International Society and the United Nations Peacebuilding : Diffusing institutions and restoring 'normalcy' in Liberia

In the early 1990s, with the recognition of conflict causes as being socially rooted prompted a normative shift within the United Nations (UN). The organization began to claim for a comprehensive international response to address the roots of intrastate conflict in the aftermath of civil wars. Thisnew idea was captured by the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding, that embraced the idea that building peace required not only the end of direct violence but also the reconstruction of the state and its democratic and market institutions. This paper aims to evidence that the UN peacebuilding approach seeks to ensure the commitment of post-war states to (Western) institutions and rules that underpin what the English School understands as an“international society”. From a critical perspective, I argue that this international society is not free from power relations and that the UNpeacebuilding strategy is a form to impose, through the Foucauldian techniques knows as biopower and discipline, a set of institutions and rules that prioritizes European assumptions of how state and society ought to beafter the end of warfare. To illustrate this argument, this article analyzes the peacebuilding process led by the UN peace operation deployed in Liberia between 2003 and 2018.