The Colonial Legacy of Peace(building): France, Europe, Africa.

What is the colonial legacy of peace(building) and what can it tell us about the practice and discourse of peacebuilding? This paper examines peacebuilding's colonial legacy, the politics of its theorization or non-theorization, and its effects on the prospect for building peace in so-called post-conflict African settings. It inquires into the relevance of colonial legacies and anti-colonial strategies to the contemporary discourse and practice of peacebuilding. The main objective is to problematize this legacy because in the contemporary peacebuilding scholarship the colonial legacy is often rejected a priori as totally irrelevant or it is simply assumed, thus leading to questionable comparisons between colonial violence and current peace operations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]