Abstract
The perception that liberal peacebuilding is in ideological decline has prompted some observers to argue that a reduction in the willingness of the world’s major governments and international organisations to engage in statebuilding will follow. It is argued that such arguments are misconceived because they locate statebuilding in the narrow context of peace operations. The nature of, and impetus for, contemporary statebuilding is only explicable when viewed against the backdrop of long-term historical processes emanating from the intervening states, leading to the emergence of regulatory forms of statehood and associated risk management rationalities. Statebuilding interventions further facilitate state transformation within both intervened and intervening states. The future of statebuilding is therefore the future of statehood. As the conditions that have given rise to statebuilding remain in place, it is likely to outlast the apparent decline of liberal peacebuilding.
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Notes
Although linked, the ‘liberal peace thesis’ is distinct to the so-called ‘democratic peace theory’. The latter is principally focused on the foreign policies of states and their propensity to engage in war (see Doyle, 1983a, 1983b). The former, on the other hand, primarily concerns the relationship between liberalism and internally peaceful societies. The literature on the democratic peace theory is vast, often employing large-n methods to confirm or disconfirm its assumptions (for example, Gartzke and Weisinger, 2013), and engaging it is well beyond the scope of this article.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers and editors of International Politics, as well as Lee Jones, Caroline Hughes, Kelly Gerard, Garry Rodan, David Chandler, Roland Paris, Simon Chesterman and Outi Keranen for their comments on earlier versions of this article. The responsibility for the final version is solely mine. I also gratefully acknowledge generous funding for this research provided by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP130102273). ‘The politics of public administration reform: capacity development and ideological contestation in international state-building’.
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Hameiri, S. The crisis of liberal peacebuilding and the future of statebuilding. Int Polit 51, 316–333 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.15