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Although United Nations peace missions have played an important conflict management role for decades, a backlash against the post-Cold War model of 'liberal peacebuilding' and other recent developments have called their future into doubt. Some observers contend that a 'pragmatic turn' is now underway—a shift away from ambitious plans to transform war-torn societies into liberal democracies and towards more modest and realistic goals. Whether 'pragmatism' offers a viable alternative framework for peacebuilding, however, is less clear. This article challenges key assumptions of the pragmatic approach to peacebuilding, including the notion that UN missions can be 'agnostic' about the governance arrangements of societies that host these operations, as some proponents of pragmatism recommend. Historical case-studies show that such assumptions are integral features of collective conflict management systems, including UN peace missions. Moreover, a close examination of the pragmatist approach reveals that it, too, is based on such assumptions—namely, that building peace requires the promotion of pluralist societies and states. Pluralist peacebuilding, the article concludes, could offer a compelling foundation for future UN missions in an era of rising statist–authoritarianism, but developing this approach will first require discarding pragmatism's pretence of ideological agnosticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community's sobering track record of sustainably reducing the number of armed conflicts worldwide, as well as the increasing involvement of non-human complexities in times of climate crisis suggest that current approaches to foster peace are too narrow and inflexible. So far, demands and calls for more flexible and adaptive peace practice made by policy-makers and researchers have not led to a related paradigm shift. In order to contribute to such a change of practice, this article advances a speculative analytical attempt that seeks to conceptually uncover new modes of engaging with the world for the purpose of peace. It builds on Baruch Spinoza's materialism and describes peace as intimately interrelated with the issue of political community. Following Spinoza, the article reconsiders the imaginary of political community as something that is constantly being rearticulated by a contingent complexity of human and non-human actors, and thus transcends the geographic scope of its formal borders as well as its epistemic scope across power hierarchies. Finally, the article introduces the human–non-human multitude as political subject that is able to detect and interpret the constituents of a political community, and therefore to maintain and sustain peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is having profound effects on global security and peacebuilding efforts. While existing research has mainly focused on the link between climate change and conflict, it has largely overlooked the complex interplay between climate change, conflict-affected states and peacebuilding. Climate change exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in conflict-affected societies by adding stress to livelihoods and negatively impacting food, water and energy security. This is particularly concerning as climate change is often felt most acutely in settings where public institutions are already failing to meet the population's needs. Consequently, climate change can contribute to exacerbating grievances and hinder the ability to maintain, reinforce and build peace. Although practitioners in the peacebuilding field are beginning to respond to the effects of climate change, academic research has not adequately addressed the question of how climate change affects peacebuilding and how peacebuilding strategies can respond effectively. To fill this gap, a multidisciplinary approach drawing from climate security, environmental peacebuilding, environmental studies, and peace and conflict studies is needed in order to develop a research agenda that encompasses the intersections of climate change and peacebuilding. By recognizing the importance of climate change in peacebuilding efforts, this research agenda aims to provide critical insights and guide future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section focuses on knowledge production on peace by asking three inter-related questions: who produces knowledge on peace, what knowledge is prioritized and how does it feed into policy and practice. The articles of the section provide a critical perspective on the actors, dynamics and hierarchies in peace studies and offer insights into how current biases may be addressed. The special section contributes to peace research and broader International Relations in three ways. First, it speaks to the core of debates about the original purpose of the disciplines and their proximity to policy debates. Second, it is embedded in current debates about gendering and decolonializing the disciplines and the need to ensure more diversity. Third, it is part of an emerging research agenda on what types of knowledge influence which types of actors and institutions. Overall, the special section shows that especially in times of tectonic changes in world politics that lead to a revisiting of our thinking about peace and conflict, it is crucial to understand what knowledge is privileged, whose knowledge this is and how the knowledge relates to the practices it seeks to inform. Only then can built-in biases, hierarchies and practical disconnects be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, knowledge about peace and security has become increasingly mediated and co-produced with and through digital objects such as databases, indicators, apps, big data and data analysis algorithms. Only recently has the literature begun to recognize this. This article addresses the gap in the literature by exploring the centrality of digital objects' design in their emergence as experts in relation to international peace and security practices. By centering the politics of design, we contribute to broader debates on the effects of technology for who/what is considered an expert in contemporary international policy. Through a material-semiotic