Pragmatic Peacebuilding after the Epistemological Critique of Liberalism: Governance without Peace?

This article argues that, after the epistemological critique of liberal peace interventions - that pointed to the problems of governing post-war societies from a top-down and externally driven perspective - we have witnessed the rise of pragmatic peacebuilding. Thus, peacebuilding is increasingly practiced as a bottom-up, relational and iterative process that involves multiple (international and local) actors aspiring to hybrid outcomes. The article is developed in the course of three sections. Firstly, it focuses on the critique of liberalism, which was motivated by the little success of international interventions throughout the 1990s. The critique, informed by poststructuralist logics, emphasises the particularism of post-conflict societies and their complex political and social everyday settings to indicate the limits of building peace from a top-down liberal institutionalist approach. The second section establishes the link between this epistemological critique and the rise of pragmatic (ontological) peacebuilding, which presents itself as a solution to the problems of liberalism and to the relativist or culturalist alternatives that poststructuralist critiques seemed to lead peacebuilding to. Thirdly, the article engages with the European Union External Action mechanisms, resources and structures of peacebuilding to understand empirically the logics of pragmatic peacebuilding. The conclusion of this article is that contemporary projects of building peace (as evidenced in the case study of EU external Action) are turning into solipsistic processes in which peace resolutions or settlements are not only difficult to achieve, but they are becoming irrelevant, extraneous.