Description
This paper analyses how peacebuilding has become militarised over the last decade. During this time, peacebuilding has increasingly focused on military peace enforcement and on building the military capacity of target states. The broad spectrum of goals and actors associated with the liberal peace agenda are narrowing down to those of a military nature. Scholars addressing this trend disagree about whether new developments entail the end of peacebuilding or its reproduction and have not provided enough theoretical and empirical backing to account for the processes, drivers and practical and structural implications of peacebuilding’s militarisation. This paper argues that we are witnessing the rise of a new paradigm that is displacing liberal with military peace. Drawing on the historical sociology of global militarism, its main premise is that what has changed is the social context in which the use of force takes place. The paper combines quantitative data with the study of the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is not by chance that Africa is being the target and cradle of this new paradigm, showing that this shift reproduces global relations of power and has implications for the governance of international order.
