BOOK REVIEW: The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-conflict States (original) (raw)

International peacebuilding efforts have more often failed to deliver long-term stability and peace than offered successful models of building sustainable peace. Indeed, a growing body of literature has shown that international peacebuilding efforts impose Western, neoliberal ideas of governance and society that frequently fail to anchor peace locally in societies affected by conflict. Moreover, they fail to address the increasingly complex challenges relating to, among others, human rights, environmental and climate change, and health and sanitation, which affect societies long after conflicts have ceased. In The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-conflict States, Naazneen H Barma provides a new perspective on the question of why so many international peacebuilding interventions fail. Using a historical institutionalist lens, Barma conducts an in-depth comparative study of peacebuilding interventions in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan. She argues that these interventions failed to reach their intended goals because of the ways in which domestic elites constructed political order during three moments of intervention: conflict settlement, implementation and in the aftermath of intervention. She contends that, in such processes, international peacebuilding interventions selectively grant substantial power to specific elites, who in turn ‘use that power to enact subtle strategies of institutional conversion to their own ends’ (p. 4). Eventually, this leads to a consolidation of ‘neopatrimonial political order’ in which traditional and modern institutions coexist.