A Battle for Sovereignty

This article examines the role, status and perceptions of the Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo from both Kosovo Albanian and Serbian perspectives. The analysis focuses on two cases, which attracted particular resistance on each of the two sides: the passing of legislation in the Kosovar parliament in 2012 that aimed to protect Serbian cultural heritage and the 2015 unsuccessful Kosovo bid for unesco membership. Both moments demonstrate how cultural heritage is primarily approached from the statehood perspective and used to additionally deepen inter-ethnic distances. The authors shed more light on the discrepancies between the international peacebuilding efforts and the internationally imposed legal framework, challenging the reduction of the peacebuilding efforts to institutional design, while dominant discourses of both Serbian and Albanian elites essentially deepen the enmity and serve as resistance mechanisms to the international peacebuilding strategies.

Identifying Pathways to Peace: How International Support Can Help Prevent Conflict Recurrence

This article provides new evidence on how the international community can effectively foster peace after civil war. It expands the current literature's narrow focus on either peacekeeping or aggregated aid flows, adopting a comprehensive, yet disaggregated, view on international peacebuilding efforts. We distinguish five areas of peacebuilding support (peacekeeping, nonmilitary security support, support for politics and governance, for socioeconomic development, and for societal conflict transformation) and analyze which types or combinations are particularly effective and in which context. Applying configurational analysis (qualitative comparative analysis) to all thirty-six post-civil war peace episodes between 1990 and 2014, we find that (1) peacekeeping is only one important component of effective post-conflict support, (2) the largest share of peaceful cases can be explained by support for politics and governance, (3) only combined international efforts across all types of support can address difficult contexts, and (4) countries neglected by the international community are highly prone to experiencing conflict recurrence. Three case studies shed light on underlying causal mechanisms.

Norm Contestation and Normative Transformation in Global Peacebuilding Order(s): The Cases of China, Japan, and Russia

Focusing on the disconnect between mainstream “liberal” peacebuilding and the discourses and practices of “new” and “alternative” peacebuilding actors, this article develops a nonbinary approach that goes beyond norm localization to capture the ways in which major powers influence the nature, content, and direction of normative change. Within the context of their bilateral and multilateral contributions to the “global peacebuilding order,” what forms and types of interventions are conceived by these actors as peacebuilding? How, in turn, has the substantive content of their peacebuilding practices (re)shaped norms and narratives in international peacebuilding efforts? Based on extensive empirical research of the peacebuilding policies and activities of China, Japan, and Russia, this article analyzes the way in which these “top-top” dynamics between norms embedded in the liberal narrative and major powers with competing visions can influence peacebuilding as practiced and pursued in host states. In doing so, it brings together research on global norms and peacebuilding studies and offers a simple yet analytically powerful tool to better understand the evolution of global peacebuilding order(s) and the role of rising powers in (re)shaping global governance.

Cuando la paz depende de los objetos cotidianos

This article draws on philosophical pragmatism to examine the growing “new materialist” and “socio-natural” sensitivities in international peacebuilding processes. There has been a shift from the idea of liberal peace, in which international organizations tried to impose liberal and democratic transitions in societies affected by conflict, towards interventions that promote inclusive peace processes and put a premium on the material elements of the everyday. In turn, these processes are much more experimental, uncertain and unpredictable. The pragmatism of James and Dewey is useful both to understand the limitations and criticisms of liberal peace, as well as to anticipate the opportunities and risks that are taken when peace depends on everyday objects.

Peace Formation and the Reshaping of International Peacebuilding

Contrary to most debates about state formation and the development of international peacebuilding, this chapter outlines an alternative perspective on the shaping of local-to-global political community based upon the hybrid political orders produced by the agency of subaltern actors engaged in peaceful forms of politics after war. Drawing on long-standing critical debates it investigates the positive potential of peace formation, outlining the theoretical development of this concept as a parallel process and often in opposition to modern state formation and the evolution of the international peace architecture with which it is often bound.

International Political Sociology of Peacebuilding

This chapter explores how sociological methods, concepts, and theories have been engaged to study international peacebuilding. Sociology is used in three ways to study peacebuilding: as general ontological understanding of the research object as a “society” in which policymakers can intervene in order to achieve specific policy goals; as a set of observation methods; and as a reference in social theory and philosophy that allows criticizing peacebuilding’s configurations of power and inequality. Given their substantially different epistemologies, these ways draw a very uneven image of what that society actually is, how it “works,” and how it affects or is affected by peacebuilding.

Hybrid Peacebuilding Approaches in Africa: Harnessing Complementary Parallels

Many of the most pressing conflicts across sub-Saharan Africa today—including violent extremism, sexual and gender-based violence, pastoralist/farmer conflicts, and criminal banditry—are shaped by local, community-level drivers. Despite these local drivers, however, international peacebuilding approaches often ignore or neglect bottom-up, grassroots strategies for addressing them. Often, international efforts to contribute to the prevention and management of local conflicts depend heavily on large-scale, expensive, and external interventions like peacekeepers, while under-investing in or by-passing traditional/customary mechanisms and resources that uphold locally defined values of peace, tolerance, solidarity, and respect. Recognizing that these traditional and customary practices themselves sometimes have their own legacies of violence and inequality, this policy note emphasizes the possibility of combining aspects of traditional peacebuilding mechanisms with international conflict management approaches to harness the benefits of both.

Restorative Peacebuilding in Liberia

This chapter explores how traditional Liberian communities decimated by colonization, multi-generational trauma, and war found healing through ancient wisdom and ritual. The events related here highlight some of the ways that guidance from other-than-human realms, particularly from nature and the dead, makes quantum healing possible by restoring respectful relationships with all life as well as with the unseen world that is its source. The discussion highlights the urgency for international peacebuilding and foreign aid policy to re-examine the erroneous assumption that outside experts and money will solve the dilemmas caused by colonization, commodification, and greed. In the experiences related here, the authors show how dreaming, divination, ritual, offerings, and community councils helped divided communities work together for the sake of peace. The unexpected appearance of elephants—traditionally understood to be harbingers of peace—reawakened an ancient understanding of how to work in alliance with the natural world. The mysterious, interwoven events related here reveal new ways of working collaboratively across cultures and beyond the human realm. This suggests an innovative role for outsiders wishing to support the efforts of traditional communities seeking peace and stability after war, with the awareness that impending global extinction requires an unprecedented cultural shift to re-invigorate lived reciprocity within and beyond the human community for the sake of all life.