Saving liberal peacebuilding from itself

Peacebuilding is the new black. It’s one of the biggest ‘things’ in global, international security; the palliative to the greatest threats to the North. Whether that threat comes from ‘failed’, ‘fragile’ or ‘failing’ states, countries on the ‘periphery’, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the solution is to suspend the fighting long enough to insert peacebuilders who will convert those places into law-abiding democracies that interact peacefully internationally and do not abuse their own people. Peacebuilding is the means of achieving the Liberal peace; sanctioned intervention to force change peacefully on hundreds of millions of people. The formula is simple, and the process formulaic, applied universally everywhere peacebuilding goes, from Cambodia through Nepal and Sudan to Kuwait, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do what it says it does on the tin, but smoke, mirrors, hubris and myth maintain the illusion that it does.