Introduction: Peacebuilding, Peace Operations and Regime Change Wars

This special issue critically interrogates the current practices of international
‘peacebuilding’ interventions and ‘peace missions’ to highlight the violence that
inheres in their attempts to enforce socio-economic and political changes (such
as regime change) from the ‘outside’. As in the Latin adage: ‘Si vis pacem, para
bellum’ (‘if you wish for peace, prepare for war’) the starting point of this
special issue was the basic observation that these interventions and missions
have little to do with peace but, rather, are violent from their outset.
By combining conceptual analysis with case study articles, we hope that this
special issue contributes to the on-going debate about how something normatively desirable – ‘building peace’ – has turned out so badly. In the face of apparently shipwrecked ‘transformative’ projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, Coˆte d’Ivoire, Libya and Palestine, it is essential that the way Western states conduct the politics of peace is critically analysed. Contributors were asked to approach the puzzle of violent peace from a wide variety of perspectives – and this is reflected in the different approaches represented.