Monitoring and evaluating international peacebuilding efforts have become more sophisticated over the past years, but still relies on managerial approaches that often do not capture the complexity of war, peace and the grey areas in between. The article argues that organizations should embrace qualitative approaches more widely and introduces ethnographic vignettes as one example to explain the...

This article argues that the post-conflict reconciliation process is undermined by the importance given to the retributive form of justice dominating peacebuilding and transitional justice measures. Retributive justice reinforces the division between perpetrator and victim, thus undermining the reconciliation process between antagonistic parties. The so-called objective categories of perpetrato...

The ideology of the liberal peace has propelled the political economies of war-torn societies into a scheme of global convergence towards “market liberalisation”. This orthodoxy was an uncontestable assumption underlying external economic assistance. However, the project faltered under its inherent contradictions and because it ignored the socio-economic problems confronting war-torn societies,...

Despite the EU’s longstanding engagement in the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is in the middle of what some local actors think is its most serious constitutional crisis since the war, Chandler (2009: 74) is right to say that BiH is an ‘inverted state’, not representative of local interests, but of external agendas. It represents the EU’s ambitions in the field of peacebuilding (Björkdah...

Peacebuilding and transitional justice are viewed as integral components of statebuilding in post-conflict spaces. This Special Issue critically evaluates peacebuilding Iraq through macro micro-level analyses Iraq's political development following foreign-imposed regime change. In line with the articles Issue, this introduction examines post-2003 trajectory an outcome failure securitized absenc...