruler and the subject) led to a discussion that the male political subject is simultaneously masculine and feminine. The feminization of the male political subject represented an alignment between two spheres that reinforce one another, through mirroring the public and the private. These two systems created a contradiction within the subject often leading him to over-compensate his damage. Therefore, patriarchal relativity was introduced to discuss a perspective on over-compensation amongst subjects and agents that coincide and conflate within vertical patriarchy. Accordingly, new concepts of patriarchy were needed to capture the nuances within a system that defines the subject at macro and micro levels. Throughout this research, the contributions produced by scholars during the past forty years over debates on patriarchal theory have been reproduced to a great extent. This research has utilized a multi-level analysis through comparisons made by references to metaphors. Metaphoric reproduction is a rare approach within patriarchal theory, often different to utilizing a single theoretical framework. The employment of semi-structured and unstructured interviews with additional content analysis substantiates the author’s subjectivity. This subjectivity reflects a feminist understanding of politics, political sociology, philosophy, and gender theory. As a result, political structures, processes, privilege, and vulnerability have been explored with a view understanding and empowering the marginalized.

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Over the past decade, child soldiers have inundated the media. Images of boys armed with AK-47s appear ever-present, providing a cautionary story of innocent childhood gone awry (Rosen, 2005). As these representations turn commonly held assumptions of a protected and innocent childhood on its head, what they conceal is as challenging as what they reveal. These media images tell us little about the children behind the guns or the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences. I was concerned with girl soldiers in Sierra Leone as an unexplored group of ‘war affected’ citizens. I quickly discovered that this was a growing and global phenomenon, one that few analysts and policy makers were aware of. Little was understood of the issue of girl soldiers, not only where, why, and how the practice of using girls in war came about, but also what it means for girls and, most importantly, what to do about it. in the aftermath of conflict, there is often the expectation that people’s lives will improve. Girl soldiers’ post-conflict reality in Sierra Leone was somewhat different. In a rapid time span countless girls unlike boys’ were confronted with the reality of establishing new identities that depended not on the rebel forces, but on factors such as access to family and community support — factors that were lacking for girl soldiers at war’s end.

This thesis asks why is trust between respective decision-makers the key factor when it comes to the EU’s ability to engage China (or not) on the resolution of security threats on the African continent? This thesis argues that the EU’s ability to impact upon Chinese decision-making in the realm of African security risk management relies above all on the capacity of EU policy-makers (i.e. operatives on the ground) to foster sufficient levels of cognitive-based political trust with their Chinese counterparts. More specifically, to attain such levels, this thesis demonstrates that these decision-makers have to do more than simply rely upon a convergence of rational interests with their Chinese interlocutors to foster trust, due to the primordial importance that cognitive factors – such as identity, communicative action and displays of empathy – play when it comes to bridging their contrasting political preferences with regard to the resolution of conflict situations on the African continent. This thesis shows that such cognitive factors often serve as the key variable between these actors either engaging in practical cooperation/coordination on the ground to help diffuse a given security threat or adopting conflicting (if not obstructing) views on how best to resolve a given conflict situation. To demonstrate this, the thesis comparatively focuses on two specific case studies: the EU’s interaction with China on the Darfur crisis (1) and bilateral dealings on counter-piracy activities in the Indian Ocean (2). The case studies will retrace a situation (1) where the EU’s inability to generate sufficient levels of trust with China prevented any form of meaningful diplomatic and practical cooperation, instead leaving both sides on opposing sides of the spectrum and will compare it to this other case (2), where the EU was able to foster enough trust to thereafter trigger a change in China’s tactical approach – more in line with its own expectations – to the extent of facilitating actual practical cooperation between the two sides.

Over the last few decades, international organisations and bilateral donors have progressively promoted externally-led state building and Security Sector Reform (SSR) as two of the principal policy approaches to enhance state legitimacy and promote stability and security in countries emerging from conflicts. At the same time, the state building and SSR research agendas have grown exponentially and the quest for evidence-based policies has increasingly become an important aspect for international and British decision-makers working in fragile, conflict-affected countries. Nonetheless, the use and uptake of state building and SSR-oriented research findings by those involved in policy-making has remained a largely under-studied field of research, and enquiry into the research-policy nexus has rarely approached the issues of state building and SSR. This PhD research seeks to compensate for this gap in the literature by investigating the extent to which research has influenced and interacted with SSR policies, programmes and activities implemented by the United Kingdom (UK) in conflict-affected Sierra Leone. The thesis uses concepts and notions from the literature on the policy process and research utilisation to explore the ways in which research has influenced UK-led SSR policy. It analyses the evolution of the network of policy-makers, street-level bureaucrats, and researchers working on SSR in Sierra Leone, and argues that two main variables – an increased stability in the country and a progressive evolution of SSR in policy and research – contributed to the expansion of the policy network over time and to a better use of research by street-level bureaucrats on the ground. The thesis tests the applicability of the literature on the research-policy nexus to the challenge of state building and SSR in conflict-affected environments, deriving from the Sierra Leone case study a series of recommendations to improve the use of research by international organisations and bilateral donors working in fragile states.

The purpose of this thesis is to challenge and further the understanding of security within the post-Agreement society of Northern Ireland. Using a feminist lens to examine security and policing in the conflict transformational society allows the research to uncover 'hidden' aspects of the transition from violent conflict to peace and contributes to a consideration of the role of gender in conflict and transition. The research takes a qualitative approach and uses the voices and experiences of women to challenge dominant understandings of security and to provide an alternative account of security and insecurity in a divided society. The thesis identifies a range of insecurities which exist for women 17 years after the peace Agreement, indicating that legacies of conflict which remain unaddressed continue to position women in situations of insecurity and hinder the development of a positive peace. The thesis addresses a lack of consideration towards women's experiences with policing. The research has found a complex relationship between women and the formal security sector. For example, residual elements of community conflict policing continue to block access to policing in some situations, yet it is unclear if state based community policing is ready to fill the security gap at this time. The lack of effectiveness of the criminal justice system with regard to gender based violence leaves many women feeling disillusioned. Yet it is also clear that women expect security to be provided through the state. This study provides a unique contribution to the field of feminist security studies and gendered conflict transformation by considering aspects of gender security in a specific time and context. The thesis concludes that it is unhelpful to fix meanings of gender security but to consider how insecurity interacts and overlaps in the lives of women in order to enable a more secure transition for women from conflict to peace.

This thesis seeks to examine the effectiveness of the ECOWAS Parliament in conflict prevention in West Africa. From a holistic perspective, it also discusses the emergence of regional parliaments and specifically analyses their contribution to conflict prevention. This thesis is the first to assess how the ECOWAS Parliament attempts to prevent conflict in West Africa and how effective this has been. It presents the argument that, bodies such as the ECOWAS-P which are mandated as the legislative organs in a region otherwise noted for protracted conflicts play a crucial role in preventing conflict. The study employed participant observation (specifically in the ECOWAS-P), case study methods, elite interviews, parliamentary and archival research. The thesis greatest contribution lie in undertaking an institutionalist approach to conflict prevention and drawing from public administration developed and applied a performance management tool to help assess how the ECOWAs-P has succeeded at this task. It finds that with no provision made for the parliament in the regional conflict prevention mechanism, it has had to employ normative initiatives to be relevant in conflict prevention. The research exposes that the lack of a universal suffrage mode of election of EMPs emphasises its democratic deficit. The thesis concludes that, the ECOWAS-P as a new institution provided under the revised treaty of 1993 is increasingly gaining more responsibility as a body for conflict prevention and prospectively the enhancement of its powers by the draft supplementary act passed in December 2014 will help it in making binding laws.