Exploring Peace Formation

This volume examines the dynamics of socio-political order in post-colonial states across the Pacific Islands region and West Africa in order to elaborate on the processes and practices of peace formation.

Drawing on field research and engaging with post-liberal conceptualisations of peacebuilding, this book investigates the interaction of a variety of actors and institutions involved in the provision of peace, security and justice in post-colonial states. The chapters analyse how different types of actors and institutions involved in peace formation engage in and are interpenetrated by a host of relations in the local arena, making ‘the local’ contested ground on which different discourses and praxes of peace, security and justice coexist and overlap. In the course of interactions, new and different forms of socio-political order emerge which are far from being captured through the familiar notions of a liberal peace and a Weberian ideal-type state. Rather, this volume investigates how (dis)order emerges as a result of interdependence among agents, thus laying open the fundamentally relational character of peace formation. This innovative relational, liminal and integrative understanding of peace formation has far-reaching consequences for internationally supported peacebuilding.

This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, peace studies, security studies, governance, development and IR.