This book investigates why peace and reform processes across the world have recently been stagnating or have become blocked. They have failed to maintain security, rights, development, and justice in the liberal international order. The book identifies the related rise of counter-peace processes at the heart of failed peacemaking efforts, and explores the implications for an emerging multi-polar order where local and international tools for peace and reform appear to be ineffective. Across a range of recent cases, from Cambodia, the Balkans, the Sahel region, DRC, Colombia, Afghanistan, and many others, such dynamics are becoming clearer. In particular, small-scale blocking tactics across different peace processes have been evolving into larger political strategies which are then disseminated within revisionist and revanchist international networks. Ultimately, this phenomenon has undermined liberal international order.Spoilers and tactical blockages to peace have connected across local, national, regional and international scales, highlighting ideological divisions. Drawing on counter-revolutionary theory, the concept of counter-peace is used as a tool to critically interrogate a systemic array of blockages to peace. Distinct counter-peace patterns are now entangled in peace and reform processes, including  the stalemate pattern, the limited counter-peace, and the unmitigated counter-peace patterns. Across cases, once tactical blockages begin to form these patterns, they become systemic and ultimately enable conflict escalation. Consequently, the intimate entanglement of the existing international peace architecture with counter-peace processes points to ideological divisions in international order, as well as the growing gulf between diminished practices of peace and reform with critical scholarship on peace, justice, and sustainability.

This book examines the role of everyday action in accepting, resisting and reshaping interventions, and the unique forms of peace that emerge from the interactions between local and international actors. Building on critiques of liberal peace-building, it redefines critical peace and conflict studies, based on new research from 16 countries.

This innovative and timely consideration of the European Union's crisis response mechanisms brings together scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to examine how and why the EU responds to crises on its borders and further afield. The work is based on extensive fieldwork in - among other places - Afghanistan, Libya, Mali and Iraq. The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others not. A major finding from this comparative study is that EU crisis response interventions have been placing increasing emphasis on security and stabilisation and less emphasis on human rights and democratisation. This changes - quite fundamentally - the EU's stance as an international actor and leads to questions about the nature of the European Union and how it perceives itself and is perceived by others. -- .

This innovative and timely consideration of the European Union's crisis response mechanisms brings together scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to examine how and why the EU responds to crises on its borders and further afield. The work is based on extensive fieldwork in - among other places - Afghanistan, Libya, Mali and Iraq. The book considers the construction of crises and how some issues are deemed crises and others not. A major finding from this comparative study is that EU crisis response interventions have been placing increasing emphasis on security and stabilisation and less emphasis on human rights and democratisation. This changes - quite fundamentally - the EU's stance as an international actor and leads to questions about the nature of the European Union and how it perceives itself and is perceived by others.

In addition to being a major area of research within International Relations, peacebuilding and statebuilding is a major policy area within the UN and other international and regional organizations. It is also a concern of international financial institutions, including the World Bank, and a significant factor in the foreign and security policies of many established and emerging democracies. Peacebuilding and statebuilding are among the main approaches for preventing, managing, and mitigating global insecurities; dealing with the humanitarian consequences of civil wars; and expanding democracy and neoliberal economic regimes. Peace formation is a relatively new concept, addressing how local actors work in parallel to international and national projects, and helps shape the legitimacy of peace processes and state reform. The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual and policy landscape. It offers a systematic overview of conceptual foundations, political implications, and tensions at the global, regional, and local levels, as well as key policies, practices, examples, and discourses underlining all segments of peacebuilding and statebuilding praxis. Approaching peacebuilding from disciplinary perspectives across the social sciences, the Handbook is organized around four major thematic sections. Section one explores how peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation is conceived by different disciplines and IR approaches, thus offering an overview of the conceptual bedrock of major theories and approaches. Section two situates these approaches among other major global issues, including globalization, civil society, terrorism, and technology to illustrate their global, regional, and local resonance. Section three looks at key themes in the field, including peace agreements, democratization, security reform, human rights, environment, and culture. Finally, section four looks at key features of everyday and civil society peace formation processes, both in theory and in practice.

This title examines the roles and new opportunities arising from the increasing participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peace-making, peacekeeping and peace-building processes, both formal and informal, state-sponsored and unofficial. Drawing on both academic experts and activists, this study brings together contributions from those who have observed how NGOs have sought to reflect civil society concerns, provide humanitarian relief, monitor compliance with international norms and treaty requirements, and disseminate information of concern to advocacy networks.
A critical appraisal of the opportunities and constraints of NGOs is provided alongside the examination of the NGOs role in the "new agendas" for peace.

This title examines the roles and new opportunities arising from the increasing participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peace-making, peacekeeping and peace-building processes, both formal and informal, state-sponsored and unofficial. Drawing on both academic experts and activists, this study brings together contributions from those who have observed how NGOs have sought to reflect civil society concerns, provide humanitarian relief, monitor compliance with international norms and treaty requirements, and disseminate information of concern to advocacy networks.
A critical appraisal of the opportunities and constraints of NGOs is provided alongside the examination of the NGOs role in the new agendas for peace.