analysis of the UN SanctionsApp and the Security Assistance Monitor database, and semi-structured interviews with creators and users, we show how the normative goal of inclusion is inscribed into digital artifacts and translated into use. These cases were selected based on their inclusion of relevant state and nonstate actors into policy decisions, and our findings suggest that usage and material infrastructures play an important role in how this purpose is advanced. We shed light onto how digital expert objects produce actionable knowledge via the web of relations implicated in their production and highlight the importance of practitioners' participation in the making of such objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically reflects on twenty years of efforts to prevent and punish sexual exploitation by peacekeepers and humanitarian actors through the UN's zero-tolerance policy ('the Bulletin'). I trace the assumptions and motivations that underpin the Bulletin's framing of (un)acceptable sex and investigate the operational and normative implications of its strong discouragement of sexual relationships with beneficiaries. I argue that, by construing the power differential between local communities and UN/NGO personnel as inherent, singular and totalizing, the Bulletin first reinforces conservative gender norms by framing women as perpetually and uniquely vulnerable and reinscribing gendered power imbalances. Second, it denies women agency in an era of Women, Peace and Security, laying the foundation for a detrimental separation between local people and international personnel. Third, it restructures paternalism in ways that entrench power imbalances between local communities and the organizations mandated to 'protect' them, reproducing colonial patterns of dealing with sex and sexuality. This analysis lays bare the tensions between care and control in how the international community responds to sexual misconduct by UN/NGO personnel and demonstrates the ramifications of these tensions for the practice and effectiveness of peace and humanitarian operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Feminist conversations on peace i offers a collection of transcripts of "chats" between feminist academics, activists and practitioners from around the world. In the second book reviewed here, I Finding gender equality in the women, peace and security agenda i , Barbara Trojanowska offers an empirically rich and systematic analysis of gender equality debates within the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Trojanowska guides readers carefully and clearly through her analysis of the "multifaceted, complex, and cross-cutting issue" of gender equality (p. 17). [Extracted from the article]

Over the past decade or more, an increasing number of US initiatives and institutions has taken on the challenge of promoting policy-relevant research and bridging the academia–policy divide. Much of the emphasis of such programmes has been on how scholars can better engage the policy community and the broader public. Less attention has been paid to the pitfalls to avoid when seeking to bridge the gap. In this article, we argue that the more that scholars are engaged in producing and disseminating policy-relevant research, the more essential it is to consider how they can build a set of bridging standards to accompany their ideas. We identify four key dimensions of how scholars engage in policy and public debates and discuss how paying careful attention to these four 'I's—Influence, Interlocutors, Integrity and Inclusion—can mitigate the most egregious instances of falling prey to a cult of relevance in bridging the gap. We then explore these factors in a discussion of two case-studies that highlight challenges that arise for those scholars who seek to contribute to policy and public debates: the applications of theories to US foreign policy surrounding the so-called democratic peace; and the efforts of international relations scholars to contribute to peace-building in post-conflict states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offering these gains against the structural issues within international law, Campbell and Chinkin illustrate the precarious position in which scholars sit and highlight the discussions needed for meaningful change. The international community has increasingly sought to implement gender provisions within international law. Both Chinkin and Campbell illustrate how international law engages in narrow understandings of peace and women, reflective of particular power structures. [Extracted from the article]

Today's most pressing security and policy challenges—great power conflict, economic interdependence, peacebuilding, climate change and other non-traditional threats such as pandemics—are all complex problems. Hyperconnectivity, power diffusion and radical technological transformation are significantly shrinking the policy space available to governments and other international agencies in what has been called the twenty-first century of complexity. Thus, the practice of statecraft requires accentuated strategic rationale: clear emphasis on big-picture and longer-term purposes and priorities. While effective strategy is essential for mobilizing power and winning strategic contests, effective diplomacy is necessary for garnering support for the strategy. This article contributes to stepping up to this challenge in three innovative ways. First, it utilizes key insights from complex adaptive systems thinking to recast the conceptual underpinnings of power, strategy and statecraft. Second, the article advances a 'strategic diplomacy' diagnostic and policy framework to maximize policy space in dealing with complex systems problems in international affairs. And third, by applying the framework to three significant international policy challenges, the article demonstrates the utility and implications of the 'strategic diplomacy' framework for strategic policy in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia has begun to promote itself internationally as a mediator of conflict and as a 'peacemaker'. Russian officials cite its extensive experience in managing numerous post-Soviet conflicts and its more recent experience of intervention in civil