Challenges of Liberal Peace and Statebuilding in Divided Societies

Abstract

The debate within liberal peace studies on how to build peaceful societies has produced an important body of knowledge that is informing and shaping the governance of many countries in Africa and around the world. This article critically evaluates the assumptions and values of liberal peace on statebuilding by situating it within the current debate in peace studies, and focuses particularly on one of the key assumptions in liberal peace literature: that peace is necessarily the outcome of liberal democracy, market-based economic reforms and the formation of institutions associated with modern states.1 A case study from East Africa illustrates this paradigm. The main question is: What are the challenges to liberal peace in post-colonial African contexts? To interrogate the paradigm underpinning liberal peace, the article concentrates on recent statebuilding activities in South Sudan.....