The UN peacemaking operation in Cyprus has been one of the longest of its kind. Yet it has resulted in little but discarded proposals, non-papers or reports. This study sets out to investigate the Cypriot parties' views of the process of peacemaking in order to shed light on the Cyprus problem, and on the theoretical debates surrounding mediation.

The UN peacemaking operation in Cyprus has been one of the longest of its kind. Yet it has resulted in little but discarded proposals, non-papers or reports. This study sets out to investigate the Cypriot parties' views of the process of peacemaking in order to shed light on the Cyprus problem, and on the theoretical debates surrounding mediation.

This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in International Relations (IR) theory. The book examines the concept of peace and its usage in the main theoretical debates in IR, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism, as well as in the more direct debates on peace and conflict studies. It explores themes relating to culture, development, agency, and structure, not just in terms of representations of IR, and of peace, but in terms of the discipline of IR itself. The work also specifically explores the recent mantras associated with liberal and neoliberal versions of peace, which appear to have become foundational for much of the mainstream literature and for doctrines for peace and development in the policy world. Analysing war has often led to the dominance - and mitigation - of violence as a basic assumption in, and response to, the problems of IR. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that the discipline offers a rich basis for the study of peace, which has advanced significantly over the last century or so. It also proposes innovative theoretical dimensions of the study of peace, with new chapters discussing post-colonial and digital developments. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, politics, and IR.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The concept of peace has always attracted radical thought, action, and practices. It has been taken to mean merely an absence of overt violence or war, but in the contemporary era it is often used interchangeably with 'peacemaking', 'peacebuilding', 'conflict resolution', and 'statebuilding'. The modern concept of peace has therefore broadened from the mere absence of violence to something much more complicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Richmond explores the evolution of peace in practice and in theory, exploring our modern assumptions about peace and the various different interpretations of its applications. This second edition has been theoretically and empirically updated and introduces a new framework to understand the overall evolution of the international peace architecture. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book examines the role of everyday action in accepting, resisting and reshaping interventions, and the unique forms of peace that emerge from the interactions between local and international actors. Building on critiques of liberal peace-building, it redefines critical peace and conflict studies, based on new research from 16 countries.

This edited volume focuses on disentangling the interplay of local peacebuilding processes and international policy, via comparative theoretical and empirical work on the question of legitimacy and authority. Using a number of conflict-affected regions as case studies including Kosovo, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sudan the book incorporates the expertise of a range of international scholars in order to understand the dynamics of local peacebuilding, the construction of legitimate authority, and its interplay with internationally led peace- and state-building interventions. The commissioned chapters advance our understanding of local legitimacy, sustainable international engagement, and the hybrid forms of authority they produce.

As Oliver Richmond explains, there is a level to peacemaking that operates in the realm of dialogue, declarations, symbols and rituals. But after all this pomp and circumstance is where the reality of security, development, politics, economics, identity, and culture figure in; conflict, cooperation, and reconciliation are at their most vivid at the local scale. Thus local peace operations are crucial to maintaining order on the ground even in the most violent contexts. However, as Richmond argues, such local capacity to build peace from the inside is generally left unrecognized, and it has been largely ignored in the policy and scholarly literature on peacebuilding. In Peace and Political Order, Richmond looks at peace processes as they scale up from local to transnational efforts to consider how to build a lasting and productive peace. He takes a comparative and expansive look at peace efforts in conflict situations in countries around the world to consider what local voices might suggest about the inadequacy of peace processes engineered at the international level. As well, he explores how local workers act to modify or resist peace processes headed by international NGOs, and to what degree local actors have enjoyed success in the peace process (and how they have affected the international peace process).

The guiding principle of peacemaking and peacebuilding over the past quarter century has been "liberal peace": the promotion of democracy, capitalism, law, and respect for human rights. These components represent a historic effort to prevent a reoccurrence of the nationalism, fascism, and economic collapse that led to the World Wars as well as many later conflicts. Ultimately, this strategy has been somewhat successful in reducing war between countries, but it has failed to produce legitimate and sustainable forms of peace at the domestic level. The goals of peacebuilding have changed over time and place, but they have always been built around compromise via processes of intervention aimed at supporting "progress" in conflict-affected countries. They have simultaneously promoted changes in the regional and global order. As Oliver P. Richmond argues in this book, the concept of peace has evolved continuously through several eras: from the imperial era, through the states-system, liberal, and current neoliberal eras of states and markets. It holds the prospect of developing further through the emerging "digital" era of transnational networks, new technologies, and heightened mobility. Yet, as recent studies have shown, only a minority of modern peace agreements survive for more than a few years and many peace agreements and peacebuilding missions have become intractable, blocked, or frozen. This casts a shadow on the legitimacy, stability, and effectiveness of the overall international peace architecture, reflecting significant problems in the evolution of an often violently contested international and domestic order. This book examines the development of the international peace architecture, a "grand design" comprising various subsequent attempts to develop a peaceful international order. Richmond examines six main theoretical-historical stages in this process often addressed through peacekeeping and international mediation, including the balance of power mechanism of the 19th Century, liberal internationalism after World War I, and the expansion of rights and decolonization after World War II. It also includes liberal peacebuilding after the end of the Cold War, neoliberal statebuilding during the 2000s, and an as yet unresolved current "digital" stage. They have produced a substantial, though fragile, international peace architecture. However, it is always entangled with, and hindered by, blockages and a more substantial counter-peace framework. The Grand Design provides a sweeping look at the troubled history of peace processes, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, and their effects on the evolution of international order. It also considers what the next stage may bring.