wars in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia considers all these activities forms of 'peacemaking', but its approach differs radically from the model of liberal peacebuilding that has dominated international practice in the post-Cold War era. It prioritizes authoritarian stability over justice, human rights and democracy and advocates short-term goals of conflict management over long-term goals of conflict resolution. In this article I explain why Russia's norms of peacemaking and conflict management diverged so markedly from liberal peacebuilding norms. I argue that Russia is no longer simply contesting western norms, but developing its own distinct model of conflict management. This model accepts the use of force as an integral element in peacemaking, engages in 'coercive' mediation by authoritative actors, and views the West as a geopolitical and normative opponent. This debate over Russia's approach to peace and conflict also offers wider insights into how Russia challenges the norms and practices that underpin the liberal international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, as the Afghan government announced its intention to begin a formal peace process, there were numerous calls for women to have a seat at the table. Both mainstream and critical discourse on women and the peace process in Afghanistan, however, relied on the production of essentialized subjectivities which failed to recognize the political and social complexity of women's lives, diminished their intellectual contributions and silenced their voices. This article challenges the simultaneous hyper-visualization and silencing of Afghan women by both Afghan and international actors. Drawing on feminist and decolonial theory, we examine the ways in which the colonial mechanisms of intervention, patriarchy and the global hierarchies of knowledge production worked in tandem to marginalize Afghan women while upholding them as agents of peace. The article brings together findings from three participatory research projects on women and peace, which took place from 2010 to 2014 across eight provinces in Afghanistan. A prismed view of the participants' intersectional realities is constructed, which highlights diverse positionalities and articulations of peace, the social and political cleavages, and differentiated obstacles to their involvement in the peace and reintegration process. The concluding remarks emphasize the relevance of these findings for Afghanistan at the time of publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a state-centrism in the way insurgencies are conceived in international politics. Herein, policy and practice targeting insurgencies draw on the long-established scholarly perception that war-making is the vocation of the state and that the violence of non-state insurgent factions is a source of insecurity. However, this state-centrism also has a colonial legacy and is an outgrowth of the colonial hostility towards anti-colonial factions. In this article, I establish the colonial roots of the current standing of insurgencies in international politics. Empirically, I focus on the European Union's (EU) peacebuilding efforts in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). These efforts are largely premised on the notion that state-building is synonymous with peacebuilding and are focused on furbishing the state-like institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA). But, in doing so, this manner of peacebuilding also replicates the scholarly antagonism towards non-state armed factions and, with it, the logic of colonial counterinsurgencies, as it de-legitimizes the varied forms of insurgent politics that occur outside the institutional limits of the PA. In the end, it is not entirely surprising that this mode of engagement has not secured peace—especially since it is premised on a certain antagonism towards insurgent politics. Therefore, I conclude, a substantial understanding (and incorporation) of the political grievances that drive insurgent politics, and their appeal, is essential for effective peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conceptual debate around the term cyber warfare has dominated the cybersecurity discipline over the last two decades. Much less attention has been given during this period to an equally important question: what constitutes cyber peace? This article draws on the literatures in peace and conflict studies and on desecuritization in critical security studies, to suggest how we might begin to rearticulate the cybersecurity narrative and shift the debate away from securitization and cyberwar to a more academically grounded focus on desecuritization and cyber peace. It is argued that such a move away from a vicious circle where states frame cybersecurity predominantly within a national security narrative and where they seek to perpetually prepare for cyberwar, to a virtual cycle of positive cyber peace, is not only a desirable, but a necessary outcome going forward. We assert that this is particularly important if we are to avoid (continuing) to construct the very vulnerabilities and insecurities that lead to the prioritization of offence and destruction in cyberspace, rather than transformative, human-centred development in information and communications technology innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UN peacekeeping became a flagship activity of the liberal international order (LIO) in the post-Cold War era, characterized by globalization, liberal norms and western leadership. Western states' diminished support for LIO UN peacekeeping has left it increasingly open to challenge, but significant changes are only likely if a strong group of states coalesces around an alternative model of UN peacekeeping. This article highlights African actors and China as well positioned to play pivotal roles in such a coalition. African states, who host the preponderance of UN missions and furnish almost half of the UN's uniformed peacekeepers, support globalized UN peacekeeping, show relatively weak support for the most liberal peacebuilding principles and assert the need for African-led solutions to continental crises. China's influence reflects its P5 status, financial and personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping and engagement with regional actors, notably in Africa. Aspiring to global leadership and a 'new world order', China endorses globalized UN peacekeeping but proposes a non-liberal (and non-western led) notion of 'developmental peace' to guide it. The complementarities between African and Chinese priorities raise the possibility of a profound challenge to LIO peacekeeping. Rather than heralding deglobalization, however, this challenge illustrates that post-LIO international institutions may instead be characterized by deliberalization and dewesternization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of security sector reform, this article explores shifts in international interventions since the Cold War. Identifying three phases, it traces the global North's failure to transform fragile states into liberal democratic polities and changes to intervention practices in response to that failure. Immediately after the Cold War, an unfettered belief in the liberal peace thesis, and its global applicability, drove interventions that sought to establish an integrated liberal internationalist system of states shaped by mutuality. This changed with 9/11, shifting the focus towards extensive statebuilding exercises to replace, by force if necessary, security sectors and reconstruct failed states as liberal democracies. The current phase reflects lost faith in the global North's transformative potential following experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. New forms of intervention from a distance have emerged, relying on delegation to technology and militaries of the global South. This type of intervention allows the global North to maintain a sense of influence while shifting the burden of intervention onto the global South's populations and militaries—and foreclosing comprehensive statebuilding. The global North can no longer claim to act on behalf of universally applicable norms, but alternatives have yet to materialize, leaving interventions in an ideological limbo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is a diverse field of practice comprised of numerous actors, activities and artefacts. Conventional accounts of WPS development and implementation tend to reproduce a narrative that positions states located in the global North as 'providers' of WPS, and those in the South as 'recipients'. This assumption in turn prescribes, and proscribes, forms of WPS engagement and has a constitutive effect on the agenda itself, as shown by post- and de-colonial analyses of the WPS agenda. This article seeks to explore the WPS practices of a group of states that in many ways challenge these North/South and provider/recipient binaries by explicitly positioning themselves as operating beyond and across them: the BRICS countries, comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In this article, we explore how constructions of conflict within the WPS practices of BRICS states relate to the acknowledgement of, and commitment to, the agenda more broadly. We ultimately argue that the BRICS' commitment to the WPS agenda is driven more by identity-making geopolitical considerations, including geostrategic interests, than a politics of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iran's strategy with respect to Saudi Arabia is a key factor in the complex balance of power of the Middle East as the Iranian–Saudi rivalry impacts the dynamics of peace and conflict across the region from Yemen to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain. What is Iranian strategic thinking on Saudi Arabia? And what have been the key factors driving the evolution of Iranian strategy towards the Kingdom? In what marks a substantive shift from its previous detente policy, we argue that Tehran has developed a new containment strategy in response to the perceived threat posed by an increasingly pro-active Saudi Arabia in the post-Arab Spring period. Incorporating rich fieldwork and interviews in the Middle East, this article delineates the theoretical contours of Iranian containment and contextualizes it within the framework of the Persian Gulf security architecture, demonstrating how rational geopolitical decision-making factors based on a containment strategy, rather than the primacy of sectarianism or domestic political orientations, shape Iran's Saudi strategy. Accordingly, the article traces Iranian strategic decision-making towards the Kingdom since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and examines three cases of Iran's current use of containment against Saudi Arabia in Syria, Yemen and Qatar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the unprecedented COVID-lockdown in 2020, many peace diplomatic efforts turned virtual. This represented a temporary loss of many of the usual practices of peace diplomacy and provided an opportunity to examine micro-dynamics of both virtual diplomacy and face-to-face meetings. Based on interviews with parties and mediators involved in the Syrian and Yemeni peace processes we analyze the affordances of virtual and physical meetings respectively. We find that virtual meetings condition peace diplomacy by broadening accessibility, putting confidentiality at risk, allowing for higher frequency of meetings, often disrupting interaction, but also in some instances equalizing it. The transition to virtual also meetings demonstrated what is lost in the absence of physicality: bodily presence, spending longer periods of time together, the possibility of reconciliatory interaction and sharing informal space. When this is missing, it hampers conditions for what we call the sense of peace , that is, the visceral potential of meeting physically, which we conceptualize to include a sense of understanding, togetherness and trust. We further propose a wider application of this conception beyond peace diplomacy, in the form of diplomatic approachment. Finally, we suggest strategies in virtual diplomacy and discuss how virtual and physical diplomacy may supplement each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geopolitical and geophysical realities of south Asia create a deep sense of paradox. On the one hand, territorial disputes and hyper-nationalism have resulted in some of the