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Introduction: Peacebuilding, Peace Operations and Regime Change Wars

This special issue critically interrogates the current practices of international ‘peacebuilding’ interventions and ‘peace missions’ to highlight the violence that inheres in their attempts to enforce socio-economic and political changes (such as regime change) from the ‘outside’. As in the Latin adage: ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ (‘if you wish for peace, prepare for war’) the starting point of this special issue was the basic observation that these interventions and missions have little to do with peace but, rather, are violent from their outset. By combining conceptual analysis with case study articles, we hope that this special issue contributes to the on-going debate about how something normatively desirable – ‘building peace’ – has turned out so badly. In the face of apparently shipwrecked ‘transformative’ projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and Palestine, it is essential that the way Western states conduct the politics of peace is critically analysed. Contributors were asked to approach the puzzle of violent peace from a wide variety of perspectives – and this is reflected in the different approaches represented. Peace interventions are variously regarded in this special issue as being the outcome of a set of ideas about international order (including what ‘peace’ constitutes), the preservation of power relations, racist and ‘orientalist’ views of non-Western societies and individuals, and/or an implicit religious bias toward Christianity. However, while they vary in their analytical underpinnings, these articles all critically scrutinize the purported ‘peacefulness’ of international (particularly UN) interventions. In the conceptual section, Florian Kühn, Michael Pugh, Philip Cunliffe and Heidi Hudson challenge conventional discourses of peacebuilding and resulting policy. One of their shared concerns is that what is taken to be peace may be obscuring more violent political practices, and so they critically explore hegemonic Western (and specifically UN) discourses about international intervention. One effect of this self-referential discourse is that while the politics of peace has a teleological aim at its centre, the practice of peace pushes aside alternative routes and emancipatory ideas about social relations beyond Western prescriptive assumptions about the state. This practice can be regarded as aggressive in its drive to introduce a prescribed set of policies – economic and security related – into international attempts at building peace. Thus peace is subverted and turned into something serving the interests of governing elites. Extended to social relations, this helps to cement existing gender relations that, with closer examination, are reactionary in that they favour stereotyped roles and certain forms of agency as Hudson explores in her article. In effect, this narrows political