“Peaces of the Puzzle”: Mapping the Trajectories of Three Decades of Peacebuilding Scholarship

Abstract

This chapter maps the trajectories of peacebuilding scholarship since the 1992 UN report, An Agenda for Peace. Recent literature on peacebuilding employs critical analysis of the liberal peacebuilding agenda. Critics of liberal peacebuilding have highlighted the Western-centric and locally insensitive approaches to rebuilding security, justice and reconciliation, and economy, among other peacebuilding components. These critiques have led to several “turns” in peacebuilding scholarship, including the overlapping hybrid, local, gender, and post-liberal turns. Employing a systematic literature review of journal articles published since 1990 and indexed in the Web of Science database, this chapter will trace the development of peacebuilding scholarship in the past three decades and the emerging research trends that could inform future peacebuilding operations. This review covers bibliographic and thematic analyses to identify the patterns and, more importantly, the knowledge gaps in the existing peacebuilding literature. While the legacy of the liberal peacebuilding agenda continues to influence contemporary peace operations, the political science/international relations (IR) discipline has offered alternative approaches to peacebuilding.