most militarized borders in the world. South Asia's international boundaries are subject to a range of conflicts, which includes high-level armed confrontations between India and Pakistan and low-level, yet deadly, incidents at the India–Bangladesh border. On the other hand, the region's ecology is inherently interlinked through shared rivers, glaciers and forests. South Asia's borders therefore present unique opportunities for environmental peacebuilding, as they are the epicentre of political conflicts as well as the source of transnational ecological connections. This article argues that grassroots processes of environmental peacebuilding can be used to build societal resistance to the rise of ethno-nationalistic populism in south Asia. Using interview data, the article tests concepts on pathways to environmental peacebuilding against underlying drivers of regional conflicts. The study suggests ways by which grassroots environmental initiatives on the Sundarbans forest between India and Bangladesh and the Thar desert between India and Pakistan can address the contemporary rise in nativist politics. The article contributes to existing literature by connecting theories on pathways to environmental peacebuilding to the ideational drivers of territorial and political conflicts. It adds to policy discussions by suggesting an ecological response to the contemporary rise of ethno-nationalistic populism in various regions of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental peacebuilding is a rapidly growing field of research and practice at the intersection of environment, conflict, peace and security. Focusing on these linkages is crucial in a time when the environment is a core issue of international politics and the number of armed conflicts remains high. This article introduces a special issue with a particular emphasis on environmental opportunities for building and sustaining peace. We first detail the definitions, theoretical assumptions and intellectual background of environmental peacebuilding. The article then provides context for the special issue by briefly reviewing core findings and debates of the first two generations of environmental peacebuilding research. Finally, we identify knowledge gaps that should be addressed in the next generation of research, and to which the articles in this special issue contribute: bottom-up approaches, gender, conflict-sensitive programming, use of big data and frontier technology, and monitoring and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major challenge in the field of environmental peacebuilding is showing the impact of its initiatives. Questions emerge, such as what kind of postwar peacebuilding dimensions are more likely to be affected by natural resource management projects? Although quantitative studies assess the relation between natural resource management programmes and conflict, the question remains: what are the mechanisms involved in implementing projects designed for environmental peacebuilding? To answer these questions, a mixed methods research approach is chosen, combining four qualitative and quantitative methods to triangulate results. First, we identify a set of peacebuilding dimensions and mechanisms based in the literature that facilitate assessing the impact of sustainable land-use systems (SLUS) design in the post-peace agreement region of Caquetá, Colombia. Second, not only do we interview experts and practitioners at global, national (Colombia) and local (Department of Caquetá) levels in the fields of peacebuilding, natural resource management and environmental peacebuilding, we also conduct three workshops and a survey in Caquetá to prioritize dimensions and discover explanatory mechanisms. The case of Caquetá, Colombia, shows that peacebuilding dimensions, such as socio-economic inclusion (e.g. sustainable livelihoods), creation of governance scenarios, and building capacities for dialogue and a peace culture, should be addressed to take account of the impacts of SLUS projects in post-conflict peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 12 November 2019, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), handed down a landmark decision in the case of 'Katsa Su' concerning the Awa indigenous group in Colombia. The Colombian conflict has particularly affected indigenous groups, such as the Awa people, and has also affected the territory in which they live. In this article, we explore the decision of the JEP, within a broader analysis of the Colombian peace agreement and consider how it might help us to think about the place of the environment in the Women, Peace and Security agenda and in international law. We call for a gendered and intersectional approach to environmental peacebuilding which is attentive to the importance of gender and different groups. Further, we highlight how the Colombian example shows how concepts such as relief, recovery and reparations are often confined in international law to women's recovery and redress with respect to sexual violence and yet, this conceptualization should be much broader. The Katsa Su case provides an example of the fact that reparations and redress must address other forms of violence, spiritual and ecological, which women also suffer in times of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many modern conflicts, from Iraq to Yemen, have emerged as brutal wars in which state and non-state actors directly and indirectly target a wide array of civilian infrastructures, including water, energy and food systems. Similar to many twentieth-century wars, a common feature of the wars in the Middle East and North Africa in the twenty-first century has been the 'civilianization' of war, as civilian casualties far outnumbered battlefield deaths. We explore the targeting of civilian infrastructures in the Yemeni war (2011–2019) to explicate the connections between conflict, hunger and disease. We draw upon interviews with UN and humanitarian organizations, an original database tracking civilian infrastructure destruction, and a variety of print sources to document the extent and spatial distribution of the targeting of water, energy, agricultural and health systems in Yemen. We elucidate how the conduct of the Yemeni war has undermined