The familiar orthodoxy of liberal peacebuilding depends upon transplanting and exporting conditionality and dependency in order to cement a social contract between populations, their governments and the state, on which rests a legitimate and consensual liberal peace. What often emerges is a hybrid form of the liberal peace, subject to powerful local critiques, sometimes resistance, and to the perception that international peacebuilding is failing to live up to expectations. In Kantian terms, the problems that the liberal peace has faced, and the crisis that it is now in, can be termed "backsliding". It has been particularly notable that liberal peacebuilding has not been able to build united polities from territorial fragments in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and even in Northern Ireland, where some or all if its elements are in development. This indicates a need for a reform of the liberal model for peace, or to establish a capacity for it to coexist with other alternatives, or to replace it. This article examines a range of issues inherent in the liberal peacebuilding paradigm, some causes of backsliding, and what might be done about them in terms of using peacebuilding to create a new social contract and to arrive at may well be a "liberal-local hybrid" form of peace.
Liberal Peacebuilding; Statebuilding; Backsliding; Social Contract