Deconstructing liberal peacebuilding: Lessons from the Western Balkans
Deconstructing liberal peacebuilding: Lessons from the Western Balkans

Summary/Abstract: The paper contributes to the deconstruction of the liberal peacebuilding concept, particularly its main components of failed state and state-building, 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.

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