human security and livelihoods and has created ethical, logistical and organizational challenges for humanitarian organizations and for advancing peacebuilding efforts. We find that after the 2011 popular uprising, some non-state actors targeted the energy sector; however, the scope and intensity of wartime targeting of civilian objects, particularly those associated with agriculture, fisheries and health, increased significantly once the Saudi-led coalition entered the war in 2015. Loss of livelihoods, internal displacement, currency depreciation, and blockades and sieges further intensified the wartime spread of hunger and disease. The targeting of civilian infrastructures significantly hinders peacebuilding efforts to restore basic services, rebuild livelihoods and strengthen governance mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental peacebuilding is the integration of natural resource management into conflict prevention, resolution and recovery so as to support peace and environmental sustainability. Most studies have been of cases where there is significant involvement of external (usually international) actors. They thus provide implicit support for liberal peacebuilding practice, which is itself the subject of much critique. Conversely, documented examples of environmental peacebuilding from below are rare. We analyse an endogenously emerging environmental peacebuilding institution, the customary tara bandu process in Timor-Leste. We explain the way tara bandu is used bottom-up to promote the sustainable use of natural resources and more peaceful relations. Tara bandu proves to be a successful, locally diverse environmental peacebuilding institution. We further show how recent attempts by international peacebuilders and state institutions to employ tara bandu have somewhat ignored the way it is deeply interwoven with local social and spiritual relations, and in so doing have jeopardized its legitimacy and efficacy. This suggests that attempts from outside actors to facilitate environmental peacebuilding may be constrained by a mismatch between theorized norms of social and environmental relations (such as 'shared interests') and local cultural particularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental governance reform—especially in the minerals sector—has featured prominently in Sierra Leone's peacebuilding agenda. While reform has enhanced environmental governance capacity in ways that foster peace, it has also exacerbated conflict over the redistribution of extractive rights. This article examines one such conflict over tantalite in northern Sierra Leone. In the chiefdom of Sella Limba, violence erupted as local landowners and a multinational company utilized institutional hybridity—or the blending of informal–indigenous institutions with liberal reforms—to construct competing claims over mineral rights. The resulting uncertainty over the extractive 'rules of the game' accelerated conflict as stakeholders attempted to (re)negotiate the distributional consequences of institutional change in real time. International and national actors ultimately rejected hybrid institutional arrangements on the grounds that they distorted post-conflict reforms and undermined peace. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, I retrace the conflict to provide an alternative perspective. I contend that institutional hybridity served as a necessary component of, rather than barrier to, peacebuilding because it 1) opened space for diverse political participation in post-conflict environmental governance and 2) promoted greater political accountability and integration. These outcomes have been theorized as ways in which environmental reform can facilitate post-conflict peace. This argument aims to advance environmental peacebuilding theory by examining the conditions under which environmental governance reform contributes to post-conflict peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 there is an almost unanimous call for an increased number of uniformed women in peace operations from policy-makers and multilateral organizations. This continuous push for the inclusion of more women is often justified by arguments about an increased operational effectiveness related to women's 'added value': both implicitly and explicitly advocating for greater gender equality. Yet, in this article, I contend that using instrumentalist arguments to increase the number of female peacekeepers may on the contrary undermine gender equality. This is related to the risk of producing self-fulfilling prophecies whereby female peacekeepers try to live up to the high expectations by fitting into gender-stereotypes and/or by working harder than their male colleagues. Rather than increase gender equality, such efforts risk transforming the female 'added value' to an 'added burden' which male peacekeepers do not have to carry. Anchoring the study in feminist theory with the aim to understand gendered relations of power, to illustrate my argument I draw on extensive interview material from military staff and peacekeepers in South Africa, Burundi, Belgium and Niger; interviews and informal discussions with female and male peacekeepers; and participation in several policy and research workshops on female participation in peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from apartheid South Africa to majority rule just four years after President F. W. de Klerk's historic speech of 2 February 1990 still feels like a miracle. Quite understandably, Buthelezi felt that the Zulu people were disadvantaged by the organization of the ANC, the power of its armed wing and the inevitability that the ANC would assume power in South Africa. Peacemaking and peacebuilding in South Africa: the National Peace Accord, 1991-1994. [Extracted from the article]

That persistent military inequality is related to domestic politics appears likely--Lyall suggests that additional country-level time series data would enable scholars to study within-case variation over time and shed light on choices to exclude. Both The end of China's non-intervention policy in Africa by Obert Hodzi and Peacebuilding in the Asia Pacific edited by Carmela Lutmar and James Ockey are well-timed interventions. Conflict, security and defence 575 International Affairs 97: 2, 2021 and gender differences may be just as or more important in some societies. [Extracted from the article]

