Deconstructing liberal peacebuilding: Lessons from the Western Balkans

Abstract

The paper contributes to the deconstruction of the liberal peacebuilding concept, particularly its main components of failed state and statebuilding, through the analysis of two internationally-backed statehood projects in the Western Balkans: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The authors analyse critical peacebuilding literature on these two cases to provide arguments for abandoning the failed state and state-building ideas as overly biassed and ideologically based. Instead, they suggest reintroducing the conceptualisation of state-making as a more suitable framework for understanding the post-war context and dynamics in the Western Balkans. Based on that premise, the authors conclude that the cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo should be approached from a broader historical and geographical perspective and call for the decentralisation of the “Westphalian state” and the reinstatement of the longue durée perspective in state-formation research, as well as the depathologisation of the subjects of that research.

Keywords

• liberal peacebuilding
• failed state
• state-building
• state-making
• the western balkans
• bosnia and herzegovina
• kosovo