Description
The fact that no new peacekeeping operations have been authorised in almost a decade and the fact that, the last and ongoing operations have focused on peace enforcement have fostered a debate over the status and survival of liberal peacebuilding as such. One of the missing links in these studies is military power. Whereas a rise in global militarism has been widely studied, its consequences in the peacebuilding realm has not followed through. Drawing on the sociology of global militarism, this paper argues that liberal peacebuilding has been transformed by new and increasingly important forms of military power. First, it shows an increasing reliance on military actors, means and goals, affecting how peace operations legitimise, organise and wage physical violence. Second, it explores changes on the social relations, knowledge production and practices that underpin liberal peacebuilding. The paper provides a wide thematic analysis of main UN and EU peacebuilding documents from 1991 to the present and analyses the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the findings from fieldwork, based on interviews and observations. The implications are not just how we must look at liberal peace from now on but the fact that new trends are being established without the likelihood to improve the impact of these interventions.