Finally, the finding that 'meaningful inclusion creates lethal armies; military inequality divides them, destroying them from within' (p. 431) should shape how scholars understand war, but also how states treat their citizens as a matter of national security. First, by introducing the Project Mars dataset, Jason Lyall contributes mightily to addressing selection bias in the study of war, which has long focused on western states and armies. Second, the exhaustive, multi-method analysis of the drivers of battlefield performance in modern war is innovative and enlightening--Lyall's connection of first-rate quantitative analysis with deep military history is unique. [Extracted from the article]

His areas of specialization include political science, international politics, International Relations theory, political psychology, political thought, security studies, Indo-Pacific studies, and history. Navnita Chadha Behera is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Delhi, India. Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute. [Extracted from the article]

The 'local turn' in peacebuilding has been inspired by the idea that post-conflict order is made more just, representative and legitimate when there is greater recognition and incorporation of local sites of authority. However, the gendered visions of security that may be projected from these spheres have often escaped critical attention. This oversight continues despite growing feminist interest in understanding both the contributions that women can make to the durability of conflict settlement processes and the obstacles that often prevent those contributions from progressing. In this article, I examine the frictional encounters that occur between the local and the liberal in peacebuilding and focus particularly on what this means for women. I argue that a focus on vernacular security provides a productive analytical lens for answering this question and for building understanding of where and how women are advantaged and disadvantaged by projects of post-conflict transition. My findings demonstrate how the security vernaculars that are generated in liberal–local peacebuilding produce scenarios that are often contradictory for women and can be enabling and constraining in different contexts. The discussion draws from recent research findings on the gendered impacts of peacebuilding and post-conflict restoration in Bougainville, an autonomous territory of Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of centenary anniversaries for some of the original think-tanks, as well as increasing turbulence in domestic and international affairs, makes this a propitious time to review the role of think-tanks in helping to build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world. Today, western think-tanks, in particular, face a number of challenges to their relevance and credibility. It remains to be seen whether they can rediscover a sense of purpose that is fit for the twenty-first century, at a time when the pillars of the western-led international order that mobilized their counterparts early in the twentieth century are eroding. To do so, I propose five practical steps that all think-tanks can take to adapt to these demands and challenges. I also suggest a set of principles that both western think-tanks and their counterparts in other parts of the world should commit to if they want to work together to promote the sort of peaceful and cooperative world that lies at the core of their stated missions. At heart, leading think-tanks must consider whether it suffices to try to remain sources of objective debate and analysis, or if it is time, once again, for them to adopt a more proactive stance, being explicit about the principles that they believe should underpin peace and prosperity. If independent think-tanks work together around converging principles, then they can contribute to the emergence for the first time of an inclusive international society and thus confirm their normative as well as practical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the special issue on topics including peacebuilding through iterative learning and adaptation, interventions in Somali, and the militarization of peacebuilding.

International peacebuilding is experiencing a pragmatic turn. The era of liberal idealism is waning, and in its place new approaches to peacebuilding are emerging. This article identifies one such emerging approach, gives it a name—adaptive peacebuilding—and explores what it may be able to offer peacebuilding once it is more fully developed. It builds on the knowledge generated in the fields of complexity, resilience and local ownership, and may help inform the implementation of the emerging UN concept of sustaining peace. It is an alternative to the determined-design neo-liberal approach that has dominated peacebuilding over the past three decades. It represents an approach where peacebuilders, working closely together with the communities and people affected by conflict, actively engage in structured processes to sustain peace by using an inductive methodology of iterative learning and adaptation. The adaptive peacebuilding approach embraces uncertainty, focuses on processes rather than end-states, and invests in the resilience of local and national institutions to promote change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how contemporary counter-insurgency and peacebuilding converge around a pragmatic interventionary discourse that reinvents historical pacification practices centred on bottom-up support for local coercion wielders and securitized institution-building. The analysis combines a historical perspective on the changing position and meaning of peace in relation to counter-insurgency with an exploration of contemporary articulations of war with peace in interventions in the Somali context. Through analyses of the cases of Jubaland and Somaliland—two sites where counter-insurgency has adapted to the limitations of state-centric stabilization by instead targeting institutions and actors beyond the host nation government—the article