This book is the first to chart the rise and fall of peacebuilding. Charting its beginnings, as an ad-hoc extension of peacekeeping responsibilities, and formalisation, as a UN-supported international project of building liberal states. Twenty years later, the grounding policy assumptions of peacebuilding - that democracy, the rule of law and free markets were a universal solution to conflict-prone states and societies - have been revealed as naive at best, and at worst, hubristic and Eurocentric.

Here, Chandler traces the disillusionment with international peacebuilding, and the...