Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool

This chapter discusses the role of women in forging paths into post-liberal peace formations. The adoption of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 could be said to have marked the incorporation of key tenets of gender rights discourse in the global liberal peace agenda. The resolution is based on liberal principles of representation and participation of women in all levels of peacebuilding and on democratisation in setting up new institutions and norms of gender equality in the post-conflict processes; it also recognises the specific protection needs of women and girls in conflict situations as well as the underutilised contribution women make to conflict prevention, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping. Ultimately, the chapter asks whether gender discourse can uphold the promise of peace formation by holding peacebuilders accountable to just, democratic, and equal societies.

Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland

This chapter looks at the pros and cons of peace formation in Northern Ireland; a case where many would suppose that international, elite-level, and social claims had moved close together during the peace process, having been at least partly reconciled mainly by various international and state-level initiatives. This translates as a form of oligarchy between domestic political parties and the British and Irish governments which did its best to stage-manage popular input. Indeed, the agency of local actors was encouraged when deemed useful but was ignored if it fell outside of the intentions of the elite peace oligarchy unless it threatened a reversion to violence. At the same time, however, party politics managed to channel popular support into the peace process, even as popular legitimacy for the outcomes of this process was waning. The chapter argues that this level of peace process — elite negotiations and party politics — has not brought about reconciliation.

Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo

This chapter focuses on Kosovo, in which similar dynamics as to the previous chapter pertain. It involves often ignored grassroots and civil society initiatives. Many have retained their distance from sensitive national political dynamics and take a longer-term perspective. Donors tend not to value highly such processes because their impact is not visible or immediate. Yet they have been instrumental in building networks and trust in local politics, particularly for the younger generation, for women, former combatants, and socially excluded groups. The chapter argues that this has had a limited impact on national politics, specifically with regard to ongoing European Union negotiations and with Serbia. It then concludes that peace formation has more potential than has so far been realised.

Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the four cornerstones in the relationship between different forms of conflict and peace. State formation describes the formation of the state through indigenous or internal violence between competing groups and their agendas which often turn the state into a criminal and predatory elite racket. Statebuilding is the resultant externalised process aimed at rectifying this situation. Peacebuilding focuses on external support for liberally oriented, rights-based institutions with a special and legitimating focus on norms and human rights, civil society, and a social contract via representative institutions embedded in a rule of law. Lastly, peace formation processes can be defined as the mobilisation — formal or informal, public or hidden, indigenous — of local agents of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, development, or peace actors in customary, religious, cultural, social, or local governance settings. The chapter then outlines the theoretical debates about state formation and statebuilding as well as the critique of liberal statebuilding/peacebuilding that has emerged.

Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands

This concluding chapter illustrates how, in the Soloman Islands, very significant agency lies at the social level of peacemaking. In July 2003, after several years of internal violent conflicts, the Solomon Islands became the target of the biggest peacebuilding intervention in the Pacific region to date — the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). This mission is generally presented as a success story of post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding. The chapter shows how locals have pursued their own indigenous processes of peace formation detached from, and parallel to, RAMSI, albeit in its shadow. It draws mainly on field research into community views on the capacities, effectiveness, and legitimacy of international, state, and local, non-state agents of peace and state formation, using the categories of incompatibility, substitution, and complementarity to analyse the approaches and practices of these actors.

Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within

This chapter outlines the role of peace formation in Timor Leste. Only after the last United Nations peace mission exited did the Timorese government have some space and time to seriously address the gap between the external institutional architecture created and the existing traditional structures still functioning. The chapter thus argues that, to promote a sustainable peace, United Nations interventions should address the tensions arising from building a new institutional architecture by taking into account the existing local governance and dispute-settlement structures and dynamics even when they do not match United Nations norms, principles, and practices. Engaging with local peace-formation dynamics contributes to an increased legitimacy of the externally led peace efforts. In this way, United Nations efforts can become embedded in local dynamics, providing a stronger and more sustainable effort towards peace.

Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?

This chapter focuses on the case of Cambodia. Local agency is evident in efforts by Cambodian people to cope with the immensity of the events overwhelming them. For example, much initial restoration of basic infrastructure and rudimentary services, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, was the result of local agency as much as central direction. Nevertheless, throughout postcolonial Cambodian history, Cambodian governance has been characterised by high levels of surveillance and repression. This has been accompanied by an explicit concern by elites to manipulate ideas of the Cambodian tradition into a politics of populist authenticity that significantly affects possibilities for emancipatory forms of peace formation. The chapter then examines two areas: the reform of village-level political structures and the restoration of Buddhist rituals.

International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone

This chapter discusses international peacebuilding and local agency in Sierra Leone, asking whether it is tactical or strategic. The peacebuilding and statebuilding in Sierra Leone have not made a genuine attempt to adjust to context. They still do not facilitate equal representation and rarely address structural constraints beyond political power-sharing. The chapter then gives the examples of organisations such as Fambul Tok and Hope Sierra Leone as agential and innovative local actors which have built extensive local–global networks more in sync with local realties and ideas and within the limits of the standards set by international actors. Sierra Leone's agency is thus both strategic and tactical: able to create spaces for locally driven peace initiatives yet disciplined by donors. International actors still refuse or fail to incorporate figures of authority on the ground, bypassing social configurations of power, including the state, preferring civil society and private sectors.

Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace

This chapter evaluates the (neo)liberal peace agenda in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the region, arguing that local politics and international intervention continue to be somewhat oppositional. The February 2014 protests have pointed to a range of issues which are not even on the international actors' agendas even though they are related to material and concrete issues across the country. This has thrown into question the Dayton Agreement, the legitimacy of intervention, and local ownership, foregrounding questions relating the objectives of politics and the nature of legitimate authority in Bosnian society as a more autonomous political framework than that imagined by the European Union or foreign donors. One which is not just critical of nationalists in the region and country but also the emancipatory claims of external actors where they do not directly speak to the concerns of the local populations and its many different groups.

Afghanistan’s Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts

This chapter examines the signals for peace formation in Afghanistan. Divisions in Afghan society have long been managed through co-operation across different groups to maintain social, economic, and political capital across networks of factional relations. The chapter then illustrates a range of ‘conflict-calming behaviours’ that try to circumvent zero-sum politics, including customs and norms of reconciliation, mediation, face saving, and forgiveness, which are also built into what would be regarded as good leadership. It argues that Afghan political bargaining is a more sophisticated form of peace formation. This form of peace formation is termed as ‘everyday diplomacy,’ adept at maintaining complex power relations but clearly also regularly breaking down and limited in its prospects of counteracting the negative effects of failed statebuilding, violent state formation, and ineffective peacebuilding.