explores how contemporary counter-insurgency embeds itself within the legitimating vocabulary of peace and bottom up reconstruction, and draws on the operational tools provided by peacebuilders. Moreover, it demonstrates how these tools are thereby reframed in such a way that their stated peacefulness is subjugated to counter-insurgency campaign objectives—with far from peaceful effects on local orders. By teasing out these effects through empirical examples, and by offering a historical contextualization of the examples, the article reappraises understandings of contemporary counter-insurgency as a benevolent and locally-sensitive approach to defeating 'subversion' and installing peace—instead it conveys the marked resemblance to colonial and Cold War efforts of pacification. This highlights the importance of closely examining the specific geopolitical and policy contexts in which the terms of the debate on bottom-up peace circulate, as well as the different intervention agendas with which such proposals become entwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining different forms of pragmatic peacebuilding—including the turn to the local, hybrid orders, resilience and non-state actors—this article argues that such approaches bring about analytical and normative challenges that are difficult to deal with within state-centred frameworks. As an alternative, the article develops the notion of 'governscapes' as a framing device that can help examine, first, the uneven ways in which the use of force and forms of governance circulate and spread within and beyond state boundaries and, second, how pragmatic peacebuilding approaches play into emerging landscapes of authority and governance. It is argued that pragmatic peacebuilding approaches place too little emphasis on the capacity for using violence that characterizes many of the 'non-state' actors that exercise some kind of authority against or alongside state authorities. Finally, the article examines cases in which international actors have engaged non-state actors in order to promote peacebuilding. In one case, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, international actors aimed to build multilevel security arrangements; in other cases that the article mentions, international NGOs and organizations have sought, through partial recognition, to make armed non-state actors more accountable to the populations they control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do roads literally lead to peace? While seemingly a strange question to ask, today's peacebuilders certainly seem to think so. After decades of focus on questions of governance, today, instead, infrastructure primes in state- and peacebuilding missions in many fragile and conflict-affected societies. Peacebuilding efforts in places ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan to the Congo are, to a considerable extent, interventions in the built environment. While infrastructure has always been around in post-conflict reconstruction, today, infrastructure is mobilized during ongoing conflict, invested with aspirations of improving security and stability. To be sure, infrastructure played a big role in the formation of strong western states. But can we take this experience to try and forge political orders of concrete and steel? At a first glance, a theory of change that reorders societies by deploying the hidden powers of the built environment seems compelling, and measurable and concrete infrastructure outputs, additionally, fit perfectly within today's more pragmatic approaches to peace. However, based on examples from across the contemporary global peacebuilding landscape, we show that infrastructure neither amounts to a uniform force, nor is it clear what its impact on peace exactly is. What is certain is that infrastructure is profoundly entwined with contemporary peacebuilding, and that we therefore need to develop novel theoretical angles to come to terms with the ubiquitous politics of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global political landscape is in flux, the roles and functions of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping is also shifting. Increasingly, UN peacekeepers are deployed to places where there is no peace to keep. This challenges and undermines existing foundational assumptions of what UN peacekeeping 'is'. Focusing on the UN peace bureaucracy, this article contributes to the debate on the future of UN peace operations and the pragmatic turn in peacebuilding. It does so by taking a step back to ask not how to make the UN 'fit for purpose' but rather for what purpose the international civil servants working for the UN wish the world body to be fit. Zooming in on the review conducted by the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) in 2014–2015, the article interprets the HIPPO as a deliberate push-back against the Security Council's robust turn to stabilization. To counter this militarized form of pragmatism, the HIPPO produced an alternative—more UN-like—yet still pragmatic vision of the future role of UN peace operations in the twenty-first century. The article suggests that while the Zeitgeist is moving from liberal templates towards more pragmatic forms of intervention, the exact role of the UN in this move remains contested—with UN officials actively contributing to the contestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This edited volume confronts one of the most difficult issues in African conflict studies: postwar reconstruction or peacebuilding. Stated differently, the peacebuilding efforts analysed emphasize the maintenance of state integrity, with no improvements to human security. On the positive side, peacebuilding efforts demonstrate that, even after many years of civil strife, the integrity of the state can be quickly restored and violence brought to an end. [Extracted from the article]

Each contributor brings their own feminist perspective to the topic at hand, drawing on a variety of theories and methods including Ubuntu feminism, ecofeminism, intersectionality and many more. One of the most enjoyable chapters is Ray Acheson's contribution on feminist, queer and Indigenous knowledges for abolishing nuclear weapons. [Extracted from the article]