4 - Liberal Peacebuilding

Summary

In this essay, I argue that liberal concepts provide a strong basis for understanding contemporary peacebuilding practice, for assessing its successes and failures, and for improving its outcomes.At the same time, its overwhelming focus on building liberal democratic institutions and on the role of external actors has resulted in conceptual blind spots.Neither the proponents nor the critics of the liberal approach have paid sufficient attention to understanding the internal political dynamics that drive postwar peace and state building. While critics frequently point out the liberal tendency to neglect local perspective and power dynamics, they have not adequately explained how varying political, social, and institutional realities affect peacebuilding outcomes. I explore how a hybrid approach that focuses attention on internal political dynamics can shed light on peacebuilding successes and failures. I conclude with the implications, devoting more attention to the implications of internal politics for the study and practice of peacebuilding and the implications a hybrid model has for the paradigm of liberalism.