Introduction

In keeping with the crisis-ridden zeitgeist of the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, practices and theory associated with conflict resolution and peacebuilding are now undergoing a major reflective and critical evaluation. This has touched upon the heart of political, economic, social, and cultural systems; institutions, ideologies, and norms that have been held to be the core of liberal political theory for hundreds of years; and, currently, of generally held assumptions about IR, peace and conflict. The post-Cold War construction and reconstruction of peace praxis has been unmasked as being — to some degree at least — a triumph of process, technocracy, bureaucracy, and ideology over substance, and, more directly, over the lives of millions of ordinary people for a generation or more in politically unstable parts of the world. Though scholars would accept that there has been an overall reduction in the number of wars in recent times, the quality of the peace that has emerged has been low and fraught. The liberal emperor has been shown to be semi-clothed at best.