This book analyses the changing dynamics of sovereignty resulting from contemporary international state-building interventions.

It aims to highlight how the exercise of 'exceptional' forms of power by intervening agencies impacts on the sovereign capacity of intervened states. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of three case studies - Kosovo, East Timor and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the book shifts the focus of the debate to the nature of contemporary intervention as an act of statemaking, and argues that foreign intervention changes the dynamics of political power upon which...

This book examines the adverse impacts of liberal peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies.

It introduces peace figuration as a new analytical framework for studying the intentionality, performativity, and consequences of liberal peacebuilding. The work challenges current theories and views and searches for alternative non-conflicted research avenues that are suitable for understanding how peacebuilding intentions are made, how different events shape peace outcomes, and what are the consequences of peacebuilding interventions. Drawing on detailed case studies of peacebuilding in...

This book analyses regional interventions in African conflict spaces, by engaging with political discourse theory.

Interventions are a performance of agency, but what happens if interventions are performed by forces that scholars have hardly ever considered as relevant agents in this regard? Based on a study of regional politics towards the crises in Burundi and Zimbabwe, the book analyses how these interventions shaped and changed the emerging regional interveners. The book engages political discourse theory, proposing an understanding of intervention as a field, in which multiple...

This book contributes to current debates on the protection of human rights in the 21st century.

With the global economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, the post-intervention chaos in Libya, the migration crisis in Europe, and the regional conflagration sparked by the conflict in Syria, the need to protect human rights has arguably never been greater. In light of the precipitous decline in global respect for human rights and the eruption or escalation of intra-state crises across the world, this book asks 'what is the future of human rights protection?'. Seeking to avoid both...

This book contributes to current debates on the protection of human rights in the 21st century.

With the global economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, the post-intervention chaos in Libya, the migration crisis in Europe, and the regional conflagration sparked by the conflict in Syria, the need to protect human rights has arguably never been greater. In light of the precipitous decline in global respect for human rights and the eruption or escalation of intra-state crises across the world, this book asks 'what is the future of human rights protection?'. Seeking to avoid both...

The book examines the dynamics between domestic and international statebuilding actors.

While the dynamics between -local- and -international- statebuilding actors have been previously theorised through concepts such as hybridity and friction, there have been few attempts to develop conceptual tools for the empirical study of statebuilding dynamics. By drawing on a set of concepts and mechanisms developed in the Contentious Politics literature, this book fills this gap. It deploys concepts such as political opportunity structures, mobilizing structures and framing to trace the...

This book analyses the role of legitimacy in explaining local actors' compliance with international peacebuilding operations.

The book provides a comparative, micro-level study of local actors' reasons for compliance with or resistance to international peacebuilding. Specifically, it analyses three pathways to compliance -legitimacy, coercion, and reward-seeking - to explore local police officers' compliance with the reforms stipulated by the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. The work constructs a holistic framework of the mechanisms connecting...

This book examines the logic behind the shifts and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peacebuilding.

In particular, the book is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered how we think about peacebuilding beyond the 'liberal peacebuilding' paradigm. To do so, the book engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peacebuilding, from hands-on institutionalisation, to the 'local turn'. It uses the case of Kosovo to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards...