Beyond the metropolis? Popular peace and post-conflict peacebuilding

The debate on peacebuilding is deadlocked. Leading scholars of fourth generation peacebuilding, who take Liberalism to task for creating what they refer to as crises in peacebuilding, have themselves been challenged by those they criticise for over-stating Liberal failure and failing themselves to produce the goods in terms of an alternative. But behind this debate, it seems that both approaches are asking the same question: how can stable, legitimate, sustainable peace be engineered? This article engages critical theory with problem-solving social sciences. It proposes that the crises in orthodox post-conflict peacebuilding are genuine, but there are approaches that might put flesh on fourth generation concepts without bringing the Liberal edifice down, shifting the debate away from ontology and ideology and returning it to the people in whose name it is held.