This updated and revised second edition examines the conceptualisation and evolution of peace in International Relations (IR) theory. The book examines the concept of peace and its usage in the main theoretical debates in IR, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism, as well as in the more direct debates on peace and conflict studies. It explores themes relating to culture, development, agency, and structure, not just in terms of representations of IR, and of peace, but in terms of the discipline of IR itself. The work also specifically explores the recent mantras associated with liberal and neoliberal versions of peace, which appear to have become foundational for much of the mainstream literature and for doctrines for peace and development in the policy world. Analysing war has often led to the dominance - and mitigation - of violence as a basic assumption in, and response to, the problems of IR. This study aims to redress this negative balance by arguing that the discipline offers a rich basis for the study of peace, which has advanced significantly over the last century or so. It also proposes innovative theoretical dimensions of the study of peace, with new chapters discussing post-colonial and digital developments. This book will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, politics, and IR.

As Oliver Richmond explains, there is a level to peacemaking that operates in the realm of dialogue, declarations, symbols and rituals. But after all this pomp and circumstance is where the reality of security, development, politics, economics, identity, and culture figure in; conflict, cooperation, and reconciliation are at their most vivid at the local scale. Thus local peace operations are crucial to maintaining order on the ground even in the most violent contexts. However, as Richmond argues, such local capacity to build peace from the inside is generally left unrecognized, and it has been largely ignored in the policy and scholarly literature on peacebuilding. In Peace and Political Order, Richmond looks at peace processes as they scale up from local to transnational efforts to consider how to build a lasting and productive peace. He takes a comparative and expansive look at peace efforts in conflict situations in countries around the world to consider what local voices might suggest about the inadequacy of peace processes engineered at the international level. As well, he explores how local workers act to modify or resist peace processes headed by international NGOs, and to what degree local actors have enjoyed success in the peace process (and how they have affected the international peace process).

This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union. Two very different but connected epistemic, cultural and institutional settings, which have been divided by distance, colonialism and culture; yet have recently been brought closer together by ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, neoliberal state and development projects. The differences are obvious in terms of geography, culture, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. This is the first book to compare contemporary Indian and European Union approaches to peace and is based on strong case studies and rigorous analysis. Postgraduate students, peace and conflict researchers, policy-makers and practitioners will benefit immensely from insights provided in this book. -- .

Furthering the understanding of the legitimate authority in internationally-led peace-and state-building interventions This study focuses on understanding the complexities of legitimate authority in internationally led peace- and statebuilding interventions. Innovative theoretical approach, engaging with local and contextual forms of legitimacy in peacebuilding contexts Introduces nuanced understandings of the concept of legitimacy Based on wide ranging fieldwork and twelve case studies Broader lessons for IR and for policy-makers Includes local authors This edited volume focuses on disentangling the interplay of local peacebuilding processes and international policy, via comparative theoretical and empirical work on the question of legitimacy and authority. Using a number of conflict-affected regions as case studies - including Kosovo, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sudan - the book incorporates the expertise of a range of international scholars in order to understand the dynamics of local peacebuilding, the construction of legitimate authority, and its interplay with internationally led peace- and state-building interventions. The commissioned chapters advance our understanding of local legitimacy, sustainable international engagement, and the hybrid forms of authority they produce.

This book examines the role of everyday action in accepting, resisting and reshaping interventions, and the unique forms of peace that emerge from the interactions between local and international actors. Building on critiques of liberal peace-building, it redefines critical peace and conflict studies, based on new research from 16 countries.

Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be 'failed by design'? This study explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. And it looks at how far can local 'peace formation' dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, Oliver Richmond and Sandra Pogodda find answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.

This book, newly available in paperback, examines the nature of 'liberal peace': the common aim of the international community's approach to post-conflict statebuilding. Adopting a particularly critical stance on this one-size-fits-all paradigm, it explores the process by breaking down liberal peace theory into its constituent parts: democratisation, free market reform and development, human rights, civil society, and the rule of law. Readers are provided with critically and theoretically informed empirical access to the 'technology' of the liberal peacebuilding process, particularly in regard to Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and the Middle East. Key Features *critically interrogates the theory, experience, and current outcomes of liberal peacebuilding *includes five empirically-informed case studies: Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and the Middle East *focuses on the key institutional aspects of liberal peacebuilding and key international actors *assesses the local outcomes of liberal peacebuilding