Peacebuilding as Statebuilding

Abstract

Practically as soon as international protectorates had been established in the late 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor, peacebuilding discourses sought to roll back from international responsibilities. Peacebuilding was not to be associated with protectorates for peace but with a new process, that of statebuilding – strengthening ‘sovereignty’ rather than undermining it – on the basis of the development of liberal institutional mechanisms of conflict management. This was the dominant framework for the international regulation of non-Western states in the 2000s. This chapter seeks to examine the development, content and consequences of the ‘peacebuilding-as-statebuilding’ discourse. Locating peacebuilding as a response to the consequences of the 1990s decade that militarised and internationalised the issue of peace, it engages with changing theoretical approaches to state sovereignty, which redefined sovereignty as state capacity rather than as political independence; recasting intervention as strengthening sovereignty rather than undermining it. Peacebuilding interventions increasingly appeared not as external coercion but as an internal matter of administrative assistance for ‘good governance’ or ‘institutional capacity-building’. The consequences of this move are also considered and it is suggested that ‘peacebuilding-as-statebuilding’ in non-Western states without self-government resulted in the institutionalisation of weak states which had little relationship with their societies and lacked legitimate authority.